Re: [Usability]Re: Improving the metacity minimise animation

[Gregory Merchan <merchan phys lsu edu>]

On Fri, Oct 18, 2002 at 02:26:45PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> MArk Finlay <linuxexpert eircom net> writes:
> > 
> > I can understand how you are getting sick of this discussion so I'm
> > going to just post up some stuff related to improving the metacity
> > animation.
> 
> I *love* discussion on how to _improve_ the animation, that's sort of
> the whole reason I don't want to just add a preference.
<snip>

I finally got a look at it. :-)  (I use sawfish, still.)

First, a correction. The WM spec does have icon geometry. So, as someone
might have pointed out, the (un)minimize animation can go to the right place.
There is still nothing for opening and closing though.

About the animation:

Here, the real time for the operation is about 1 sec. I haven't looked
at metacity's source, but I have a guess as to why.


> > 3. The animation may not look great in E but it feels much smoother.
> > Metacity's animation looks a bit like a flipbook animation.
> > 
> > 4. The lines are much thiner in E making the animation less intrusive.
<snip>

I don't remember E's animation. I suspect the thick black lines of metacity's
animation makes it seem like a burden; like dripping molasses. I vaguely
recall a similar complaint about the Crux Gtk+ 1.x theme which also had
many black lines.

Here's my line of guessing:

Is the server grabbed during the animation? I suspect that exposure
processing by other apps (e.g., the Nautilus desktop) may be stealing time
from metacity.

If the server is grabbed, how about using the XOR trick to draw the
rectangles? IIRC, it is described in the O'Reilly Xlib manual. There are
also a few window managers which use if for moving or resizing windows.
I think the benefits of this are reduced exposures on other windows and
increased visibility (since you won't get black on dark).

Making the lines thinner would probably be good too. I think Win98 used
a 1px dashed line.


Cheers,
Greg Merchan