Metacity’s window menu is less than cluttered; there’s room for a fair amount of extra options in there. One that was recently suggested is an option to take a screenshot of the current window. However, that can be done already using keybindings. What about more adventurous use of the menus?
GNOME bug 472370 makes the reasonable suggestion that Metacity should contain an IMAP client. It would be possible to read your GMail inbox right from the system menu of any window. After all, Zawinski’s law points out that programs which cannot read email are overtaken by programs that can, and if Compiz contains an email client, your chronicler has yet to hear of it.
This appears to be a perfectly sensible idea, and our prototype is demonstrated in this post. It will be included in the next unstable version. After we iron all the bugs out of this, we might deal with focus fixes if we have the time.
Heh… why not go further, and hook it in to the calendar too? For those important dates that people need to remember… :)
aaah, gotta love this time of the year! Tis is when we get some real work done with awesome, well-thought out features. However, I think this menu would be even better if it had tabs in it.
Made. Of. Awesome.
Wait, are you really going to implement this? Or is this an April Fools Day joke?
It might actually be useful…
Don’t mean to be a negative nancy, but is Metacity really worth all this nitpicking? I can think of more important parts of GNOME that are lacking in bigger ways. Seems like the window manager is the only element really getting some innovation.
Why not to make it possible to add some buttons for window related tasks and / or information? Just like gadgets or panel applets. For example, someone may want to know how much of system resources this program consumes – a tiny info about the program’s proc and mem load can be displayed in the title bar. It would be nice if different applications could have different sets of such applets: a text processor could have a direct link to the folder with the texts which are being edited, or any other program could have a file manager button, or a calculator, or a quick note button, which could be linked to this application or placed on desktop… Just have a look at what is there on your panels and think if it could be app-related and placed on the title bar…
In general, the idea is to implement some of the panel’s functionality, probably application-specific. It will take some load off the panels and make this functionality more task/app-oriented.
By the way it seems to be quite opposite to Mac approach, where the upper panel acts as the title bar…