Slashdot Mirror
Expose Metacity With Expocity
ubiquitin writes "expocity is a project to patch metacity and lets you switch between applications in the metacity window manager. After pressing a keystroke, your window manager will present you an overview of all open windows and you can select the window, you want to switch to, visually. For an idea on how this works, check out this screenshot."
We have cloned MacOsX 10.3 expose feature.
Then people would know what to expect without clicking on the screenshot
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Why not just say "Expose effect for Metacity" instead of beating around the bush.
Call a spade a spade.
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
here. ;-)
Anyway, it's a good idea and very useful.
Slashdot looked deep within my soul and assigned
me a number based on the order in which I joined
Hmmm. Expocity for Metacity. An tool that's "an efficient means of switching between applications" and that "will present you a complete overview of all open windows [letting] you select the window, you want to switch to, visually".
Apple's Expose for the rest of us?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
See that little icon in the upper right corner of the screenshot? Click on that sometime - you get a nice easy to read list of the apps you currently have open.
Because of this, I don't even use the gnome-applet that minimizes apps to the taskbar in the Windows style. No reason to.
But each to their own...
I have 8 virtual desktops. I know whats on each of them. Alt-1 gets me to my email and general web browser. Alt-2 has my IRC client. Alt-3 has a gnome-console with a tab to the servers I want to keep an eye on. Alt-4 has some statistical analysis I'm working on. Alt-5 is my web development screen. And so on. Xmms is set to stick on all screens, and is shrunk to mini-view up at the top.
Within each virtual screen its easy to find the application I want - in the web dev screen I might have a Mozilla window, and Opera window, an emacs windows, and a Gimp window, but its easy to find the one I want.
I neither understand why you'd need a screen of thumbnails to all your open apps, nor understand why this is on slashdot. Oh well.
Baz
So the reason "Linux is losing the desktop race" is because the very people who are currently trying to improve the linux desktop experience aren't making cool stuff for windows instead?
Keith Packard is currently finishing up a sample compositing manager for his X server that presents live app windows updated in essentially real time. Should see a live demo in the next day or two---a preliminary screen shot is already available in the freedesktop.org article from earlier today.
I'm glad the WM folks are already duplicating Mac eXpose layout and function: once the two are combined, the X desktop should have the full Mac eXpose functionality.
Even better, this is only the beginning of the cool things that can be done quickly and easily with X compositing... It looks like X is finally almost ready for the (modern) desktop.
At home, I use OSX 10.3, and Expose is one of my favourite features of 10.3, which I use most often. Now, with Expose-like functionality on Metacity, I can have the same kind of comfort on my computer at work (where I use GNU/Linux with Gnome as desktop environment and - of course - Metacity as window manager). This will definitely improve my workflow.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
Only slashdots' target audience of tinkerers and unix users. If you're not a geek, maybe you should ask yourself why you're here.
apt-get-expose is basically a heavily modified version of apt-get and dselect, using a completely re-implemented ncurses and screen library to allow multiple apt-get sessions to be tiled onto the console with a single keystroke. Believe me, when you're neck deep in 20 apt-get sessions trying to juggle installs across several nodes in the supercomputer cluster, being able to visually choose a particular apt-get session is a God-send!
It wasn't easy. If any of you have seen the way Expose works in Mac OS X, then you'll know how fluid that "tile all windows" animation is. It was, to put it mildly, a 'challenge' to get the ncurses library to emulate that functionality using only ASCII art. We extensively debated how we would get ASCII text-scaling support to the same level of smoothness as Mac OS X achieves, and in the end the only way we could see was to hack some low-level VGA BIOS calls. It's way cool, and it's as fast as the Mac OS X version, but using all ASCII characters (we tried Unicode, but the 16-byte overhead wasn't justifiable).
Since then, we've been able to roll out apt-get-expose (using apt-get, by the way...being able to roll out new versions of apt-get with apt-get rocks!!!) across the campus, and administrators of other clusters can't stop raving about how easy it is to manage multiple apt-get sessions with apt-get-expose.
Window tiling and arrangement functionality shouldn't be restricted only to those running Mac OS X and Expocity. apt-get tile all windows dude!!
> does anyone actually care about this??
My favorite Metacity application management tool is -
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
And WHY do I see a Windows XP background in the Exposity bar?
"Hell hath no fury like a hippo with a machine gun."
You are right that this is why windos is the more popular than gnome on the desktop. But if open source coders' main interest was HCI and design, and thous would be willing to do what you ask of them, there would never have been any linux in the first place.
My dime anyway.
I could be wrong. I'm always wrong...
I've tried Explose, but ultimately see no more merit than clicking on the dock, or for a windows user like myself, the taskbar.... it just seems like another little feature that doesnt really do much for traditional users... I've used windows '95 since, well, '95.. .and if windows integrated an expose' type function, i'd never ever use it purely because I'm so used to the old methods of the taskbar... I discarded the new xP 'towering' of similar items on the taskbar within about a day because i saw no use for it.
Expose is all very well for newcomers to machines, but ultimately it moves different OS's and interfaces (gnome, windows, macOS) further and further apart so people are less and less familiar when and if they need to use another system/OS at one point.
Just my t'pence.
I am here to tell you that is exactly why Linux is losing the desktop race.
Please don't tell people who are volunteering their time writing open source applications that their time would be better spent elsewhere. The reason Linux is as close to where it is on the desktop is because people have worked on the sort of things that interest them. You may be right: Maybe some other project would be more objectively useful. But on the other hand, if you were in charge, deciding who got to work on what project, nobody would want to work on open-source anymore, and Linux would suck pretty quick.
So let people do what they want, even if you think it's dumb. It's a community effort that is strong because people can work when, how, and on what they want.
Do you hang out at neighborhood cleanups telling people they should be volunteering their time at soup kitchens instead?
It's a great feature, coming from someone who is used to expose on OS X 10.3. Fun to play with at first, then very very practical when you see the power.
"This is you left and that's your left. This is your right and that's your right. You're gonna die!
For me, the GUI has reached the end of development. It's got all the features that I could ever use. And I use WindowMaker, not Gnome or KDE.
You see, I'm a programmer. I have windows full of 'bash' open, plus one Mozilla. I keep 10 virtual desktops, indexed by 'alt+number', at my fingertips. On each of those desktops, I have 3 xterms open. That's all I need or want.
