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."
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
Ah, but is it truly innovative? Much of the functionality of expose has been around for years, albeit not in an all-in once package like expose. I remember back in the windows 3.1 days, there was an option to tile all open windows, and one of the XP powertoys gives a miniature snapshot of the window you're about to tab to upon hitting the task switching command. Yes, apple deserves kudos for putting the pieces together, but they weren't the inventor of those pieces. Everybody steals from everybody in the computer biz -- innovation is usually just a matter of extending someone else's ideas and adding a small twist to it.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
TWMs icon manager. Xerox 'Rooms'. Virtual Desktops. Expocity. Ratpoison. All designed to help you get around your X window clutter. Great.
But how many of them deserve slashdot headlines? Did Expocity get in just because its a clone of a Mac UI feature?
And its a patch to a window manager? Looking at the code I think the reason for this is because it is continuously updating its thumbnails as the window manager gets events, so I guess it can display them rapidly when the user asks. Will this slow everything down?
Could this be re-implemented as a standalone X program? Or would getting thumbnails of obscured windows be a problem?
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.