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."

Comments

a Better headline would be

[imsabbel]

We have cloned MacOsX 10.3 expose feature.
Then people would know what to expect without clicking on the screenshot

Re:a Better headline would be

[KamuSan]

Yeah, good. Maybe now I'll fire up Linux again, instead of just working with OS X. If you have worked with Expose, you don't want anything else. It feels so natural.

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.
I'm NOT an Apple zealot or apologist, I actually like Linux more than OS X (and don't like Windows at all) and have used Linux for far more than I used OS X.
So, please, show me some URLs to OSS projects that you think are really innovative and are not copies of commercial initiatives. Please restore my faith in OSS ;-)

Re:a Better headline would be

[quigonn]

Well, basically everybody copies features from everyone else. That's business.

Re:a Better headline would be

[nacturation]

Why ? I have heard of, but not seen the expose feature. If you try asking a Mac user about it, the standard reply is: "wowmanitssooooooocooolitjustblowsmymindawayyougot taseeitman"
without any explanation of what it actually does.

Now this article explains it nicely, it actually looks quite useful.

I thought the Apple site explains it quite nicely, even with a Flash "try it out" demonstration. Not sure how much easier one could make it. ;-)

Re:a Better headline would be

[Dwonis]

OSS projects *do* take a lot of ideas from others, but they also do lots of things on their own that nobody else has done.

For example, Python has evolved into an extremely intuitive yet powerful programming language.
Perl was also fairly new in its time.
There's GNU Emacs which is one of the most powerful text editors in existence.
There's the Apache Webserver. Although webservers aren't new, I would hardly call Apache a copy of anything.
I'm not sure whether the first publicly-released blog software was open source, but I think it might have been.
OpenBSD was, AFAIK, the first secure-by-default modern Unix system.
Linux (the kernel) has also done (or been modified to do) several things not done before.
X11 started as a project out of MIT (which I would guess was open-source, even though the phrase hadn't been coined yet.)
GNU readline is also something that is exclusive to open source
I'd guess that ls --color was something new to free software, as well, just because I douby anyone with a pure profit motive would consider it worth the time to implement. :-)
The Debian Project has made several innovations in operating system integration.

Anyway, there are plenty of examples. You just have to look.

Expose

[captainclever]

Why not just say "Expose effect for Metacity" instead of beating around the bush.

Call a spade a spade.

Better link about how this works...

[pldms]

here. ;-)

Anyway, it's a good idea and very useful.

Expocity + X Compositing = cool

[po8]

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.

apt-get expose

[Debian Troll's Best]

With the recent release of Mac OS X 10.3 with it's great Expose feature (which the Metacity Expocity tool is obviously inspired from), it's got me thinking about some of the problems I face day-to-day in my current job as an administrator of a mid-sized Debian cluster (256 compute nodes, plus 8 storage nodes) at a supercomputing laboratory in a well known mid-western university. When I'm rolling out packages across all of the nodes in the cluster using apt-get, it can sometimes be a pain to keep track of 256 + 8 individual package installations on each of the machines. It's a full time job just telnetting into each of those machines and issuing the apt-get commands. During a recent student vacation however, some of my coworkers and I came up with an Expose/Expocity-inspired package management solution: apt-get-expose.

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!!

Re: uh...

[Black Parrot]

> does anyone actually care about this??

My favorite Metacity application management tool is -

killall metacity ; sawfish &

Re:My 2 Cents.

[nuffle]

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?

Microsoft's Definition of Innovation

[Llywelyn]

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.

Classic example

[Sanity]

And here we see a perfect example of the attitude that is holding back Linux on the desktop: "Why would anyone need X, I can do that with Y" where X is an easy-to-use feature, and Y is a complicated way to achieve the same thing that most desktop users would never adopt.

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).

Window metaphor considered harmful

[heironymouscoward]

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.

Re: Window metaphor considered harmful

[Black Parrot]

> There has to be a better way.

Yes, I prefer the metaphor of a fishbowl where applications swim around at random, and instead of moving a "pointer" with your mouse you move a little net that you can use to fish out the application you want to look at more closely. This powerful metaphor combines the best features of a game with dynamic, organic organization of information, and teaches children visio-spatial coordination as well as fishing skills.

For troublesome applications such as viruses you can trade your net for a speargun, and to log out you simply toss a handgrenade into the tank, killing most of your applications and stunning the rest, without having to think through a bunch of unintuitive menus.

All rendered in 3D and accompanied by sound effects, of course.

I just tried it

[gbowland]

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 :-)

The desktop is a marketplace, not a race.

[Moderation abuser]

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.