Now take this feature. I'd have 30 little boxes on my screen to select from, and all would be unreadable greek text. Impossible to use.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
Yep, using the same definition of innovation as Microsoft, you're right.
Copy your ideas from Apple, give it a slightly different finish and not do it as well, and then have it named "innovative."
Bloody brilliant.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
The average desktop user barely understands the concept of files and folders - do you honestly expect them to be organized enough to arrange their programs into virtual desktops as you have done?
This project is exactly what Linux should be doing - assimilating the best features from its competitors on the desktop. I just wish that Linux was also innovating on the desktop, rather than just following in the footsteps of others (and no, themability is not an innovation so far as usability is concerned).
...I'd be able to do my "live" production with more finesse, and just overall grace for everything; if only I could get more nice apps for music making(softsynths and editors) for GNU/Linux. It's the only reason I still run this machine dual boot with Windoughs. Sigh. Maybe in a couple years.
I've always thought of making more of my own stuff(I tinker with some open source audio stuff -- ZynAddSubFX is deadly when you want to get a fine-tuned sound), but my coding skills are pretty pathetic.
I'd love to see a more organized project from Linux based softsynths and audio production. Like, the flexibility(and latency!) is much better in Linux, but more apps are needed. Imagine every kid who wants to do project recording or who has hopes of electronica-stardom wanting to switch over to Linux because of some deadly and free(audio apps are expensive) synthesizers and editors/sequencers. That's no small group. I guess another problem would be support for the particular audio and midi hardware interfaces.
Can't complain: can only dream.
Yup, virtual desktops are cool, but 3D virtual desktop selection is even cooler, and surpisingly fast if you have a decent video card: http://desk3d.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
This is a troll, I warn you in advance. That is, I am going to deliberate provoke you to think.
Looking at the incredible screenshot of Expocity for Metacity, I think to myself: how can anyone work with such a confusion of information in front of them?
My hero, Dijkstra (anyone who could live with 5 successive constanants in his name must be cool), once said "GOTOs considered harmful". We know where that led us to...
Anyhow, I believe the desktop Window metaphor has outlived its usefulness. It dates to the earliest metaphors of visual computing, but continues today only because it has become dogma. Let me list some of the ways it does not model a true desktop, such as you or I sit at every day and work on.
First, a true desktop has hundreds of objects on it, varying from piles of CDs, documents, bills to be paid, loudspeakers, mouldy cups of coffee... This is the real working environment of most creative people, a cluttered mess that makes perfect sense because it maps our projects. You've all had that sense of panic when someone "cleaned your desk?"
Second, in a real desktop, you add new stuff, it covers old stuff. This is normal and natural and necessary and the only way to filter the real work from the junk. If it ain't screaming at you, it's not serious.
Thirdly, the objects on a GUI windowed desktop do not match the actual objects we work on. I have to look through my email client to find important emails, I have my bookmarks in Konqueror, I have that hot dossier on a disk somewhere.
There has to be a better way.
What we need is a unified desktop that represents the real objects we work on, in a way that mirrors the manner in which we actually use them.
A desktop that hides information which needs to be hidden, and exposes the information which needs to be visible. A desktop that shows everything, from incoming emails to useful web bookmarks, to documents and toys, newsgroups, and devices.
I've specified this desktop in
journal entries.
Putting my money where my mouth is, we're working on a prototype that will be unleashed on the world sometime early next year.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
But is this metacity reloaded, or metacity revolutions?
Panther has been out for, what, a month? Good to know the Mac is still worth copying, at least....
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Especially that neat bar along the bottom with the flashy icons. I've seen that in heaps of screenshots but I just _can't_ find any information on how to get it. >:-(
KwinIII is the next generation window handling system for KDE, to be released with KDE 3.2 in February 2004. At first, it looks like KwinII (the same one thats been used since KDE 2). Until you right click on it, then you will see teh true power of KwinIII. The features you will find are so good, you won't want to give the up. Borderless windows, Windows always on top, various focus and switching modes, mouse wheel freindly, resize meters and more. Its 100,000 times better then any window handling system (also known as Window Manager) I've ever tried. Try the KDE 3.2 beta today, and see what an innovative window manager it is!
P.S Unlike metacity, it has ALL its options avalible from the GUI, no having to use gconf-editor like tools to use it!
Are you a troll, or were you just shortchanged on brains? Metacity copied it from Apple, not the other way around.
...Was this not feature not copied from apple? As I understand it, the parent has the wrong end of the stick - unless anyone can inform otherwise?
Use your own brains. Metacity has been out for YEARS. Panther came out 3 weeks ago.
THINK, little dude.
Please, I consider the project here: http://virt-dimension.sourceforge.net/ as more priority to getting Linux functionality to winblows
But that functionality already exists for Windows anyway. It might not be Open Source, but I hardly think that's a priority for Windows users anyway.
Incidentally, I could have swore that I read several hundred posts from Linux desktop users here just two or three weeks ago telling us that Linux didn't want or need such frivolous eye candy, and that it wasn't a significant advance in UI design.
I'm glad that someone disagrees and that you now have a (presumably somewhat inferior) version to play with.
so..
lemme get this straight, linux desktop experience would be better if the oss coders spent more of their time coding yet another litestep for _windows_? doing eye candy for _windows_? so that people could use _windows_ better? or just to appear cool??
oss coders don't code to show what useless cool things they are capable off, most of the applications have born out of need for them, there is no need for showing off what you're capable of for them. people who devote time to create 'cool' desktop themes for litestep&others are the ones who are just after the 'cool' part(usually, i use litestep on my windows machine but purely for usability reasons). i'm not saying that people shouldn't do cool things for the sake of it being cool, but you hardly can except somebody who is doing things out of need to do things out of looking cool to people he doesn't even know. you think the linux kernel was written so that linus would appear cool and get chicks? i don't think linus is that stupid(i'm pretty sure that he would have noticed that it's not a very good way to get laid).
this expocity seems like somebody saw a (cool) usability feature(expose from macosx) he would like to see on his desktop and then rolled out his own, which is cool in it's own nerdy way he hardly would spend his time in a futile attempt to port it over to windows just so that his capable of it.
it's much better plan with oss to do the programs that you need, as that's a sureshot way to benefit from it(and that's how it works). the programmer had no need for them, so why should he have devoted time for it? it's already pretty trivial to port stuff from 'nix world to run in windows world(cygwin&all), and the stuff that isn't trivial isn't actually really needed(appearances, windowmanagers, lowlevel stuff) because windows has it's own and replacing them would be totally pointless unless you wanted for some reason extend windows way beyond it's possibilities(in which case, why aren't already running some linux or bsd distro?).
btw, linux isn't losing, if anything it's catching up(the number of linux desktops would need to hit a decline for it to 'be losing').
