Hi Bruce,
> In particular, its ability to hide itself and reappear when the
> pointer goes near is a nice way of conserving screen space. I want
> something like an icon box which should be easily available
This is the only "good" idea to come from Win95 (IMHO) :-) - I've also
tried to create an application which shrinks itself when the focus
leaves the window, and pops itself up automatically as soon as the
focus enters the mini-window, however with fvwm2 it doesn't work (and
there's a few good, but "technical" technical reasons :-( ).
Of course this would also be possible if the mouse events could be
extended, so that not just things like button events, but also enter
and leave events could be mapped. Then you could have something like:
Mouse Enter I A Deiconify
Mouse Leave F A Iconify
all that's missing then is to be able to bind this functionality to a
specific application.
The "technical" difficulty that I spoke of above is simply that if you
try to move or resize a window, during the move or resize operation,
the focus is taken away from the app, and the app gets a focus event
(actually it gets 4!). Also, for some reason the geometry returned by
fvwm is not exactly the same as the geometry given by the application,
so having the application know where it is tends to go a little awry,
for me, the window wanders to the top left of the screen.
The other difficulty was that I didn't actually want to iconify the
window, rather, show a minimizes version of the window, with some key
information. Some uses for this sort of thing that come to mind would
be:
A mail program, which when minimised shows subjects of a few
of the newest waiting e-mails. Move the focus (with the
keyboard or mouse) onto this mini window, and your full blown
mailer pops up.
A task tracking program (similar to xtimex) where the current
activity and time would be shown in the mini window, and the
full selection of activities when it gets the focus.
A simple clock, in the mini form you see the time and date,
in the full size form, you get a scheduler, alarm clock etc.
There are tons of ways in which this idea can be put to good use,
there are just a few things which need to be worked out:
- how to "SIMPLY" adjust the size and position of the full
sized window, and the same for the mini-window (at least as
far as positioning goes)
- how to combine this idea with the ButtonBar (mini window in
the button bar, full size window somewhere on the screen)
Perhaps this could be solved with a library (libminimizer?), at the
moment I don't know if X11 needs some slightly different events
(InMotion, Resizing?) or if the way the window manager communicates
with the windows needs to be cleared up a bit, it could also be that
something like this already exists, and I'm just showing my ignorance,
but I am yet to see ANY application which does this sort of thing.
By the way, the mini-windows here are NOT to be confused with icons,
icons are little more than a button saying: "I am an application,
click on me to see what I am", a mini window is a proper application
window, displaying information, but not accepting it (when focus
enters the mini window, the full size window for the application pop's
up, taking the focus with it).
I would be most glad to hear ideas and suggestions about this sort of
thing, and would dearly love to see a working example, maybe you guys
are the ones to pull it off?
PS: this has NOTHING to do with my employer, all comments, brilliant
ideas and errors in this e-mail are mine and mine alone, except of
course the idea of a self hiding application which I gladly borrowed
from M$ (and they've never stolen ideas either - nooooooo ;-)
Steve
_______________________________ ._ o ________________________________
// Stephen Riehm / //\. Stephen.Riehm_at_pc-plus.de
\\\\ pc-plus ' \>> | Phone: +49 89 45566 148
//// 81675 Munich, Germany \\ ` Fax: +49 89 45566 113
\\
--
Visit the official FVWM web page at <URL:http://www.hpc.uh.edu/fvwm/>.
To unsubscribe from the list, send "unsubscribe fvwm" in the body of a
message to majordomo_at_hpc.uh.edu.
To report problems, send mail to fvwm-owner_at_hpc.uh.edu.
Received on Tue Aug 26 1997 - 07:32:49 BST