Re: Icons on the desktop

[Kevin Birch <kbirch pobox com>]

On 5/5/98 12:30 PM Guillermo S. Romero / unnamed / Familia Romero
famrom@ran.es said:

>SMALL... gmc is big or small? What do you think? I have not tested.
>NT Explorer takes some MBs just to show the icons... and thats pathetic. I
>have restarted it to test and from scratch it needs 3208KB. Poor, just to
>show less thatn 60 icons (most of the repeated).
>
gmc may indeed be a small app, and that is good.  But this issue here is
the fact that the icons do not show up until you start gmc.  Thus there
is an unnatural coupling of the iconic desktop metaphor and the
application used to view the icon's contents.  There should be a daemon
that is running when a user logs in that will show the desktop,
regardless of whether there are gmc windows on the screen.  When a user
opens one of these icons, a gmc window should be instantiated to show the
appropriate contents.

>>In addition, are there some plans to make the desktop layer more aware of
>>icons, i.e. that they are always behind everything else?
>
>I always will like that desktop is treated similar to other windows, so you
>can go to a panel or menu or use a keybinding and choose "Minimize all" or
>"Show me the desktop", so you can select icons faster. With Windoze you can
>do "Minize all" and then "Undo minimize all"... but no key avaliable or a
>single button toggle (at least I do not know it), and that will be really
>cool (one button or key to fast toggle, I mean).
>
This is a very doable thing if there is desktop that appears behind all
other windows.  This could be an invisible window or whatever, but it
must appear behind everything else to maintain the illusion of a desktop.
 If you've ever used Active Desktop, one of the buttons that it comes
with is a show/hide desktop.  When this is pressed, any windows on screen
are hidden and only the desktop and its icons remain.  Press it again,
and your desktop is restored.



Çheers,
Kevin

--
Kevin Birch
kbirch@pobox.com