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

[Rob Browning <rlb cs utexas edu>]

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.

  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...

-- 
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu>
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