Re: A Proposal For The Addition Of Color-Reactiveness To The GNOME Desktop

[raster redhat com]

On 20 May, Rob Browning shouted:
->  
->  I'm not sure what I think of all this, but I do have a couple of
->  comments:
->  
->    1) I think that instead of beacons for the icons, that if you wanted
->       to pursue this, applications should just be allowed to treat
->       their icons as small windows, and should have a good drawing
->       toolkit for rendering into them.  For example, why shouldn't an
->       iconized FTP transfer, in addition to having a light indicating
->       the state of the connection, have a small pie chart, numeric
->       display, or other progress meter showing the percent complete?
->       Same thing goes for other apps.  An iconized rendering window
->       could show a minaturized version of it's progress so that it
->       would be easy to see how far it's gotten.
->  
->       And this is somewhat half-baked, but I had always thought it
->       might be interesting (and really easy if we had display
->       postscript systems) to have some windows just iconify to smaller
->       versions (say %20) of themselves so you could still see what they
->       were doing, even when they were "out of the way".  You should
->       even still be able see enough detail to tell when say a long
->       compile in an xterm was finished.

the "icons as windows" system already exists in X and is part of the
basic ICCCM specs.

->    2) Using the type of strings you describe to represent the color
->       transitions seems like a limiting idea.  Off the top of my head,
->       you'd be better off using something like this
->   
->         "B=DarkBlue R=Red G=#007700 B 1.0 R 0.2 G 0.5"
->  
->       where you define the colors, then use them in an alternating list
->       which contains alternating pairs of a color abbreviation and a
->       time in seconds.  This makes it much more flexible (and easier to
->       read) when specifying long periods.  It also links the delays to
->       wall-clock time in a very obvious manner, something you probably
->       should do.
->  
->  Just a couple of thoughts...
->  

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