unity-design team mailing list archive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Kristoffer Lundén wrote on 27/05/10 19:23:
>
> Is it possible for the window manager (or some other mechanism that it
> can communicate with) to know if I am interacting with a window at the
> moment (defined as typing, clicking, moving etc within a certain time
> I guess, that would needed to be tested out)?
>...

That is precisely what it does, and has done for years. But it will
always be guessing. If you're watching a video and it mentions an
unfamiliar word, and you launch the Dictionary to look it up, and it
takes two seconds to launch, you want it to take focus. But if you
launch OpenOffice.org and it takes 40 seconds to launch, probably you
don't want it to suddenly cover the video you'll be watching 40 seconds
later. So when should the window manager switch from assuming you want a
new window focused, to assuming you don't? After five seconds? Ten?
Twenty? And how can the window manager, by itself, tell which was the
action that resulted in the window eventually opening?

I don't know the exact details of the algorithm Metacity and Compiz use
to make this guess, and most of the people in this discussion seem not
to know that there even is one. So I think the next step is for someone
to dig into the code and find out exactly what the algorithm is in
Metacity, in Compiz, and in kwin (and ideally research what it is in
Windows and Mac OS X, too). Only then can we report informed bugs where
the algorithm isn't working properly, and only then can we make sensible
suggestions for how it could be improved.

- -- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

iEYEARECAAYFAkv/m2gACgkQ6PUxNfU6ecplVwCgint4HqMFgheyP27TKeJpDdws
Uo0AnRZ+EDA5L5ulZecY65LNcJigN3xJ
=9++P
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----