Hi Everybody, I had good discussion with indigo on IRC today that got me thinking about alternatives to PicoGUI's 'panel' system for managing applications on the screen. Since it was the first thing he complained about after trying PicoGUI, I figure it could use some fixing up. :) He was going to post something about it soon, but since i found some extra info after he went to bed i figured i'd go ahead and start discussing a little..
The requirements for this system - non-overlapping application windows - minimal screen space usage (for example, it would be a waste to have resizing handles on each edge of a window) - intuitive user interface! - customizability I found a couple other systems with the same goal as PicoGUI- to eliminate the extra time and screen space associated with moving around windows by forcing them to occupy non-overlapping 'panels' or 'frames'. The user needs to be able to move apps between frames, resize the frames, and create/destroy them. -- emacs The most obvious example of this type of system is emacs. You can split the window, resize, and load buffers using keyboard commands. -- ion A while back (though still after i'd created picogui and its panel widget) i found this. ion is a window manager for X. It starts with one frame occupying the entire display, and lets users split the frame horizontally or vertically, and resize it. Each frame has a bar at the top that shows all the apps attached to that frame. You can click an app's name to display it in the frame, or drag it's name to another frame. It uses keyboard commands for just about everything, including splitting and resizing the frames. I found a post on the handhelds.org mailing list from one user who found ion quite useful on the iPaq: http://www.handhelds.org/pipermail/handhelds/2001-May/001823.html -- oberon I stumbled upon another system that uses non-overlapping windows, the GUI in Oberon (http://www.oberon.ethz.ch). I don't know much about the GUI yet, but from this screenshot you can see that it uses the same bar for the name of the app and for commands related to it, somewhat like how PicoGUI now allows applications to add their own widgets to the panelbar: http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/ Anyway... we were trying to figure out how to implement a system like this that would work well on a handheld or a desktop. Here are some ideas: - I was thinking about using a system like ion, where the frame has a bar at the top. The bar would have widgets to resize the panel (by dragging a button), split the panel, or load another app. On the same bar you'd have the equivalent of picogui's current panelbar, with the apps' name and any additional widgets. - indigo suggested that we use a menu instead on handhelds, since the bar would take up valuable space. One of the handheld's silkscreen or hardware buttons could bring up a menu of the frames, apps within the frame, and all apps. - Maybe we have a button on the handheld to toggle the bars on and off? - We'd probably want this to be very configurable, so that a desktop computer could use a full bar like ion, and a handheld could use something simplified that takes less screen space. Also, on a desktop you might want to switch apps with an alt-middle-click menu while using a button on a handheld. I'd appreciate any ideas from PicoGUI's potential users on how useful this would be, etc. Also, indigo's busy writing an OS and I probably won't have time for this until i fix the textbox widget, so volunteers to actually code this thing are welcome >:) --Micah _______________________________________________ Pgui-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/pgui-devel