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
How is that different from the "tasklist" (or "windows list") available from nearly all other window managers (fvwm, sawfish, openbox ...)? (except, of course, wmx!)
However, it was added without patching the wm itself and thereby bloating its code. Instead, since ratpoison can be fully controlled via the commandline, the "expose" functionality (to be found in the "contrib" directory as "rpshowall.sh") was written as an external shell script which tells ratpoison to split frames in a certain way. Through ratpoison's freely definable keybindings, the script can be used like a built-in function/command of the wm.
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
Uh, we're talking about the expocity feature here, which has decidedly NOT been available for years. Besides, Expose was a feature in Panther since the developer beta, at least five months ago.
Haha, don't you feel like a nudnik now.
Just everyone who had used MaxOSX.3, which some of us are above.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
and mine is
killall -9 metacity; enlightenment &
MS Office has and continues to enhance the productivity of 10's of millions of people. this closed, proprietary, buggy, awkward, featureless software has been the platform for vertical innovation in almost every industry on the planet changing the way people do business.
lateral innovations - like Open Office - have not yet had this same impact.
if you are going to argue innovation, you should consider the entire scope of innovation.
I know that lots of readers here believe that they should be able to copy ideas from other peoples software and make an open source or free alternative, but does this kind of blantant copying harm the cause?
I would rather see innovation from the Linux and open source commnuitities that doesn't merely try to implement what other companies are already doing.
Apple deserve much praise for their recent work on OS X in my opinion. Simply duplicating work that they've invested time, money and effort in research and development.
It think this dilutes their efforts. Imitation is not always the sincerest form of flattery.
I feel quite well. I'm not the apple apologist grasping for ways to defend The Company
MS Bob was an attempt to model a home office in a literal fashion. It could never work because computers are by definition abstract.
My proposal is for an abstraction, of course. The key question is "what kind of abstraction works most closely like the way we actually think".
My conclusion is that windows and folders do not match the way I (and many creative people) think. Thus, my search for a new model, a unified metaphor that can represent all my tasks, hundreds and thousands of them.
Comparing this with Microsoft Bob is just being ignorant and flippant. However, if that is the best prior art that Slashdot can show me, I at least know that I'm not reinventing the wheel.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
This just shows in summary how poorly designed (aesthetically) most GNOME applications are. All the applications look the same! You can see the brilliance of Apples work with expose because each application has a unique appearance.
for info, cvs is at
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome co metacity
blah
No, instead you're the apple antagonist grasping for ways to attack The Company
its here
Mind you, the gdesklets are nice eycandy but a performance hog and tend to be unstable.
have fun.
And if it isn't, wouldn't a simple thing like being able to edge-flip between workspaces or drag windows between workspaces also become "not crack."
This, my friends, may be the demise of metacity. If Ruler Havoc allows this patch into the window manager, he has opened up the floodgates of "crack," and "crack" will dominate!
I, for one, welcome our new crack overlords.
Say you work with a GUI in which you could make a link to every document (email, text document, web page) you work with by just dragging and dropping it's icon somewhere.
Then you could simulate this idea by making a folder on your desktop for each group/task/situation that you can think of. Say, I get an email from a friend about an article I should read. This article refers to another article I think he should read. I create a new folder on my desktop, name it 'Turning gold into lead', and drag and drop his email, the articles and my email into this folder. Now I've got a nice stack of things that are related to eachother.
It would be even nicer if I opened an item in this folder and the window I had open for that item jumps open. Or if I could open all the items in the folder at once. Or that I could close all the items in the folder that I have open by just clicking on the folder.
I need but speak the truth. Your attack is as hollow as your cranium. Begone!
...or do they moan when Jobs fucks'em in the ass.
...Buy a PC and get used to getting it in the ass?...no...thank...you...
Buy a PC and get used to it...
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
I like the tabbed window feature, but there are issues with tabbed windows: it's hard to show the windows side by side for example when you're comparing source code.
Also, to be really useful you should be able to save state. Save the grouping of tabbed windows like you can do in Safari or Chimera. In those apps you can add multiple links to a toolbar folder and open them all at once.
exactly how is this getting into his CVS?
That said, I can't wait to try it out. Hopefully other WMs such as kwin will be able to use some of their code.Surely there's gotta be a better way to link to a project than just to a ftp directory full of source archives?
Perhaps you should consider changing your .sig as you seem to spend a lot of time here...
(A)bort, (R)etry, (P)retend this never happened...
It's a very, very evil hack. It works, for some definition of working - it'll make your Metacity very, very slow. It hooks into Metacity so that every time a window is exposed or does a redraw, it recalculates a thumbnail of the window.
:-)
This means dragging a window over multiple other windows will make the window manager unresponsive for quite some time! Anyway, hitting the magic button does produce a pretty thumbnail though.
This is definitely not useful in the real world, but still cute
...does it run on Windows ?
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
Wow, now you can see all your different open porn windows at once! Go technology. ;)
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
I finally got it to work after manually patching a failed hunk and editing some sources and Makefiles.
:)
I have to say, this app is really nice. The thumbnails zoom onto the screen, but they show up as black if you haven't viewed the window since you started metacity. This shouldn't be a problem if you run the patched metacity from the start.
And for those who don't know, the keybinding is Alt+Tab.
Martin, thanks for bringing even more eyecandy to Linux. You rock
Founder of Mirror Moon - Tsukihime Game Trans
...does Ontogeny Recapitulate Phylogeny in window managers?
-- thinkyhead software and media
> My hero, Dijkstra (anyone who could live with
..
> 5 successive constanants in his name must be
> cool),
I hate to break it to you, but it's only 4. Count them
K S T R that's 4
The IJ combine to form a single vowel in dutch.
Odd but true.
Scaling graphics is so old it was already built into ancient vector hardware.
:-)
I could cite many apps (and games) which did this, but not now.
No, I see it as a lazyness among coders to grab the dragon by the "ahem" balls and outcode the beast. You as a community have shown yourselves more than capable of rising beyond the beast.
I thought you were better than that, Slashdot.
I thought the goal is to provide answers not the negative crush.
I am deeply hurt by this answer by a united community.
