Everyone, I just saw your talk about some nice desktop effects, and please, may i add some comment to this topic, from 'production users' view ? I do not want to hijack your thread so i change the subject.
In my humble opinion, any major future market for Windowmaker would include compact laptops, netbooks, and smartphones, because here you can play your strongest cards: Speed, small memory and disk usage footprint, clean desktop which requires no large screen. As a side effect, if it runs on small devices, it's as well perfect for heavy load systems (like rendering machines) and also for comparably old computers. This is a wide range. But, YMMV. Now, in business, for any product, before you discuss future features, you would do a step-for-step analysis, maybe like that: - Where is the product right now (positioned in which market, or fitting what needs, of which customers) - Into which market should it move (assuming the original market has changed or disappeared) - Which key features does that imply (which are absolute basic, and need to work bug-free, and where can we be better than others) Then comes feasibility (can we few really do it) and finally also implementing a monitoring of success (like, user survey, which of course would be a good first step too) So 'speed' would be one core feature, suitable for that market, and for one, it can be achieved by general code overhaul, up to internal redesign. A different approach is to improve the efficiency of workflow. And here comes my personal example, my workflow. It is is thematic: * Communications require mail, ekiga, skype, chat. Most of the other theme sessions require _not_ to be disturbed by incoming calls (if i want to get anywhere) so i'm better off to shut them all down again, when i switch... * For graphic design, i launch image viewer, image editor, file manager with tabs already located in the necessary folders, scanner, photo download. * Or i may do sound and composing, then it's player, several sound / midi editors, a terminal (for quick daemon control.) Or movie editing which needs kdenlive, avidemux, (rarely any other) and again tabbed filemanager, and some additional tools like audacity and upload manager. * Another 'theme' is system management (including updates, backups, or some tool scripting) which mostly requires only a tabbed terminal but often also monitors and log viewer. * And yes, there is an office session too :) about writing letters and financial stuff, although i try to ignore these things to the greatest possible extent... * Web-browser is the one thing that's about always needed in any session. Naturally, i have dedicated workspaces for any such themes, and guess what, they call it 'activities' today. But let's call it workspace sessions here. What i usually do is, click on several docked icons to launch the set of apps. With custom icons (usually hacked from a generic one), WMaker allows me to launch a file manager with prelocated tabs, too. All in all, that's already a fast workflow. I asked myself how to automate the task. Would it be convenient to save multiple sessions just to a virtual 'menu' and relaunch them from that ? But it needed to be workspace-wise to be really useful, and i may change the set now and then, making the menu approach complicated. So how could that be fast and immediately intuitive ? So i came up with this: When i select several docked icons, and 'drag' them to one special icon which saves this set under this icon as a set of launch commands. Now clicking that icon would launch the set. I can close the complete set with one icon click, too. To make it simple, there would be only one such launcher icon per workspace. Then, the selected icons get a little color mark, like 'omnipresent' already have. This is easy to manage, apparent at one look. It is just a short idea, not important, and only serves as an example how a feature could speed up the workflow. (This is not a feature request ! I'm ok with how it is right now) Compare it to a standard Gnome session, where to achieve the same result, a lot of clicks are required and it still would never be as flexible as that. I believe that this is the type of features which would make Windowmaker stronger in the market. But i also believe that developers *now and then* just need something fun to code, and that's totally OK with me. I like fun, too. And if you have no fun, you may stop working at all :) So, please do not think i'm against any pure eye candy. But one needs to be aware that these things may be a good PR, but do not necessarily make the application stronger in competition. ....sorry i bothered you with this long mail ! Michael -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [email protected].
