unity-design team mailing list archive

[Mark Shuttleworth <mark.shuttleworth@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

David Barth wrote:
> 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.

Yes, this gives us a binary "it has moved" or "it has been idle", which
is fine for the screensaver because the screensaver only cares if you
have been COMPLETELY idle. We might care about a little more detail,
like, "is your attention in this part of the screen", which is not the same.

For example, if I left the cursor in the top right of the screen after
closing a window and my attention is now somewhere else, but I just
nudge the touchpad a *little*, the XScreenSaver API will say "not idle",
while we probably want to infer that the users attention is not there.
Attention is a factor of amount of movement and other activity like
clicking.

Finally, does the XScreenSaver API separate out mouse movement from
keyboard movement? If I leave a mouse pointer in the top right of the
screen, but am typing into a window in the bottom left, we want to treat
that mouse pointer as idle even though I am busy typing precisely
because we are interested in a different region to where the typing is
happening.

Mark

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