Linux - copying MacOS faster than Microsoft.
What have they done to Wilbur!? Oh the humanity! He doesn't have pupils anymore. Oh woe is me!!! ;P
Un-news
Good idea,
but wouldn't it be better to follow the Unix way of thinking and have an independant application or something that can be applied to other Window Managers?
- made easier by remembering what the window looks like when you first open it
A blog I run for the wealth
What does that do that Linux doesn't already have? Why is duplicating something that XWindows has always done in Windows, fixing one of Windows's great shortcomings, going to improve things for Linux?
Hey, ratpoison has an Expose clone for almost a month now.And, in my opinion, it is much better.
Usenet News server with a newsgroup representing a NIS netgroup and a cron job on each machine which polls all of the newsgroups for which the system is a member of said netgroup.
You want to apt-get on all of the nodes? Post the command to the newsgroup and bam! they all do it. You want a new machine to perform all of the administrative commands issued to date? Put the machine into the correct netgroup and bam it downloads and begins processing all of the commands which have been issued to the newsgroup to date. When it has done each, it marks it as read and goes on to the next, no problems with repeatedly running commands.
This way I can manage an almost unlimited number of systems, the administrative overhead is log(N) compared to your technique which requires an essentially linear increase in effort for the increasing number of nodes so I can look after 2,500 systems to your 250 making me cheaper despite getting paid 3 times as much.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
...who knows that windows has had a powertool to do just this for ages?
In my experience with the windows one, it really ain't all that handy. Nice in theory, but I didn't find myself relying on it.
Clif
clifgriffin > blog
your the worst kind of troll. wow i hope your joking
A topic in the gentoo forums tells of how to make an ebuild that will get the cvs source, patch it, build it and install it in your gentoo box.
There's no hurry. The desktop market isn't going anywhere.
Right now, we're seeing the catastrophic takeover of the server market by Linux, it's devastating the vendors Unix offerings, Microsoft will be next, all that will be left for non Linux systems will be a few small niches and long term holdouts.
The desktop market is really no different, the same will happen there too. Like the server switch it really is inevitable and has been for years. Purely a matter of time now.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
You probably also have a giagantic screen, yes? 1280x1020 or above? Doesn't sound like you have many windows open either.
Our CEO didn't 'get' Expose when I demo'd it on my 17" Powerbook. Then two days after he got his 12" Powerbook, he was asking a question about something and said in disgust, 'Arrg, all these frigging windows." "Hit F12". "Oh. Hmm. Okay. That IS cool." He now loves it. Can't stop using it. Once you start using it- you realize that you don't spend time hunting for windows by hiding others(and then un-hiding them because that's what you were working on), or repositioning them, or hiding and closing things. It's like having a desk where you can instantly tile the mess, grab what you want, and everything goes back to exactly where you left it.
I use virtual desktops on my linux workstation, and they're a constant pain- an inelegant solution. An opened terminal doesn't open where it should go, it opens where you currently are. You have to move them between VTs. You have to remember which one you're in, and which one you want to go to. They DO NOT solve the problem Expose is designed to solve- finding one out of many windows on the screen, very quickly.
I'd like to see you manage 40 open windows and find ONE quickly, please. Oh, what's the matter, your scheme doesn't work for more than 3-4 windows per virtual terminal?
Oh, and did I mention that I don't have any screen real estate wasted on a pager, or a window list...even my dock is auto-hide.
Please help metamoderate.
Sorry, I don't see the innovation here... I admit it's prettier, but even Winblows has had this since '95. Try Alt-Tab under your favorite flavour. I like the more visually representative layout of your windows for selection instead of just an icon as Windows does, but ultimately it's the same thing.
NORgasm
Not having much exposure to Mac, I just saw the expose effect the other day. A professor was doing a powerpoint lecture and needed to switch to a website to better get a point across.
He used the expose feature to select the browser from the 10+ he had open at the time. The audience all went "Ooooooh" and I'll admit that I thought it was a neat effect.
While I probably would just use virtual desktops most of the time, it would be useful in some cases, or to show someone (as pictures are worth a 1000 words and all that) some of the neat stuff Linux can do.
Cogito ergo sum in Slashdot.
I can't stand Metacity. The only feature that makes it so distasteful to me is that it lacks the ability to move/resize windows without showing the contents. I don't do multimedia stuff on my computers. A little programming, e-mail, web browsing, OpenOffice stuff and lot's of system administration usage. Because of this I don't buy machines with screaming video cards, usually the onboard Intel i810 or SIS chip is good enough. I would love to be able to install the default desktop for my distribution (best integrated, easiest to maintain) but it uses GNOME and METACITY and doesn't offer a change. Using a low cost video card with a window manager that insists on resizing/moving windows while dynamically redrawing everything several times a second is PAINFULL TO WATCH, and slows everything down. It makes my workstation LOOK LIKE CRAP. Please, Please, someone in charge of Metacity, add in the feature that allows me to turn off content showing while resizing/moving windows.
Wilbur is a character charlotte's web.
Wilber is the GIMP mascot.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Alt-Tab.
This is headline-worthy? Keerist. Talk about a slow news day.
>> I thought you were better than that, Slashdot.
You're new here aren't you?
>> I am deeply hurt by this answer by a united community.
The community didn't reply to your post, one person replied to your post. There is a difference.
But, better late than never...
I implemented an Expose wannabe in Squeak. Quite easy considering the way Squeak's GUI tk - Morphic- works. Very little code, yet slick. Should've taken a screenshot in anticipation...
Aaron
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Do you have the mendacity or the perspicacity to deal with the toxicity? Or the capacity?
Who says a real-world desktop is the best way to work? Computers should make it EASIER to work, not just duplicate what a pain in the ass it is to get stuff done at a real desk.
I definitely find it easier to use expose and instantly see all my documents that I am working with, rather than having them stacked in piles that I need to dig through.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
http://desk3d.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php
Looks cool, does what exactly?
In gross terms, you're right: blindly clicking on stuff can get you into trouble.
However, let's be clear about Microsoft's virus woes: the root of the problem is mixing everything with an overdose of insecure scripting, and the reason was not so much to improve the user experience as to bind him to Windows as the platform.
When you click on a URL, you don't worry about what application is behind it.
When you click on an email, you don't worry about what application is behind it.
When you click on a document on your desktop, you don't worry about what application will open it.
All these are natural acts: to open a document you should click on the document, not click on the 'Open Office' tool, then 'Open' and find the document name.
