[Wsmanager-devel] TODO?

[Kevin B. <ke...@sb...>]

I just read the TODO list. It brought up several questions. Hopefully 
someone can answer them.

   SHORT TERM

   Better icons.

What's wrong with the current icons? I think they look good. If someone 
can explain what's wrong, or why new icons are good, I could ask an 
icon designer I know if he'd be willing to donate icons.

   Nag box.

For what? I mean, this is an open-source project, so what's there to 
nag about?

   Check location of notification window.

Notification window? What window is this?

   Check preferences on initial launch.

Check for what? I mean, if the prefs are corrupted, then it should 
simply revert to defaults, given that it's using the built-in 
NSUserDefaults. So what's the issue?

   Jump to window getting focus in app.

I'm not sure what this means.

   Background images per desktop

I don't have a question so much as commentary. In all virtual desktop 
pagers I've seen (basically, KDE's), switching desktops takes a second 
or so for the background to switch. That always struck me as something 
that seemed awkward and didn't look great, because when you switched 
desktops you still had a fragment of the old desktop for a second. If 
this is implemented, would it be possible to make it switch instantly?

   Proper sticky window support (currently hard-coded make panels 
sticky).

What is the ideal level of sticky window support? I mean, if you set it 
on a per-window basis, you'd want some way to remember which windows of 
which applications were sticky, so re-launching the apps would keep it 
sticky, and I can't think of any way that could be done.

   Move panel windows -- i.e. add to pager?

I'm not sure what this means

   Move windows via pager

The desktop pager already provides this, and I don't think I'd want the 
statusbar pager to let you move windows. Unless you mean move windows 
between workspaces by dragging them on the desktop pager?

   LONG TERM

   lanch applescript via hotkey

Why applescript? Why not anything? If this were added, I'd suggest 
making it so you could, say, set an oft-edited document to a hotkey, or 
something like that.

Perhaps make it so you can also add hotkeys to specific workspaces, so, 
for instance, your Email workspace could have a hotkey to open 
Mail.app, whereas your Web-browsing workspace would use the same key to 
open Safari?

   iTunes integration

I don't understand. What sort of iTunes integration could a workspace 
manager want?

And as long as I'm asking questions, I have another question:

It appears that Desktop Manager injects some code into the Dock that 
runs in a thread and installs AppleEvent handlers to do things such as 
fade windows in and out, reorder them, and make them sticky/unsticky. I 
assume this is done because Desktop Manager doesn't have the 
permissions to modify windows in other applications, but the Dock does? 
If this is the case, then why does Desktop Manager have the permissions 
to execute code inside the Dock's context? That just seems like a 
security hole to me, where an application doesn't have permissions to 
do something, but it can inject code into another application that 
does. Would it be possible to inject malicious code into a setuid 
process? Where is this line drawn?

Thank you for your time,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Ballard
ke...@sb...
http://www.tildesoft.com
http://kevin.sb.org