unity-design team mailing list archive

[David Barth <david.barth@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> Mirco Müller wrote:
>   
>> Am Freitag, den 28.08.2009, 09:30 +0100 schrieb Mark Shuttleworth:
>>
>>   
>>     
>>> ...
>>> Mirco, is there any way to know, when the notification appears, how
>>> long the mouse has been stationary?
>>>     
>>>       
>> 	Yes, that should be doable. I'll give that a try today and let you
>> folks know about the outcome.
>>   
>>     
> OK, just let us know if it's *possible*. I'm thinking that we might
> leave the fade if the mouse has moved in the past 5 seconds on the basis
> that your eye is likely to be tracking the mouse. But if the mouse has
> been still, we wouldn't fade because you just left the mouse there from
> previous work.
>
> This would be pretty fragile to small accidental nudges of the mouse, so
> I don't think we should implement it yet, but I'd like to know how much
> we can cheaply determine about the mouse's behaviour in the past few
> seconds. I do *not* want notify-osd to be eating CPU cycles watching the
> mouse all the time, though :-)
>   
Currently, we're adding a cursor monitoring callback once a notification
is on display, but that's polling. It's acceptable to finely track what
the user is doing for fading, blurring, etc. But not as general mechanism.

However, using the XScreenSaver extension, the X server is maintaining
this information for us, so that we can track the idle time, without
doing any polling, in particular when no notification is on display.

>From xscreensaverqueryinfo(3):

#include <X11/extensions/scrnsaver.h>

typedef struct {
    Window window;                /* screen saver window */
    int state;                    /* ScreenSaver{Off,On,Disabled} */
    int kind;                     /* ScreenSaver{Blanked,Internal,External}
*/
    unsigned long til_or_since;   /* milliseconds */
    unsigned long idle;           /* milliseconds */
    unsigned long event_mask;     /* events */

} XScreenSaverInfo;

accessible with XScreenSaverQueryInfo*

*We should need to do the query only before displaying a new
notification, to know whether to apply the "no-fade-when-mouse-is-there"
feature or not.

David