Subj : Macintosh To : Corey From : Deuce Date : Sat Jul 02 2005 03:08 am Re: Macintosh By: Corey to Deuce on Fri Jul 01 2005 22:17:00 > > Hrm? I've never found X clunky, I love it to death. If they would get o > > their butts and add sound support into it too (and take it out of the ker > > would be madly in love. Aqua is very pretty, but it's a completely diffe > > class of software... and could not possibly replace X for my current uses > > either at home or at work. > > > > you should see linspire's x-windows. very nice. Unfortunately, their goals don't match my needs, and I really don't have the time to play with Systems I know in advance won't fit any need I have. One need I don't have is prettiness. I will dig up some screenshots and blink at them for you though... Looks cluttered. Cramming stuff into a teensy bar at the bottom has always turned me off. With it's hugeassed quicklaunch style icons down there, Linxpire looks worse to me. Add to the fact that I've never liked the concepts of a desktop as a file browser (it *always* leads to sloppiness). If I was designing a UI (Which, thankfully, I'll never do) I'd have the corners be hotspots... the ONE SINGE PIXEL in the corner of the screen would be hijacked for such use... let's see... When you hit the corner, a menu appears... probobly a vertically aligned menu tree... rather like the start button... no click would be necessary to invode it. Hrm... this would only apply to two corners... The top left corner, upon touching the single pixel, would give you the current window list and allow you to bring one to the forground with a single click. The bottom left corner would be your app menu... you hit it and currently available apps would appear. The rightmost corners would require a click to summon the menus... Top right would be an action menu for the current window... close, kill (why the HELL has every new WM for X taken out the kill guesture?!?!), max, restore, pin, quarter screen (For when restore merely slaps a border on the current window and you need to drag the damn corner anyways... I'd make a toggle option that you can set a max window size to "restore" to... so you can say for example that the "restore" will ALWAYS make the window smaller than 2/3 width by 2/3 height or what have you) Not sure what I'd do with the bottom right corner... probobly a home directory file peruser of some sort. I'd never use the damn thing I think though. Oh wait... the bottom right would take over the roll of the erm... whatchamacallit icons... you know... the ones that are running programs you may want to frob but don't need an active window 99% of the time... the place your messenger of choice goes. Essentially, the bottom right would be for application defined menus. Then, if you wanted a file browser in there, someone would write one I'm sure. My rationals are as follows: 1) 99.9% of the time, the slace used by your window list, pager, launcher, clock, whatever is completely wasted and sometimes distracting. I do NOT need a "Start" button on the screen 24/7. 2) The corners are the quickest places to reach with a mouse. 3) The right edge corners can't be activeated on mouse entering because people tend to bump the curners when closing windows, scrolling down, etc... having a menu pop up whenever you hit a corner is annoying at best... which of course is why the auto-hiding task bar is NOT the right solution... it makes it painfull to use the scroll button... you need to gently approach it rather than crash into the side corner then recover to the scroll button. If I could find that WM, I'd be a very happy man. Until then, I stick with xfce4... not as terrible as Linspire appears (Once you settle in that is) but far from my ideal. I'll beat a few objections to the punch here... 1) TWM style stuff is horrible... this includes BlackBox. If having a window maximized means you can't access your application list, that is crap UI design (BlackBox *was* my WM of choice until recently however... but I also want something the kids can use) 2) My needs apparently do not intersect with everyone elses... apparently, people NEED to have the comforting taskbar at the bottom... preferably, windows should be listed in order of appearance (gag) so you need to remember when you launched each one to remember which you want. (Are people allergic to alabetizing stuff? Are window titles so useless as to not be useable for this?) 3) I have a clock on the wall, as well as no less than three devices keeping accurate time strapped to my body at any given moment. One more is not a need I have. 4) I really don't care if a newbie can sit down in front of my system and do usefull work. I run FreeBSD, they couldn't anyways. It's MY system and if someone is using it, I can tell them to hit the corners when in doubt. For the 5 minutes it would take to get used to this I don't feel the need to pay for it for as long as I use the WM. 5) Any UI that needs a 1GHz system with 256MB of RAM is crap, will always be crap, and is overengineered out the butt. Now, of course, one realises that this is really the wrong sub for this message... --- þ Synchronet þ ``Penguins make tasty snacks'' .