A quick overview of where the action’s at in Metacity today. Not even a picture of a pub. As ever, dive in and discuss where you like, here or on bugzilla or on your own blog: we thrive on audience participation and we love to hear from you.
- GNOME bug 502644: a lot of people think the minimise/restore, and drag/resize wireframe animations are ugly, and ask to be able to turn them off in various combinations (other than the combinations you can already use).
It would be better to fix the animations, really: do any of you have any suggestions how they could look better?
Also, would anyone who doesn’t like the wireframe applications be happier once we have a working compositor anyway?
- GNOME bug 115584 (yeah, an old one): Someone wanted a way to name, and bind keystrokes to, a large number of workspaces. At the moment you can bind up to a dozen with gconf, although there’s no reason it shouldn’t be more. Thomas proposed a scheme to let users bind n instead. Havoc said it would be crazy to have 64 workspaces each with its own keybinding. Thomas conceded this point. I think this is heading towards WONTFIX territory.
- GNOME bug 436257: when you cancel a keyboard resize the arrows should be consistent whichever side you end on. We have a patch for this now.
- GNOME bug 430198: theme preview should have the theme’s name in the titlebar, shouldn’t it?
- GNOME bug 333548: Alex’s patch reviewed and is basically good; some fixups suggested
- GNOME bug 439749: someone supplies a patch to add “maximise vertically” and “maximise horizontally” to the list of things that can happen when you double-click a window; it is their first patch, and Thomas attempts to be friendly while also asking whether it’s worth adding in new code for a feature that probably nobody has ever wanted yet
- GNOME bug 501365: dead code removed; fixed
- GNOME bug 403148: looking for some memory leaks
- GNOME bug 499301: refactor which probably isn’t interesting to any of you
- GNOME bug 133896: handle some X errors more gracefully
Elijah and Iain: I am thinking of making this entire blog licensed cc-by-sa. What say you? Anyone else?
I do!! I want it! Maximize-vertically-on-double-click sounds fantastically useful to me. Finally, here is a reason to double-click a window’s title bar.
I never maximize windows anymore. It’s useless on today’s large displays (unless you like seeing gigantic white margins on either side of your document of course). But I maximize vertically all the time.
Will maximize ever understand the natural width of a document?
Attribution is the best license, Rusty Russell explained why:
“Why not share-alike? Because I want to maximize the usefulness of my work, and others have chosen more restrictive licenses: this would block them from copying. They’d just end up wasting their own time because they can’t just copy my work: it’s unlikely to force them to change their license.”
Full post: http://ozlabs.org/~rusty/index.cgi/IP/2005-07-05.html
@Ted: Thanks for the link; I hadn’t seen it. I think it’s odd that he compares his choice of blogging licences to the decision to switch Linux to GPL-only, yet doesn’t discuss the implications of that for share-alike. It seems to me that if you leave off share-alike your blog will be more BSD-ish than GPL-ish.
@Thomas, I think it’s because blogs and software are so different, there are huge benefits in collaborating on software but it doesn’t really matter whether there are a thousand different blogs on the same topic. Perhaps because collaborating on code is so much easier, certainly in part because of revision control – but because the end goal is different too. A blog tends to be a series of essays and there’s no need for there to be One True Essay, whereas with software it’s good to have a single application that everybody can use.
And as Rusty points out, most reuses of blogs falls within copyright exceptions such as fair use anyway. (http://ozlabs.org/~rusty/index.cgi/IP/2005-08-03.html, still mainly about avoiding -nc and -nd.)
There was an OS/2 utility called NPS WPS Enhancer that created all sorts of wireframe animations when closing or minimizing windows. Unfortunately I don’t know if a description of these animations or a screencapture of them can be found anywhere on the ‘net (a quick bit of Googling didn’t turn it up for me).