Nova Window Manager / News: Recent posts

Merry Christmas(Still Christmas here, regardless of
what Sourceforge's servers say)! I have FINALLY released NovaWM 0.8 Alpha. This is not the same as
the other releases. Nothing has been done to prepare
the release. It's simply a snapshot of my NovaWM development tree(That's why it's so large, there's lots
of unnessary files in the tarball). I can't gurantee it will
compile but I thought 0.8 was due to be out long ago.
While I didn't add all the configure options I planned
for this release configure file support is in there.

NovaWM 0.7 has finally been released. I want to get feedback
on this release! Tell what you like and don't like about it and
report ANY bugs!
Some of the changes:
-Unmap Ignore: Somehow the old way of doing this stopped working,
there was one or more too many unmap events that were ignore,
causing some windows never to go away. Now instead of counting
the number of unmap events to ignore, a list of specific
window IDs to ignore the event from are used.
-GNOME Support: For those of you who like Gnome, you can now
use NovaWM as your GNOME Window Manager!
-Fix: Fixed bug related to the grabbing the pointer in
moving and resizing.
-Fix: NovaWM is now more accurate with storing the correct
window geometry after moving, resizing, and maximizing windows.
-Fix: NovaWM now honors --disable-bar properly. I recommend
using this option when using NovaWM as the GNOME Window Manager.

NovaWM 0.6 Alpha has a lot of new features and improvements!
-Lots of bug fixes (Haven't seen any crashes yet, report any you may get!)
-If the NovaBar is disabled(--disable-bar option) you will be able to use the root menus.
-Click to focus!
-Titlebar with lowered text shows window focus
-Better window focus
-Uses xpms for titlebar button icons
-Virtual Desktop Support(See http://novawm.sourceforge.net for more info)
-Handles unmap properly most of the time.
-Highlighting support in the window list
-Clock doesn't update unless it needs to
-Other stuff

NovaWM 0.6 Alpha is now available! 0.6 is a complete
rewrite of NovaWM with lots of new features and improvements. It has new features such as virtual desktops and click to focus! A more complete feature list later.. Please give me feedback! Send me e-mails about ANY bugs,crashes, or comments!!!

NovaWM 0.5 Alpha is out!
-Menu Highlighting supported
-Improved menu item space(New Font)
-Improved Icons
-Improved buttons
-Configurable Menu!!!
-Improved Destroy Handler
-Added Restart function

0.4 is now available! Fixed even more things,
added support for transient window, fixed motif
problems with some windows. Adding scrolling for the
window list. Improved things. Started on config
support but it's still not functional.

Fixed the corrupted download ( I think ).
I included a large tarball(Not gzipped) just incase.
I downloaded it myself and tested so it should work.
Also since I recreated the releases I fixed a few more problems :)
Crashes caused by closing a window in anyway
should not happen except in some odd cases :).

The first Alpha version of NovaWM was release!
0.3 has lots of new features and support.
Now XMMS will look and work right, because Motif Hints
are now supported. XSizeHints are also now supported.
Fixed the crash on startup bug which was caused by
NovaWM trying to handle the top window which didn't exist
unless there was a window in there when NovaWM started.
Clicking dead windows will cause NovaWM to destroy
them to get them out of the way. While this is good it
can backfire. Sometimes the pointers to memory for some
windows can become mysteriously invalid and cause NovaWM to destroy a program that is still running fine
but that NovaWM doesn't recognize anymore(Happened
once when trying to move Netscape).
Screenshots will appear later tonight on the web site!
Currently, if you want a cool image on the root window,
just startup a xterm and use a program like xsetbg or xloadimage. Next release: NovaWM will run the program
for you.

NovaWM 0.2 has been released!
NOTE: Sourceforge still lists the old release
on the summary page even though I deleted it.
It will probably still list that release until tomorrow(SourcForge
sometimes updates certain things daily.)
0.2 is a major bugfix release. There are other bugs fixes
that I saved for the 0.3 release. I ran and used
NovaWM 0.2 all afternoon today without much trouble.
Though there are still applications that can cause problems.
rp3-config can crash NovaWM.
Messing the NovaWM options that modify the root
window doesn't always have good results :(
Some applications(especially GTK apps) leave behind
bad windows, if you click those bad(and blank) windows
NovaWM will crash because of a attempt to access a location in memory that has been freed.
Most other things won't hurt NovaWM :)
NOTE: The "Kill" button in NovaWM still messes up
events.
NOTE: XMMS no longer messes up events, but it doesn't
seem to ask to be configured properly and leaves
behind a bad window in place the Playlist.

I hadn't been working on NovaWM for a bit because
of other projects. Though I have continued to
work on 0.2 for the last few days and things are
going well. One of the hardest things so far isdeceiding what to add and fix and what isn't
need for this release :) .
0.2 is mostly a bugfix release.
0.1 seemed to be quite unstable, especially
on another system I tested it on.
0.2 seems to have good stability.
NovaWM's signal handler works now :)
Also I will add another option to allow
the user to speicify the root window
color or image. Right now NovaWM uses
xsetbg which appears to only load jpgs but
I'll right my own code for images soon
(NovaWM will support: BMP, TGA, PCX, and some
others.).
Window moving works fine now too :).
There are many other improvements
that I haven't mentioned and many improvements
I plan to work on tonight.