I just wanted to chime in on the love/hate relationship that most people
have w/ blackbox. I understand both sides, since I hate the idea of bloat,
but always want some little feature to scratch my itch. I myself have been
wishing (and patching) the toolbar away forever. My advice: If some newbie
says "hey! lets make blackbox do tranlucent windows and have pixmap themes",
take a deep breath and ignore him.. he's not Brad, and unless he has a
patch, its not going to happen. And if you're the person making some
suggestion, ignore the oncomming flames and try writing a patch. I'm amazed
at how rude and possesive people have been recently. I can understand the
feeling, but I can't condone the posts. I think voicing ideas of things that
bug you is totally fine, especially if you've used blackbox for awhile and
understand the philosophy. Flamefests just waste mailbox space.
Anyway, off my pulpit and onto *my suggetsions*. Rather then talk about new
features I'd like to see show up, here's my list wishlist:
1) 8-bit color work. Try using netscape w/ sloppy focus in 8 bit color. It
sorta' works, but if you leave the window, the pallet changes and won't
return unless the window focus changes.
2) A patch to blackbox/bbkeys so that window switching is stack based
instead of fixed linked list traversal.
3) LibBlackbox make sense. Having the drawing code duplicated is silly.
However, if you wanna get *really* minimalistic, I'd suggest making bbtools
be loadable libraries instead. Having the elf binary framework image in
memory multiple times seems wasteful. A plug-in architecture would prob
solve that, but the overhead of the interfaces might be just as bad. In my
perfect world, bbtools would be patches to the blackbox source, so I load
only one executable into memory, and don't have to waste time
contextswitching between bbtools. But thats just me, and I'm a bit crazy
about that sorta stuff. NOTE: I do realize how infeasable this is, I'm just
rabling at this point, NO FLAMES PLEASE!!
As always these are my itches to scratch, but if anyone wants to beat me to
it, or has suggestions about how to best implement them, I'd be happy to
hear from them.
alright.. enough from me.
-js
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