Re: Desktop/Window alignment (spatial?)



Seems that for NOW the easiest thing to do, to make the problem
bearable, is to position the windows by default down Y and left X of
their parent window. And set the default position of the root windows to
the top/right of the screen.

That will get the windows out of the way, and be totally usable for the
time being, until we can add such features as a right aligned desktop.
Already there are mechanisms to determine the default position of a
window. It doesn't seem like just setting those values to something else
is much of a problem at all.

On Mon, 2004-03-01 at 09:10, Calum Benson wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-03-01 at 11:12, Glynn Foster wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > > At the moment, unvisited windows are just placed by metacity like normal
> > > windows. However, i think your idea actually has some merits in the
> > > general case too. If you open a new small window, any window, chances
> > > are that you don't want it to cover the typical icons on the left hand
> > > (and possibly right hand) side of the desktop.
> > 
> > And in fact this was one of the main issues coming out of one of the Sun
> > usability studies, which didn't seem to get published :( Calum?
> 
> Yeah, we didn't publish it at the time because JDS was still an
> unreleased product, but there was supposed to be some effort to get it
> out afterwards.  I'll ping the relevant folks and see what happened to
> that.
> 
> As it happens I've been thinking about this problem over the past couple
> of days too, but I don't have any magic solution so far... simplest idea
> I had was just to try and make sure windows appear centred on the
> current screen the first time you open them (since unless they're really
> big, that should still keep them clear of any icons down either side of
> the screen), and always remember their previous position after that. 
> Possibly supplemented by easier ways to access desktop icons if they do
> accidentally get obscured, e.g. a Desktop submenu on the GNOME Main menu
> that stayed in sync with the contents of the desktop.
> 
> Cheeri,
> Calum.
> 
> -- 
> CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
> mailto:calum benson sun com            Java Desktop System Group
> http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771
> 
> Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems

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