App launch feedback (was: Re: visibility?)

[Peter Åstrand <peter student liu se>]

Hello GNOMErs. This is a announcement for Xalf - a tool that gives
user feedback when launching X applications. 

Xalf is mainly the result of a discussion on KDE-development list (see
http://lists.kde.org/?t=95242156500001&w=2&r=1). 

XALF is trying to solve the same problem as Busycursor (also written
by me), but in a different way. The main differences are:

1) XALF can reliable detect if newly mapped windows are belonging to a
particular launch. It does this by overloading XCreateWindow with a
version that provides passing of a environment variable to a window
property. This property can be used to distinguish the windows from each
other. The technique originally comes from SCWM. 

2) XALF does not use the mouse cursor as an "indicator". Instead, it
creates a invisible window to be shown in a standard task pager like
Gnomes tasklist_applet or the KDE Taskbar. 

Xalf can be downloaded from
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~altic/projects/xalf/. 

KDE is considering implementing some kind of app launch feedback, maybe
using the SCWM technique. 

I think it would be a good thing to provide app launch feedback also in
Gnome. This SCWM technique seems to work quite good - download Xalf and
see if it works as good for you as it does for me.

Comments are appreciated. 

/Peter Astrand <altic@lysator.liu.se>