Re: WM Compliance

[Eckehard Berns <eb berns prima de>]

On Mon, Jun 08, 1998 at 01:11:08PM -0700, Adam Jacob wrote:
> 	Are there active plans for Gnome to be color-reactive?

I already implemented a GnomeLamp widget. The pixmap looks quite dumb, but
that can be changed. And I also implemented Raster's window manager lamp stuff
(which is found in gnome.c in the E sources in the GNOME CVS tree). Thus a
call to gnome_lamp_set_window_type sets the WM_APP_STATE window property to
some CARDINAL value. The window manager should react by setting a lamp (or
what ever this `lamp' is represented by) anywhere onto the wm part of the
window. An iconified window should have the beacon form. Or at least that is
what I make out of the proposal. Up to now no GNOME app uses the GnomeLamp
widget (besides gnome-test from the gnome-libs package), and I have no idea if
the lamp stuff is ever accepted by the application programmers, but
theoretically it's there.

> Would the
> WindowManager even need to have support for that, or could that be
> a completley application controlled thing.  (From what I remember of
> the proposal, it was to put a small "light" indicating state on the 
> toolbar and mini-icon of app's, correct?) Wouldn't that be accomplished
> most easily by simply having the app draw the "lamp" onto it's
> mini-icon itself?

I don't think so. In fact the whole lamp/beacon drawing stuff is up to the wm
most of the time. As I understand the lamp proposal the lamp should help the
user _not_ to have to look at the window's contents to know what is going on.
In some circumstances there might be the need for the app to draw the lamp
(e.g. in a mini-window like you said), and that's what the actual GnomeLamp
widget is for, but that is IMHO just the exception.

But I have to admit, that the whole lamp/beacon issue is not that important,
and a wm could simply ignore it. It would be nice if some window managers
would start to support it, because without the wm's support no one will
actually implement it into his app and we will never see if the lamps can
make our life easier.

-- 
Eckehard Berns