My model is not document centric, it's task centric. True, many tasks are documents, but some are URLs, programs, even devices. Tasks are what make my world work (as a creative person), and I rely on a very definite model to organize my tasks, and that model is "clutter".
There is no reason why clicking on a mote to launch an application should be inherently insecure any more than clicking on a file in a normal file manager.
As to "ignorance", very, very few people actually understand what goes on inside a computer. I believe I do (my training is CompSci and I've been a professional software designer for 20 years), but still, I do not like having to look in ten places for my "current list of tasks".
One UI to rule them all. I think it's possible.
Hey, for fun, here's a mockup.
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If we all saw a features page for Longhorn today and it included this feature, everyone on here would be going on about how Microsoft can't innovate and how bad they suck for ripping off Mac. But when Linux does the exact same thing as Mac, and even makes the name similar, we all go, "Well, that's cool." WTF!!! This "community" that we have going here blows!! That's why I use a Mac and not this pointy hatted Linux shit. It used to be cool to use Linux, not it's just fucking annoying....
Don't get me wrong. This is a nice feature for sure. But I'm missing more important ones which could improve usability a lot. What I'm missing:
* maximize windows vertically/horizontally by right mouse click
* drag windows from one desktop to another (not by ways of the pager)
* switching desktops with mouse wheel
Apache, while an integral component of my daily existence was just a "Patchy" re-release of the NCSA httpd program that preceded it.
So, it's anything but original or innovative. That said, it's great proof that the OSS model is vastly superior to an Army of Commercial Programmers.
Werd.
It might true that Expose doesn't work as well with same-y looking apps, but maybe Expose isn't the best way to work with programs after all?
In my opinion, the problem of how to organize programs is still unsolved.
"Tabbed" windows and MDI, in other words telling programs to do the window manager's job, is one solution but something about it strikes me as very wrong.
Something like Ion is another solution, if it were tweaked a bit more and applications more adapted to it.
Workspaces/desktops is another, "Clutter" is a fourth, and we've got the hard-to-learn-easy-to-use workings of LarsWM and similar as well.
ACME of plan 9 has an interesting UI, as has Emacs.
All of these have their problems though, and I'm still on the lookout for the perfect UI.
Problems with WIMP:
Yeah, I think I'm going to start using Seth's Storage (even if basing the query language on english strikes me as a bad idea), maybe that'll get me to use the GUI again.
this expocity seems like somebody saw a (cool) usability feature(expose from macosx) he would like to see on his desktop and then rolled out his own,
I'll second that. I think expose' is much more than eye-candy. In fact the only part of it that is eye-candy is the effect where the windows part slowly and drift to open areas. Like fading menus, or rolling menus as opposed to "instant on" menus. But the ability to show all windows currently open as "thumbnails" on the Desktop is tremendously useful. I think it has the potential to all but completely replace alt+tab for most people.
I have to use Windows at work (obviously, if you look at my email address) and I use the very capable Deskwin virtual desktop system. The problem is that Windows apps don't really like playing nice with it, and it still gives me the occasional problem. Expose at home on my G5 is a wonderful thing to use. I don't close or minimize or hide windows anymore. Why bother?
All I need now is someone to copy this functionality for Windows, and I'll be a little bit happier.
(BTW, for anyone using a Mac with Expose, try hitting F9 or whatever your 'show all windows' button is, and then pressing tab or `. It's like the rich man's alt-tab.)
Metacity is a window manager for Gnome. Expocity is a patch for it that pops up a bunch of "thumbnails" of all your open windows. You can then click on one of those thumbnails to bring that window to the front, rather than having to semi-randomly click taskbar buttons and hope you find the window you want.
Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.
Also, people should note that while said soup-kitchen advocate is busy nagging the neighborhood beautification crew, his hands ain't stirrin' no pots for the homeless folks.
:) )
(This is probably obvious. I just wanted to put it into a few pompous words
Jag pratar lite svenska.
... this is a brand new innovation and be very vague in the headline so you have to read more to see what it is like.
OR just say its a blatent copy of Apple's Expose.
And someone copies a fucking simple WM feature and people bitch about OS not being innovative!? That's fucking ridiculous!
How about *tabbed browsing? Wasn't Enlightenment the first desktop to have window-snapshot icons(not so dissimilar to OSX's dock/Expose)? Mozilla, Moz Firebird, Galeon, Epiphany, Perl, Python, PHP, Apache.
OS software is driving over half the Internet, the biggest technological phenomenon in the last 30 years.
* People say Opera did this first. I disagree, Opera uses an ugly MDI interface that most sane people never liked ;p
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Powertoys.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
And Windows still sucks.
(Mine, too.)
Why would other industries be different? Even antibusiness ones?
========
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
Look at the things that you've listed, then look at the things people usually complain about when they complain about OSS software copying from people.
I think you'll notice a pattern, and it is this: *everything* that you have listed is innovations in server and programming applications.
Look at end-user and GUI applications, however, and you'll find that the open-source world hasn't guided innovation for a very long time. And you'll find that if you look at the mission statements for GUI end-user apps in the open source world, you are going to see a lot of phrases like "a window manager inspired by NeXTstep" "create a replacement for Microsoft Excel" "create a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Outlook" "provide the functionality of Office" "it's like BeOS, only free" etc.
But, of course, in terms of server apps, the "command line", and tools for programmers, it pretty much is the open source community leading the way and the commercial world either following or just using open source software wholesale. (Two counterexamples to this I can think of being Java and IBM's server OSes.)
I don't think this is a bad thing, I just think it says something about the focus of open source vs commercial software. The people who write open source software are programmers, so they make environments that programmers would be comfortable in.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I'll take "Features Enlightenment Had 3 Years Ago" for $100, Alex.
Michael Jennings | HPC Systems Engineer, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab | Author, Eterm (eterm.org)
He used the expose feature to select the browser from the 10+ he had open at the time. The audience all went "Ooooooh"
Huh. Sounds like the reason why I prefer tabbed applications. 10 browser windows don't take up much space on the Windows taskbar if you use Opera (or Moz, if that's your thing).
I don't know what kind of screen resolution people run at, or just how many different applications people have open at any given time, but at 1024x768 and usually 10 apps (often with 5-10 tabs each), I have yet to ever have to search for what I want.
