unity-design team mailing list archive

[Dylan McCall <dylanmccall@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Right.
>
> The reason for this is because applications don't provide high
> resolution thumbnails in their _NET_WM_ICON property. So we have to
> use the low-res one. I believe that KDE 4 applications provide hi-res
> icons, and GNOME 3 actually matches the .desktop file to the
> application. This is something that compiz might do in the future (at
> least through an external plugin).

I have a worried thought in the back of my mind that says this should
be provided by Unity, since Alt+Tab touches on the same territory of
managing windows and applications that the launcher does. It feels a
little odd to me that Unity is delegating core functionality to more
generic user interfaces that (by design) have no knowledge of the
fancy application matching it has been doing (or of Unity's particular
look and feel). I would love some explanation of how the architecture
works here :)

Mutter, if I recall correctly, continues with Metacity's convention of
storing a window thumbnail before it is minimized. Meanwhile, Gnome
Shell's alt tab dialog doesn't show window icons. It shows application
icons and window thumbnails.
We could learn from them here: window icons are meaningless in Gnome
Shell because they were removed from title bars at the same time. Here
in Ubuntu, titlebars have been without window icons since their
buttons were moved to the left.

On this subject, I have been suggesting Alt+F1 as an alternative to
Alt Tab for some people, and they've been pretty happy with it.
Perhaps there are some ways that approach could be strengthened.

--
Dylan