unity-design team mailing list archive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx wrote on 19/01/11 07:28:
>...
> Imagine you're writing your essay in your favourite Word Processor,
> typing, clicking, panning and zooming, whatever.
> Now there's this word you couldn't find in the Word Processor's
> built-in dictionary, so you need to open your favourite Browser to find
> it online.
> Now there are precisely 2 things that can happen:
> 1) the browser starts up immediately, i.e. before you get the chance to
> interact with anything else
> 2) the browser starts up delayed, i.e. you get enough time to start
> typing, clicking or otherwise interacting with another app, before
> browser's launch is complete
>
> *now*, in case 1 we have all the conditions satisfied for arrogantly
> raising the browser window, because since the menu-interaction
> (clicking the browser's launcher) and *now*, no human-computer
> interaction has taken place anywhere else (disregarding eye movement
> for now..).
>...

The reason that doesn't work is that the window manager has no idea that
the thing you clicked on was a browser launcher. So it has no idea that
your click, and the window that opens a few seconds later, are related.

A toolkit and window manager that worked together could solve this, by
saying, for an event handler, something like (for example) "this handler
is likely to open a window of class 'Msgcompose', 'Thunderbird'".

Then when you clicked a button hooked up to that handler (or typed a
keyboard combo hooked up to the handler, or whatever), and a window of
that class did open, the window manager would know to focus it.

And if that toolkit was used for most applications on the platform, the
window manager could then be harsher on windows that opened without that
kind of omen -- opening them unfocused unless there had been a period of
inactivity longer than Compiz uses now.

But as long as Ubuntu suffers from toolkit proliferation, and the
toolkits and the window manager don't talk to each other, all the window
manager can do is guess. And sometimes it will guess wrong.

- -- 
mpt
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