Ahem

So
this Gnome Journal article went over Gnome 2.10 “with a
fine-toothed comb”. It looks like they did a really good job overall,
but naturally I just had to look at the Metacity section. Being the
nitpicky guy that I am, I thought I would clarify and correct a few
things:

• There were a number of user visible changes if you’re looking
  for things as small as what they noted, not just one.
• The change they pointed out was not an option addition but
  merely a renaming of “Put on All Workspaces” (which reflected a
  slight change in behavior necessary to fix some ugly corner
  conditions).
• They were right that there were lots of additions and
  optimizations to the built-in compositing manager (which I need
  to take a look at at some point…), but those all went in on
  the spiffifity branch so it’s not in the release in Gnome
  2.10

For those curious about the user visible changes that I refer to
above, here’s some of them (I’m trying to only pick out some of the
ones that are at about the level of detail they seemed to choose):

• Focus stealing prevention (covered in the release notes; though
  this was actually an older feature that didn’t beat feature
  freeze for Gnome 2.6 and had just been disabled in Gnome
  2.8)
• Icons for minimized windows and hidden windows (think “show
  desktop” mode) are dimmed in the Alt-Tab switcher popup.

• Add a keynav mode for sloppy and mouse focus users so that they
  can actually use keyboard navigation in a fairly sane manner
  (the mode automatically switches on or off when you use the
  keyboard to switch windows or go back to using the mouse to
  switch windows; most may not even notice–especially since this
  isn’t needed in click-to-focus mode)
• Refuse to focus windows with a modal transient, and focus the
  child instead (unfortunately, some windows claim they are modal
  for a single window but are really modal for all other windows
  of the app; further, we don’t handle when an app correctly
  specifies that it’s modal for all other windows)
• New default icon when the app doesn’t specify one
• Treat splashscreens the same as other windows for stacking
  (“that @#$&^ Eclipse splashscreen kept me from working with
  other windows for 30 seconds!”)
• Allow fullscreen windows on one xinerama to stay on top when
  working on the other xinerama screen
• Don’t lose which window has focus when interacting with the
  panel (unless interacting with a text entry applet or something
  else that requires keyboard focus)
• Add a keybinding to launch a terminal
• Make “showing desktop” mode be per-workspace instead of
  global