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

[raster redhat com]

On 20 May, Miroslav Silovic shouted:
->  
->  I like color reactiveness a lot, and I pestered Raster to add hue
->  shifts to Imlib on a few occasions. There are a few notes, though:
->  
->  Bowie Poag <bjp@primenet.com> writes:
->  
->  > A: "The code responsible for color-reactiveness can (and should) be
->  >     tied directly to /proc, or something which watches /proc for you.
->  
->  This is absolutely unacceptable, as GNOME is supposed to be portable
->  (not all unices have /proc, and those that have (Solaris) don't use
->  the same format).
->  
->  Lamps and beacons (if I understand them correctly) are tied to windows
->  and their icons. This means that they should fall under Window
->  Manager's jurisdiction. From there, there are a few things to do:
->  
->  1) WM hints: Application should be able to send its status to WM as one
->     of the extra hints. This, in fact, is a great idea regardless of
->     whether it's used for color reactive desktop elements or some other
->     way of status displaying. So, the question to then WM team: would
->     it be feasible to add WM hints that allow the apps to tell their
->     activity status to the WM - WMs can implement it later at leisure.
->     Thing is, the idea if 'activity' varies with the application, so
->     each should be able to implement its own idea of tracking (within
->     some sort of standard guidelines).

Um.. I think we need a much more precise definition of "status" before
anything like this can be done... is statuse just running or not? is it
running, waiting for somehting, sleeping, awating input, ... ? this
would be best done by property hints... can be implimented in a flash..
if I just know what there is...

->  2) default behaviour: Noncompliant applications won't set their hints.
->     There is a question of default, in that case: the problem is that
->     network apps would be active/inactive depending on their I/O status,
->     while CPU bound apps would be active if OS isn't swapping them too
->     much. I think the reasonable default for color tracking WMs would
->     be CPU usage reported by gtop library, but for now, gtop isn't
->     portable. Or just colormark only the apps that ask for it.
->  
->  3) gmc: I could think of a few ways to colorize (or beaconize) icons
->     withing the file manager - by filesize, or age.
->  

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