Two rather similar squibs today.
GNOME bug 96348 calls for an animation to be shown when restoring (unminimising) a window, as we already do when minimising. I can’t see any problem with this idea.
GNOME bug 97288, however, would like all new windows to have the opportunity to come from somewhere. If you open a document from the file manager, for example, the window should appear to zoom out of the icon. Presumably this would involve modifying the startup notification protocol to pass in a pair of (x, y) coordinates. This would need some changes to nautilus and friends as well as to Metacity, so it seems non-trivial.
However, even if these coordinates were missing, we still know the ID of the window which launched the new window, so we could assume it came from the centre of its launcher. Something similar could also be done with transient windows.
Photo © lant-70, cc-by-nc-nd.
Sorry for the criticism, but I find the minimization animation to be terribly hard on the eye — that is, particularly ugly — and what is worse, non themeable. It looks sooo anachronistic, especially when the compositor is activated. I’d really appreciate a gconf-only option to turn it off, if possible — or at least, a way to make the black window outline a little less thick…
Anyway keep up the good work, posting comments and progress on metacity bugs really makes the (non-occasional) readers feel more involved in the project! I wish more developers did the same.
Well compiz needs this badly as well. Sure it’s animated now, but the default animation is a window that appears from above as sent from god (hard to explain, try it ;). I think it’s called glideN for some number N.
So it’s not just metacity that needs this, everyone does! Also, note that (x,y) might not be enough when launching a program from the Panel dropdown-tree-menu (try Apps->Accessories->Calculator). It closes before the applications starts – making any ‘launch’ animation originate from nothing.
Just noticed… Currently the attention is first drawn to the bottom windowlist where the calculater appears (if it’s actually noticed at all!). This is often in the opposite corner than the pane dropdown-tree-menu… eeek!). Wonder how any animation is going to fix that ;).
But at least opening a spatial folder in nautilus could have some helpfull animation.
As usual i’m not doing any work – just complaining ;). But still using the the lovely sane metacity. It’s the best program in gnome! :)