Re: Major issues with window list applet

["Kevin Vandersloot" <kfv101 psu edu>]

Hi Mike.

----- Original Message -----
From: "mike" <mike redtux demon co uk>
To: <desktop-devel-list gnome org>
Sent: Sunday, March 10, 2002 12:57 PM
Subject: Re: Major issues with window list applet


> On Sun, 2002-03-10 at 16:18, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> >
> > mike <mike redtux demon co uk> writes:
> > > yes - it is useful to have fixed area to click
> >
> > If you just slam your mouse to the edge of the panel, you can always
> > right-click there to get the panel menu.
> >
> > It's a bug that clicking on "blank" parts of the win list applet
> > gives you a winlist menu insted of panel menu. We don't want to add a
> > preference in order to work around this bug.
> >
> > > 1. how many rows
> >
> > There are always as many rows as will fit in the panel. In the old
> > tasklist, if you said "2 rows" and had a small panel, the panel would
> > grow. So just making your panel large is the same as saying "2 rows"
> > in effect. You can AFAICS always get the same effect as in the old
> > applet.
>
> It does work but not especially intuitive - if you change from x-small
> (the default to small the applets grow with the panel

I think the new behavior is much nicer. Instead of maually tweaking the size
of each applet, just make the panel larger and all the applets respond. Just
look at the old tasklist pref dialog's sizing tab - do you know what each
item really does? I had to read through the code before finally
understanding the complicated interdependencies between each sizing option.
All I really wanted was for the tasklist to use only the available space
without having to hard code sizes. Right now the new tasklist just works.
It's beautiful in it's simplicity :)

> > > 2. how to group items
> >
> > There is an option for when to group - what additional grouping option
> > is missing?
> The options are 1.never 2. when space is limited 3.always
> In gnome4 there is the far more useful option of saying how many
> instances before grouping ie: a number so for example if it is set to 3,
> if you have 3 terminals open you get 3 terms showing and if 4 you just
> get one

Hey, there are more options for this one than in the previous tasklist ;)
Anyways, you will find many options dropped from gnome2 applets. Again, as
Havoc said, if certain applets have issues that prevent them from being
useful then file bugs. However, I don't see how the number of tasks shown
before grouping really affects the usage of the tasklist. Is the number
really that important? Can a user live with it being three instead of four
or two?

Regards,
Kevin

>
> > We don't want to add options when the problem is that the defaults are
> > wrong. So we need to understand in specific detail what the actual
> > usability problem you're encountering is, then fix the usability
> > problem.
> >
> > Havoc