Does OSX make it that hard to see what you have open at a glance, and just click what you want? Or is there something I'm missing in amongst all the hoopla here?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
gentoo e-build available here
The better approach would be to just let the user store any application window as an icon using iconify, and then zoom into the application window turning it into a full window again when they choose.
They could store these windows on a Deskbar, Enlightenment did this right, Expose is actually a copy of Enlightenment so why steal from OSX which stole from Enlightenment which most likely stole from something else?
Improve on stuff! Innovate damnit
If you've never had to drag a file from the desktop to a specific place into a program with a lot of windows, you have no clue how useful Expose really can be.
And if you're still convinced that it's not good enough for a "power user" like you, it's fun to play with! Hit F9! Again! Again! Again! Again. Zoom. It's also nice to get all of your IM windows visible at once.
"I think George Lucas is gonna sue somebody."
Has worked great for me for years...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I tried it too, its actually slower than just using this very same feature which has been in E16 for years now. NOthing new here, move on.
I had it on a P120 NEC some years back...the GUI was actually arranged like a 3-d desktop, with objects directly relating to those on a "real" desktop. Get this, it was from Microsoft. It was called "Bob". Wonder why it never caught on...
http://www.enlightenment.org/pages/shots/g8.jpg Proof Expose like features have been done in E16 for over 3 years.
offtopic, but do you have a deep, unwavering belief in your sig?
Oddly, everything you site as an example of original OSS development is actually derivative of something else.
Apple's Expose was a totally original concept that's now been copied by OSS developers.
It's one thing upgrade and revise existing ideas along what would appear to be a natural path of progression, and something else entirely to brainstorm new products and new interfaces, and mass market them.
You geniuses finally figured out how to Alt+Tab?
Enlightenment has already a similar feature for at least three years. It's called the pager.
:)
For those who aren't familiar with it: Enlightenment's pager continually takes a live snapshot of each window's contents and displays them in a miniature form inside the pager.
- You can focus any window by clicking on it in the pager
- You can drag windows around inside the pager to move them
- You can drag a window out of the pager from any virtual desktop onto your current desktop
- You can iconify (minimize) a window by dragging it from the pager to the iconbox
Just make the pager fullscreen and give it a "transparent" background. Expose and its clones can keep on trying to catch up.
Am I a hipster-doofus?
The spread of consistent features through software by popular acclaim is very good for people. Imagine if car dashboards differed by manufacturer; you'd have to learn to drive each one anew when you got behind the wheel. Instead the innovation goes under the hood, improving performance, reliability, safety, style. And the intellectual property protects R&D for competitive advantages in production, not merely "look and feel". The computer industry still has a lot to learn from the car industry (although the reverse is certainly also true).
--
make install -not war
Just like Linux is copied from Unix. I hope your cheque to SCO cleared. You're a dumb bitch. I wish I could mod you -10000 Gay.
Incidentally, I could have swore that I read several hundred posts from Linux desktop users here just two or three weeks ago telling us that Linux didn't want or need such frivolous eye candy, and that it wasn't a significant advance in UI design. Well there are allways people telling you that any improvements of the UI is waste of time. Since they use twm, vtwm, ctwm and they are completely happy with that. But if I remember correctly there were more Linux-people calling it a cool feature. And the best thing is, someone implemented it for metacity.
What nimrod would release an X window manager without edge flipping -- undoubtedly one of the best productivity tools for Unix? My workstation (you know, where I actually do work) is still running RH 7.3 because I refuse to live without edge flipping.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
hm, it appears you are either an idiot or a troll.
stfu!
I just tried it out and it is definitely cool. It runs kinda slow on decent hardware (athlon-xp 1800+ 512MB) but I'm sure it will be sped up eventually. With this and composite windows ala' Keith Packard's xserver 2004 is looking like a good time for some long awaited linux desktop features. BTW if you try it out, you have to press alt-tab to activate it, it took me about 5 minutes to figure that out.
But according to Tog this principle has been patented by apple like ten years ago: Tog has been touting the "Piles" concept ever since.
Before wasting you time you may want to read a book or two.
Code is Speech. No to Censorship.
I tried this, and it actually works, quite well too. It replaces the "alt-TAB" feature, which seems like a questionable decision. I would rather have kept the old "windows" functionality (rotating between windows), and added Expose'ing as a new function entirely.
:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome login :pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome co metacity
/tmp/expocity-11-24-03.diff
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr
I downloaded the patch from the post, and got the CVS from gnome.org. Building it was easy, like:
# cvs -d
# cvs -d
# patch -p0
# cd metacity
# CFLAGS='-O3 -march=pentium4'
# make
# make install
and then restart X11.
Ah, thanks to all the language lawyers who tell me about the 'j' being a vowel in Dutch.
Similarly, the Welsh town of "Llanrwst" only has one vowel in its name, however you pronounce the thing.
En in elk geval, ik ben nederlandstalig (onder andere), dit discussie is dus een beetje overbodig.
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I was aware of the Apple Piles concept, someone mentioned it after my original design post. However, my concept is not really based on piles, patented or not. This was one of the initial concepts but we have changed things somewhat since we began making a prototype. My second journal entry gives a more accurate picture.
(How on earth can one patent a "pile". Perhaps a specific implementation of a pile, yes. But "piles" in general? Anyhow...)
"Wasting time", also a nice concept given that we all live 24 hours per day and we all die and our works all become dust, patented or not. Time is only wasted when we suffer, and this not my case so far.
I'd like to thank Slashdot for the great feedback on this one. You've been cool!
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At this point, of course, it is appropriate, perhaps even mandatory, to look back to "The Importance of Being Earnest" for a quick foray into quoteland.
Cecily: This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade.
Gwendolen: I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade.
Microsoft, innovate?
Everyone seems to think of system windows as being documents.
But really that's not what is going on at all. Each window belongs to an application, and thus has more correspondence to a real-world task-oriented object than a document object.
When I want to cook I go to a stove. When I want to drive somewhere I use a car. The fact is, that a bag of rice might well move from the car to a pantry to a stove, a perfectly natural progression and one that we understand well - humans are quite good at moving things around and reorganizing. Thus I am not sure that in fact there is a "better way" that what we do right now - have data that gets pushed around to different places and acted on by different applications. When I want to edit photos I may open Photoshop, and if I want a slideshow I open something else - all with the same pictures.
The advantage of Expose is that it's like being given X-ray vision. You don't have to wonder if you left the bag of rice in the car, you just look everywhere and then you find what you need. It's also like having a virtual telekenisis power as you can move the bag of rice from the car to the stove all from your couch (so to speak).
