Comments on: Squib of the day: Exposé

By: Exposé, part two - …for the adult in you

Exposé, part two - …for the adult in you — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:45:00 +0000

[...] …for the adult in you “Many window managers are like Marshmallow Froot Loops; Metacity is like Cheerios.” Skip to content « Squib of the day: Exposé [...]

By: gilir

gilir — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:21:15 +0000

Well, when you use most of the time only the mouse, when you have many windows open and not ordered, a Expose-like to display all windows enabled by the right-corner of the screen is very usefull :) At least, for me it’s very usefull :)

I don’t think the live preview part is usefull as well. I think it’s a just a “nice to have features”, make your desktop nicer to use.

By: You

You — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:21:06 +0000

Not sure what is best, but the Compiz like gesture is something I really do like and find much more useful and quicker than alt+tab.

By: Stuart Langridge

Stuart Langridge — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 17:49:02 +0000

Speaking purely for myself, Compiz’s scale plugin does this and I use it all the time. Naturally, this is a single-person anecdote rather than a usability study. :)

By: Calum

Calum — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:36:45 +0000

Exposé is a neat gimmick, but I have to say the *only* time I ever use it on OS X is when an application (or the window manager) misbehaves, and I end up with one small window behind another that I can’t find any other way.

Other than that, it’s no more useful to me than Alt-Tab, and usually feels less efficient to use (perhaps because there’s no useful ordering of the windows, like there is with Alt-Tab).

By: Patrys

Patrys — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:29:52 +0000

Just to be clear. When I wrote “rewrite half of Metacity” I actually meant having to reimplement half of it in the stand-alone expose app in order to correctly draw a working window border (or redirect Metacity itself to an offscreen pixmap thus creating a second compositor).

By: Simone Malacarne

Simone Malacarne — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:04:15 +0000

@Thomas
i know, comment is meant to be ironic. Like i say in the other post i think a modern windows manager should give a level of effects even if these are not functional related. It’s like cars, if you want to sell car costumer want to have some kind of confort.

I didn’t want to be irrespective to your work.

By: Thomas Thurman

Thomas Thurman — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 14:55:43 +0000

@Simone Malacarne:

This isn’t an election. If you want to rewrite half of metacity, the code’s available to you.

By: Simone Malacarne

Simone Malacarne — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 14:53:06 +0000

i vote for rewrite half of metacity to have this and the other effects a modern OS (or windows manager) should give.

By: Patrys

Patrys — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 12:35:01 +0000

Scaling the window contents is one thing, another thing is scaling the actual window decorations. I think this is the hard part as you have the choices:

* create a full-screen canvas and draw a miniature of each window using cairo or clutter or whatever – but the price is losing decorations; or

* create a whole effing lot of small windows trying to preserve the decorations but now all of a sudden decorations are not to-scale with the contents; or

* rewrite half of Metacity to get the working and to-scale decorations – with proper colors etc.