Re: [Wsmanager-devel] TODO?

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

On Feb 12, 2004, at 8:04 AM, Richard Wareham wrote:

> Perhaps I should have defined this better -- A 
> one-time-per-version-change box
> that pops up with ChangeLog in, known bugs, requests for help, etc. IT 
> only
> appears once on an upgrade.

Ah, that makes sense. What are you going to use for version checking?

I would advocate using MacPAD. I wrote the Cocoa version-checking 
socket and *I* think it works perfectly well, and is a cinch to 
implement. Additionally, this would make MacShareware be able to update 
new version automatically! :D (yeah, yeah, MacShareware isn't 
important, but hopefully MacUpdate and, god willing, one day VT will 
also supprot it)

> If I click on the Safari icon in the Dock, A window belonging to 
> Safari gets
> the focus (or becomes the key window, whatever the Mac term is). Make 
> it an
> option to switch to the workspace containing this window.

Hrm... when I showed Desktop Manager to my dad, his gripe was sort of 
the opposite of this (and this was his gripe with CTDM as well). He 
wanted to be able to click the Safari icon and have a new window open 
up even though one is open in a different workspace, i.e. acting like 
no windows were open. Of course, this seems like something that isn't 
really possible to do (since you'd have to inject code into each app to 
deal with this), so it's not important (and he agreed with me that it's 
not feasible). But anyway, my point is if you make it auto-switch 
workspaces (yeah, I know, it would be a preference) then that would 
make it very annoying to activate an application without switching 
workspaces. Yes, you could cmd-tab, but that's annoying.

> Again this was fairly speculative but I was wondering about extending 
> the
> hotkey system to allow for generic hotkey -> AppleScript/launch progam
> events.
>
>>    iTunes integration
>>
>> I don't understand. What sort of iTunes integration could a workspace
>> manager want?
>
> It just pisses me off I can't control iTunes with hotkeys :) This 
> could of
> course be rolled into the above.

Hrm, I think a better idea for these would be to come out with a 
separate app that does the hotkey stuff. After all, Desktop Manager has 
one function, and that's to manage virtual desktops. Is it a good idea 
to be added non-related features? A separate app would just be better 
in general.

And yes, I want to control iTunes with hotkeys as well. I've pondered 
making an app to do it multiple times, but just never got around to 
doing it.

> Its not so much a hole, more a policy. Basically the Dock is given full
> control over windows as a hack to allow for Expose-type functionality 
> (and
> minimisation.maximisation control, etc). The code-injection is based 
> on the
> idea that priviledges are per-user rather than per-process (I don't 
> think its
> a terribly good idea myself but then I didn't design mach :)). The
> WindowServer enforeces a per-user, per-process model -- i.e. 
> theoretically
> finer grained. but of course can be overcome using hacks similar to the
> above.

Makes sense.

I will point out that if the Dock is restarted while Desktop Manager is 
running, the code isn't re-injected. It might be a good idea to watch 
for that.

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