Your idea has been presented in many forms, but always has fallen flat when it moves beyond the application sapce (where it can be useful) and into the guise of overall system architecture - because only the user can decide what "needs to be visible" at any moment. If I want to read an old email I am quite happy to use a program that's really good at dealing with email and not a system with one big "search" icon.
An important clue to how well the application model works is the success of iTunes, a standalone app built for dealing with music. I wouldn't want my whole system to work the way iTunes does, but for organizing and buying music iTunes is excellent. We are moving to a world with more specialized applications that do tasks very well, really we've been moving there for some time. A system built to help us manage the set of specialized applications is what we need much more than a system centered around the objects we work with.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm not quite sure what the fuss is about copying Apple's "new" feature. Eight years ago when I used an X terminal tied to an AIX server, I used to do something even better.
From what I gather here, you get to see all of your windows in small-mode at the same time, right? AIX did better than that by letting you selectively make a window small, while leaving others normal size. This was great for monitoring output from "tail -f" on log files, or if you wanted to keep an eye on that C compile you had going. Make a couple of shell windows small and stick them in the corner. When they had content that looked interesting, you just made them normal size again.
Am I missing something here? Seems to me the Apple and Metacity approach is a crude version of the great AIX feature I used a long time ago.
I used to use Enlightenment. I liked it. I like Linux and use it a lot (mostly via the cli). However, the ability for applications to work well together wasn't there when I used Enlightenment (late 90s, IIRC). Even today, I don't see Linux users copying and pasting graphics, video clips, or even formatted text between applications written by different vendors.
What's the point of being able to drag icons between desktops when it doesn't do anything except in a few specific apps? I've never seen two mac apps that support graphics that don't support copy and paste of ANY format graphic data. I can paste bitmaps from photoshop into the folder icon to create custom icons. I've selected text in Write Now!, and pasted it into Microsoft Word and it maintained format. All of this integration is between applications that don't start with the same letter (i.e. g or k).
It's nice that multiple desktops and icon bars allow dragging of icons, but what about other data? Can I drag a selection from the Gimp onto the window some other graphics app in another desktop and have it work? I've yet to see it, but those features may be available today. I only use Linux via X at work an they are using an old version of RedHat.
t'nera semordnilap
What would be gained from Apple suing individual open source developers??? Apple probably benefits from the same individuals putting code back into X and BSD.
Show me where, in Unix, there is: Linux4Video, software RAID, EVMS, kernel preemption, finegrained locking for good SMP performance, NUMA architecture support, USB drivers, loadable kernel modules, or anything resembling ReiserFS.
If you think Linux is a Unix clone instead of innovative, then you either have been away from Unix for so long that you don't remember it very well, or you're using Linux 0.91.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
You know, the idea behind this project (3ddesktop) is something i'd been thinking about, or at least real similar to something i'd been thinking about before. It's funny, because i really like os x and usually if i point out cool features to the linux zealots they say "who needs it to be pretty if it does it's job?" (but then they point out that GTK 2 looks better...?) then the linux community goes and makes something like this. to me, that shows that people really DO care about what things look like in a UI, which it does, and shows that we don't want to work in a kludgy environment. on top of that, seeing your screens switch from one desktop to another and seeing where they all go gives you a spatial awareness of your workspaces, so really something like this is very useful and caters to those who need help knowing where all their stuff really is. it's the nature of meat-space, and last i checked, which was several years ago, this was part of SGI's mission statement... to get people working in an environment that felt like a meat-space environment. this spatial awareness aspect also applies to expose, and software mentioned in the root article of this thread, whatever that was. ;)
lastly, i'd like to point out that something like this 3d desktop, as cool as it is, doesn't make it into any default install that i've ever done of linux. i would LOVE to see it there. in fact, i would have LOVED to know that this project even EXISTED before this, but i didn't. that is why apple gets so much hype for things like expose... people know about them because they get hyped. you can go down to the fry's or compusa and take a look for yourself. perhaps the linux community needs to come up with a system of advertising their software so that people can see all of the options they have... i certainly would prefer a 3ddesktop banner as opposed to some x10 banner. (to digress, since i know i'll get flamed for it, i DO realize that banners cost money, but in a free, community type area you'd think that somebody would be kind enough to donate some banner space...) it would also be awesome to walk into compusa and see x86 boxen running something other than windows xp. if people could walk in and see what linux has to offer, side by side, linux and the community would only get stronger.
linux needs to be hyped, and has reason to be, because even though it offers viable alternatives to expensive, closed source solutions nobody sees them advertised or in action in mainstream media.
Okay, I have to admit it. Not only I read the article, I took the time to patch the current metacity CVS and try it :
Pro- good scaling, looks slick
- can better differentiate between similar windows
ContraI had to completely release Alt and Tab to activate it. Mouse needed to activate windows. Better: Initial Alt+Tab invokes Expose-Mode, Mode stays while I keep pressing Alt. Every further Tab press flips through the windows top-down/left-right (or in your cultural preferred directional order), releasing tab selects window
while (!asleep()) sheep++
Other than web pages and e-mail, all of the other information I access on my computer is more abstract than a plain old document would be.
A "document" is just an entry point, it can be as low-level or as high-level as you like. For instance a web page is a "document" but it can be the main page for Slashdot, a high-level entry to a large amount of information.
I'm not defending the "document is everything" model, just pointing out that it's probably abstractable to any level.
What kinds of information are you talking about, and how do you access it?
Ceci n'est pas une signature
I run GNOME at 1600x1200 on my 15.1" laptop screen.
I frequently have 10-15+ windows open in my session.
With 8 virtual desktops and no taskbar, I have never had a problem 'hunting' for windows.
Depending upon what I am doing at the time, individual virtual desktops might be characterized by my useage as: development desktop, documentation desktop, multimedia desktop, administration desktop, gimp desktop, email and schedule desktop, and so forth.
But the great thing is that these are not static or rigid categories.
With shift, meta, and ctrl + number keyboard shortcuts, poping temporarily from one virtual desktop to another is incredibly efficient.
Do I need to bring a documentation window next to my active coding window for a moment? Pop to the documentation desktop, alt+tab or mouse focus between at most 3 or so windows, and pop the desired window back to the development desktop with me.
It's that fluid.
Unless your environment use is completely unstructured (which being an executive would explain), Expose-like behavior is less efficient.
Everytime you need to shift "paradigms", say from development over to email and scheduling, or over to browsing and IRC, you are forced to reconstruct your environment one window at a time, bringing up the 3-5 windows that comprise that environment.
I don't have to do this. I - as are you - am capable of making generally reasonble categorization decisions in realtime. I have generally a good enough idea about my useage needs that these categorizations decisions prove correct a large percentage of the time on the first go. And when a categorization decision proves not quite ideal - when I need to shuffle a window elsewhere, or put off categorization of it for a bit longer - executing the categorization decision is incredibly fluid.
Did your mother ever buy you one of those nifty toddler puzzles where you put the blocks through appropriately shaped holes?
As incompetent as you make yourself out to be, I would tend to say she must not have. But then again if you are an executive or middle-management, that makes complete sense.
somewhere around here a trollish impression crossed my mind... though i kept reading.
... ; do xterm -e ssh -t $host aptitude &; done" would have been simpler ;-)
the idea of expose through ascii libs is amusing; mind you, i'm not saying that it can't be done; though something like
"for host in h1 h2 h3
Linux/BSD didn't invent TCP/IP; they wrote better stacks.
Apache wasn't a new thing; CERN and NCSA wrote the first servers and browsers.
Microsoft/Intel came up with plug-n-play and power management; linux and BSD are playing catch-up.
Sun had the concept of packages (pkgadd) before Redhat had RPM.
Apple's classic OS has more object independence features than any other OS to date (but even they are moving away from that)
What has the Linux kernel done that others have not tried? A lot of memory management theory came from university research and BSD. Likewise for task scheduling. Likewise for DoS prevention techniques. Same for fault-tolerant filesystems.
And scripting languages are hardly new.
The open source movement is great at refining stuff, but I'm hard pressed to name new accomplishments. One of the reasons for that is a lot of new stuff is a result of advances in hardware, something that OSS has not done much of.
Don't want to sound like flamebait, but it seems to me like lots of OSS projects just copy things that others (Apple, even MS) invented. This, the whole Windows L&F, Mono.
Of course, OSS projects copy a lot. What's wrong with that? Is it only OK to copy if you make proprietary software? Apple's and Microsoft's entire business is built on copying others, and neither Apple nor Microsoft have come up with a lot that's original.
Of course, most of the stuff that OSS copies is superficial fluff; the software architecture underlying OSS is rather different from Apple and Microsoft. And both Apple and Microsoft copied only the superficial appearance of the GUIs and IDEs they were aping.
In the case of Apple and Microsoft, that's a real problem because the software architecture they developed in-house was so much worse than what they copied. Xerox's GUIs, the basis for both Apple's and Microsoft's systems, actually had an execellent architectural foundation and programming language support And NeXT/Apple's IDE is a poor copy of Smalltalks, while Visual C++ is a poor copy of various other research IDEs at the time: they look somewhat similar, but they still (to this day) do so much less.
There isn't enough copying going on. Apple and Microsoft are arrogant and incompetent when it comes to software architecture and they'll rather do a poor job in house than copy someone else. They should copy more. OSS should also copy more: graphic designs and superficial UI concepts from Apple and Microsoft, but for deeper architectural issues, OSS should look more at the research literature since Apple and Microsoft are poor examples to copy from.
Like any craft, software gets better by taking the best ideas from other systems and then reimplementing them. We should do more of that, not less. Apple and Microsoft, are you listening?
En in elk geval, ik ben nederlandstalig (onder andere), dit discussie is dus een beetje overbodig.
En ik elk geval, ik ben nederlandstalig (onder andere), deze discussie is dus een beetje overbodig.
Sorry couldn't resist, but it was too obvious. (FYI in "Woordenlijst Nederlandse taal" (Sdu Uitgevers, Den Haag 1995) it says: dis-cus-sie, de (v.), dis-cus-sies. Note how it says (v.)!)
It sucks in the same way the windows taskbar sucks.
Namely, it doesn't use the screen edges correctly.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
That feature was originally present in a number of X11 window managers. But someone (HP, I believe) got a patent on it and people decided it wasn't worth fighting.
Maybe nowadays, HP doesn't care anymore or the patent has expired.
It's not clear to me that any of those window management hacks are all that useful anyway...
And has had so since at least April 2002 (when following page was last updated). It's not part of the default install, but you can find the download on the Windows XP Powertoys page. (Direct link, 534k.)
"Alt-Tab Replacement
With this PowerToy, in addition to seeing the icon of the application window you are switching to, you will also see a preview of the page. This helps particularly when multiple sessions of an application are open."
Microsoft once again goes uncredited for an advance that everybody else steals.
I do have a deep unwavering belief that you're not the first person to think of saying that :)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I'm New Here
another good example is Pure Data (pure-data.org) ... this is the original visual audio programming language, and its open source. its rediculous to clain innovation is somehow conclusively tied to the license that the code is released under, when its clearly mostly dependant on the author. sure, open source projects often clone ideas from closed source, but closed source clones closed source, and closed source clones open source all the time.
tasty electronic music vittles
Who's the chick in the artwork in the center of the screen?
Interesting but not really usable for me. (And thus by extension probably many other people)
It looks like crap if you have a alrge desktop because the textures arn't big enough. (Large as in 3200x1200) It's not smart enough to map things to several adjacent textures.
"and surpisingly fast if you have a decent video card"
Fast, sure, but still to damn slow. My computer is the one thing I expect instant gratification from. Every 100ms of waiting for desktop to switch is 100ms of annoyance.
Building a better backup.
Zettabyte Storage
OSX stole this feature from Enlightenment
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
hey thanks!
Now all they have to do is make Metacity not suck rabid goat ass.
See you space cowboy...
Are you a troll, or were you just shortchanged on brains?
I think you're the idiot.
FACE!! SCRATCH!! You are so moded. You fucking loser. Worthless lemming robot. "Spoken like a true copycat pussy".
Suck my big dick you little pansy fag. "I would kick the shit out of you if I ever..."(R) Blah, Blah, Blah!
I win, you lose, no matter how many times you reply...Hah, hah, hah!
And it has nothing to do with my 'brand' of computer you wanabee...doh! You are and will always be a LOOOOOOOOSSEEEEEEEEEER. Live with it. Bitch.
P.S. Thanks for the reply. Come back soon with some lame response...oh, wait, I got it already -- "Apple fanboy...something, something...Teh ghey...Get a real computer...HA HA HA HA HA
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON