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Expose Metacity With Expocity 516

Posted by timothy from the obvious-comparisons dept.
ubiquitin writes "expocity is a project to patch metacity and lets you switch between applications in the metacity window manager. After pressing a keystroke, your window manager will present you an overview of all open windows and you can select the window, you want to switch to, visually. For an idea on how this works, check out this screenshot."
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Expose Metacity With Expocity More

Expose Metacity With Expocity

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  • a Better headline would be (Score:5, Funny)

    by imsabbel ( 611519 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @06:43AM (#7556414)

    We have cloned MacOsX 10.3 expose feature.
    Then people would know what to expect without clicking on the screenshot

    • Re:a Better headline would be (Score:5, Insightful)

      by KamuSan ( 680564 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @06:55AM (#7556475) Journal
      Yeah, good. Maybe now I'll fire up Linux again, instead of just working with OS X. If you have worked with Expose, you don't want anything else. It feels so natural.

      Don't want to sound like flamebait, but it seems to me like lots of OSS projects just copy things that others (Apple, even MS) invented. This, the whole Windows L&F, Mono.
      I'm NOT an Apple zealot or apologist, I actually like Linux more than OS X (and don't like Windows at all) and have used Linux for far more than I used OS X.
      So, please, show me some URLs to OSS projects that you think are really innovative and are not copies of commercial initiatives. Please restore my faith in OSS ;-)

      • Re:a Better headline would be (Score:5, Insightful)

        by quigonn ( 80360 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @06:58AM (#7556490) Homepage
        Well, basically everybody copies features from everyone else. That's business.
      • Hi,

        at first sight, I'd say here [kernel.org]

        But maybe some people believe that innovation is what you can only see.

        Regards,
        jdif

      • Now,
        if you are such a fan, why not to get involved in the projects?

        It is not hard, believe me. Sometimes, just giving the right ideas tot he right people an make wonders for OSS.

        For instance, I always tought that something like this expose, but that would animate the zoom in and zoom out of the windows with 3D rendering would be a nice feature. I am not able to program it myself, I don'tknow if OS X, or XP, or any other thing has implemented or plans to implement it, but I keep hinting it here and there.

      • Re:a Better headline would be (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Dwonis ( 52652 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @09:33AM (#7557172)
        OSS projects *do* take a lot of ideas from others, but they also do lots of things on their own that nobody else has done.

        For example, Python [python.org] has evolved into an extremely intuitive yet powerful programming language.
        Perl [perl.com] was also fairly new in its time.
        There's GNU Emacs [gnu.org] which is one of the most powerful text editors in existence.
        There's the Apache Webserver [apache.org]. Although webservers aren't new, I would hardly call Apache a copy of anything.
        I'm not sure whether the first publicly-released blog software was open source, but I think it might have been.
        OpenBSD [openbsd.org] was, AFAIK, the first secure-by-default modern Unix system.
        Linux [kernel.org] (the kernel) has also done (or been modified to do) several things not done before.
        X11 [x11.org] started as a project out of MIT (which I would guess was open-source, even though the phrase hadn't been coined yet.)
        GNU readline [cwru.edu] is also something that is exclusive to open source
        I'd guess that ls --color was something new to free software, as well, just because I douby anyone with a pure profit motive would consider it worth the time to implement. :-)
        The Debian [debian.org] Project has made several innovations in operating system integration.

        Anyway, there are plenty of examples. You just have to look.

        • Just to play devil's advocate. Linux's original purpose was to be a copy/clone of Minix

        • I think you make the point exactly (Score:4, Interesting)

          by artemis67 ( 93453 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @12:03PM (#7558566)
          Oddly, everything you site as an example of original OSS development is actually derivative of something else.

          Apple's Expose was a totally original concept that's now been copied by OSS developers.

          It's one thing upgrade and revise existing ideas along what would appear to be a natural path of progression, and something else entirely to brainstorm new products and new interfaces, and mass market them.
          • Oddly, everything you site as an example of original OSS development is actually derivative of something else.

            Apple's Expose was a totally original concept that's now been copied by OSS developers.

            Totally original?
            I doubt it. I think somone said, "you know how Windows will let you scroll through icons of open windows by hitting Alt-Tab, well what if that were more useful?"

            It's a variation on a theme, it's like thumbnails crossed with alt-tabbing and made into a tremendously useful feature.

            Don't get me

          • Re:I think you make the point exactly (Score:4, Insightful)

            by jovlinger ( 55075 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @04:05PM (#7561358) Homepage
            enlightenment had this really nifty live-icon box. It would (expensively, but then that's par for E-wm course) scan each window contents and display a scaled down version in the icon box. Click on an icon to focus, or switch desktop.

            Expose is like a temporary, full screen, icon box.

            At least that's what I thought before I saw it in action. Regardless of whether the idea is innovative, it is extremely well engineered, from a HCI perspective. Slick, pretty, AND easy to use.
    • well. as the headline is "Expose Metacity With Expocity"

      it only has expose like what, 1 and a half times? really it's not like that it's too surprising either. now the question is do they have to change the name to something else?

    • Why ? I have heard of, but not seen the expose feature. If you try asking a Mac user about it, the standard reply is: "wowmanitssooooooocooolitjustblowsmymindawayyougot taseeitman"
      without any explanation of what it actually does.

      Now this article explains it nicely, it actually looks quite useful.

    • Well... (Score:3, Informative)

      by xcomputer_man ( 513295 )
      Enlightenment has already a similar feature for at least three years. It's called the pager.

      For those who aren't familiar with it: Enlightenment's pager continually takes a live snapshot of each window's contents and displays them in a miniature form inside the pager.

      - You can focus any window by clicking on it in the pager
      - You can drag windows around inside the pager to move them
      - You can drag a window out of the pager from any virtual desktop onto your current desktop
      - You can iconify (minimize) a wind

  • Expose (Score:5, Insightful)

    by captainclever ( 568610 ) <rj@NoSPaM.audioscrobbler.com> on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @06:45AM (#7556422) Homepage
    Why not just say "Expose effect for Metacity" instead of beating around the bush.

    Call a spade a spade.

    • Re:Expose (Score:4, Funny)

      by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @08:11AM (#7556758) Journal
      A "spade" as you so conveniently call it is in fact an earth-inverting horticultural instrument, capable of rapid, multi-faceted deployment within the agricultural domain.

      Calling it a "spade" is to denigrate the essential oneness of being that this delicate but powerful tool brings to the entire gardening experience.

      I would point out that with an earth-inverting horticultural instrument, one need not beat around the bush, indeed one may transplant the bush.

      Simon

  • Better link about how this works... (Score:5, Informative)

    by pldms ( 136522 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @06:45AM (#7556424)
    here [apple.com]. ;-)

    Anyway, it's a good idea and very useful.
    • Maybe usefull on the Apple desktop but as a long time X user I and other have learned to utilize more than one workspace (virtual desktops). I wouldn't stand having everytning on one desktop and in the end not knowing where I had anything.

      • Re:Better link about how this works... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by nacturation ( 646836 ) <nacturation AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @08:09AM (#7556750) Journal
        Maybe usefull on the Apple desktop but as a long time X user I and other have learned to utilize more than one workspace (virtual desktops). I wouldn't stand having everytning on one desktop and in the end not knowing where I had anything.

        Interesting if you flip this around:

        Maybe useful on an X desktop, but as a long-time Mac user I and others have learned to make full use of a single desktop. I wouldn't stand having everything scattered over multiple virtual desktops and, in the end, not knowing where I had anything.

        Really, it's all about what you're comfortable with. Why not have both? There are many advantages to each approach.

    • My 2 cents (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Bobulusman ( 467474 )
      Not having much exposure to Mac, I just saw the expose effect the other day. A professor was doing a powerpoint lecture and needed to switch to a website to better get a point across.

      He used the expose feature to select the browser from the 10+ he had open at the time. The audience all went "Ooooooh" and I'll admit that I thought it was a neat effect.

      While I probably would just use virtual desktops most of the time, it would be useful in some cases, or to show someone (as pictures are worth a 1000 words
  • Hmmm. Expocity for Metacity. An tool that's "an efficient means of switching between applications" and that "will present you a complete overview of all open windows [letting] you select the window, you want to switch to, visually".

    Apple's Expose for the rest of us?

    • Re:I wonder where they got that name... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I've just tried it. It works, even if it's DOG SLOW. Expose on my brother's iMac 400 is chunky, but it's very usable. Expocity on my P4 isn't usable yet.

      If it speeds up I'll be happy to use it.

    • Re:I wonder where they got that name... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by AllUsernamesAreGone ( 688381 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @08:22AM (#7556800)
      And there was me thinking that it was Enlightnment's pager (which has done the same thing for several years now - move the mouse over a small version of a window in the pager and it'll zoom out a larger picture, click on it and get taken to the window... and you can move windows around in the pager, even between desktops)

  • Use the virtual desktop (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Bazman ( 4849 )
    I have 8 virtual desktops. I know whats on each of them. Alt-1 gets me to my email and general web browser. Alt-2 has my IRC client. Alt-3 has a gnome-console with a tab to the servers I want to keep an eye on. Alt-4 has some statistical analysis I'm working on. Alt-5 is my web development screen. And so on. Xmms is set to stick on all screens, and is shrunk to mini-view up at the top.

    Within each virtual screen its easy to find the application I want - in the web dev screen I might have a Mozilla window, a
    • What works for you doesn't necessarily work for someone else. All I know is that every Panther user seems to rave about how good expose is.

    • Classic example (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Sanity ( 1431 ) * on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @07:05AM (#7556518) Homepage Journal
      And here we see a perfect example of the attitude that is holding back Linux on the desktop: "Why would anyone need X, I can do that with Y" where X is an easy-to-use feature, and Y is a complicated way to achieve the same thing that most desktop users would never adopt.

      The average desktop user barely understands the concept of files and folders - do you honestly expect them to be organized enough to arrange their programs into virtual desktops as you have done?

      This project is exactly what Linux should be doing - assimilating the best features from its competitors on the desktop. I just wish that Linux was also innovating on the desktop, rather than just following in the footsteps of others (and no, themability is not an innovation so far as usability is concerned).

      • Re:Classic example (Score:2, Insightful)

        by jdifool ( 678774 )
        Hi,

        Do you really think that virtual desktops are that complex ? Do you think that Joe Average can't understand that if you divide a table in eight equal parts you can just put papers related to different subjects so as to be more organized ? I disagree on that point.

        My analysis is that nobody has ever been accustomed to virtual desktops. I was a Windows user some time ago, I switched to Linux, I found that virtual desktops were a good feature, I just disciplined myself to be organized that way. And it worke

        • Re:Classic example (Score:2, Interesting)

          by beady ( 710116 )
          I think the real beauty of Expose above Virtual desktops is that your average joe user (who admittedly probably won't be using metacity at any point particularly soon, at home anway) doesn't have to think about arranging his desktops, doesn't have to think about keeping common tasks together, and Yes, of course this would be useful to him, and maybe in time he will learn that. But in the meanwhile, you tell him "Press f8 and then you can see all your windows, just click on the one you want to use" and he's

          • Re:Classic example (Score:2, Informative)

            by ocelotbob ( 173602 )
            Ah, but certain wms, like the one built into kde, and IIRC, windowmaker, allow you to name desktops. So, instead of calling wondering which desktop is which, you can break down your desktops into logical tasks -- have eclipse and a few xterms on your compiling desktop, your email program and calendar on your time management, and your pr0n and IRC windows on your *ahem* desktop ;3. Really, though, I think the best solution may be a combination of the two approaches, having an all windows mode, yet having mul

      • Re:Classic example (Score:2, Insightful)

        by krilli ( 303497 )
        What is holding Linux back on the desktop is that coders will do what benefits them.

        Without getting paid to do programming, people add the features that they want to see. The people that do not code do not get their most-wanted features added, except by chance.

        People who program tend to like virtual desktops, as they are used to that kind of environment. It is likely that they learned to program in that kind of an environment.

        If and when people that want another method for managing windows can and do pro

    • Use the virtual desktop with OpenGL 3D switching (Score:4, Interesting)

      by BiggerIsBetter ( 682164 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @07:11AM (#7556538)
      Yup, virtual desktops are cool, but 3D virtual desktop selection is even cooler, and surpisingly fast if you have a decent video card: http://desk3d.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php [sourceforge.net]
    • This is also exactly the way I work. The problem is there's never ONE window or ONE application i want to go to, it's always a subset of them. Each virtual desktop typically contains a group of related windows/apps, such as an xemacs window AND a terminal, or xmms AND a nautilus window, and so on. Sometimes multiple windows of the same application live in different desktops (e.g. web browser windows, or file managers). So the whole 'focus on a single application' paradigm i think is oversimplistic. That's w
    • I neither understand why you'd need a screen of thumbnails to all your open apps, nor understand why this is on slashdot.

      Just because YOU work in a certain way doesn't mean I have to work in that same way. You can't understand why people would want this, nor you can't fathom why it's on Slashdot? How myopic your world view is.

      All of us are different. We all want different things. One person's junk is another person's treasure.

      I guess I work a little differently from you. Because all my desktops a

      • Re:Use the virtual desktop (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Bazman ( 4849 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @10:06AM (#7557429) Journal
        TWMs icon manager. Xerox 'Rooms'. Virtual Desktops. Expocity. Ratpoison. All designed to help you get around your X window clutter. Great.

        But how many of them deserve slashdot headlines? Did Expocity get in just because its a clone of a Mac UI feature?

        And its a patch to a window manager? Looking at the code I think the reason for this is because it is continuously updating its thumbnails as the window manager gets events, so I guess it can display them rapidly when the user asks. Will this slow everything down?

        Could this be re-implemented as a standalone X program? Or would getting thumbnails of obscured windows be a problem?
    • I neither understand why you'd need a screen of thumbnails to all your open apps, nor understand why this is on slashdot. Oh well.

      That post must be ingeniously sublime flamebait. It paints a picture of man so stereotypical that in fact it must be false, too real to be real, the type of geek everyone loves to hate, like the arrogant tech support guys I saw spoofed on Mad TV. No one could actually believe, enough to post, that the only things in the world people could be interested are the only things he i
    • I neither understand why you'd need a screen of thumbnails to all your open apps

      You probably also have a giagantic screen, yes? 1280x1020 or above? Doesn't sound like you have many windows open either.

      Our CEO didn't 'get' Expose when I demo'd it on my 17" Powerbook. Then two days after he got his 12" Powerbook, he was asking a question about something and said in disgust, 'Arrg, all these frigging windows." "Hit F12". "Oh. Hmm. Okay. That IS cool." He now loves it. Can't stop using it. Once y

  • Expocity + X Compositing = cool (Score:5, Informative)

    by po8 ( 187055 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @06:50AM (#7556450)

    Keith Packard is currently finishing up a sample compositing manager for his X server that presents live app windows updated in essentially real time. Should see a live demo in the next day or two---a preliminary screen shot is already available in the freedesktop.org article from earlier today.

    I'm glad the WM folks are already duplicating Mac eXpose layout and function: once the two are combined, the X desktop should have the full Mac eXpose functionality.

    Even better, this is only the beginning of the cool things that can be done quickly and easily with X compositing... It looks like X is finally almost ready for the (modern) desktop.

  • This is awesome! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by quigonn ( 80360 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @06:53AM (#7556465) Homepage
    At home, I use OSX 10.3, and Expose is one of my favourite features of 10.3, which I use most often. Now, with Expose-like functionality on Metacity, I can have the same kind of comfort on my computer at work (where I use GNU/Linux with Gnome as desktop environment and - of course - Metacity as window manager). This will definitely improve my workflow.

  • apt-get expose (Score:5, Funny)

    by Debian Troll's Best ( 678194 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @06:56AM (#7556481) Journal
    With the recent release of Mac OS X 10.3 with it's great Expose feature (which the Metacity Expocity tool is obviously inspired from), it's got me thinking about some of the problems I face day-to-day in my current job as an administrator of a mid-sized Debian cluster (256 compute nodes, plus 8 storage nodes) at a supercomputing laboratory in a well known mid-western university. When I'm rolling out packages across all of the nodes in the cluster using apt-get, it can sometimes be a pain to keep track of 256 + 8 individual package installations on each of the machines. It's a full time job just telnetting into each of those machines and issuing the apt-get commands. During a recent student vacation however, some of my coworkers and I came up with an Expose/Expocity-inspired package management solution: apt-get-expose.

    apt-get-expose is basically a heavily modified version of apt-get and dselect, using a completely re-implemented ncurses and screen library to allow multiple apt-get sessions to be tiled onto the console with a single keystroke. Believe me, when you're neck deep in 20 apt-get sessions trying to juggle installs across several nodes in the supercomputer cluster, being able to visually choose a particular apt-get session is a God-send!

    It wasn't easy. If any of you have seen the way Expose works in Mac OS X, then you'll know how fluid that "tile all windows" animation is. It was, to put it mildly, a 'challenge' to get the ncurses library to emulate that functionality using only ASCII art. We extensively debated how we would get ASCII text-scaling support to the same level of smoothness as Mac OS X achieves, and in the end the only way we could see was to hack some low-level VGA BIOS calls. It's way cool, and it's as fast as the Mac OS X version, but using all ASCII characters (we tried Unicode, but the 16-byte overhead wasn't justifiable).

    Since then, we've been able to roll out apt-get-expose (using apt-get, by the way...being able to roll out new versions of apt-get with apt-get rocks!!!) across the campus, and administrators of other clusters can't stop raving about how easy it is to manage multiple apt-get sessions with apt-get-expose.

    Window tiling and arrangement functionality shouldn't be restricted only to those running Mac OS X and Expocity. apt-get tile all windows dude!!

    • Re:apt-get expose (Score:2, Insightful)

      by juuri ( 7678 )
      No offense but if you are manually doing this, you need to write some simple automation scripts in shell or perl to handle rolling out "releases" or updates like this.

      I've managed and done procedures like this on large clusters before and it was all managed via a small set of scripts and config files that made huge system changes or code rollouts as simple as a couple of shell commands.

    • Re:apt-get expose (Score:2, Informative)

      by nacturation ( 646836 )
      Ouch... sounds like you need automation just a *tad*. Try out radmind [umich.edu] which will save you the 262 duplicate updates you otherwise would be doing.
    • Usenet News server with a newsgroup representing a NIS netgroup and a cron job on each machine which polls all of the newsgroups for which the system is a member of said netgroup.

      You want to apt-get on all of the nodes? Post the command to the newsgroup and bam! they all do it. You want a new machine to perform all of the administrative commands issued to date? Put the machine into the correct netgroup and bam it downloads and begins processing all of the commands which have been issued to the newsgroup to
  • For me, the GUI has reached the end of development. It's got all the features that I could ever use. And I use WindowMaker, not Gnome or KDE.

    You see, I'm a programmer. I have windows full of 'bash' open, plus one Mozilla. I keep 10 virtual desktops, indexed by 'alt+number', at my fingertips. On each of those desktops, I have 3 xterms open. That's all I need or want.

    Now take this feature. I'd have 30 little boxes on my screen to select from, and all would be unreadable greek text. Impossible to use.
    • Anyone that uses WindowMaker obviously doesn't need something like this. It's kind of hard to miss a truckload of gigantic icons at the bottom of the screen. ;) You're also obviously not who this is aimed at. Just because something doesn't work for you doesn't make it a pile of crap.

      For example, I used to use WindowMaker myself. I liked it a lot as it was much faster under Mandrake than KDE or Gnome, and I think even a bit faster than blackbox. I switched to Redhat and their Bluecurve setup under Gnome w
    • How is having 30 xterms open any better? Gimme music, email, a browser, and 5 or so xterms (3 for editing, 1 for compiling, 1 for executing) and I'm happy. Gimme a better method for switching between them and I'm in geek heaven.

      • Having 30 xterms, more or less, is a beautiful thing.

        Everything on page 1 is logins to a server at home.
        Everything on page 2 is logins to a development server at work.
        Everything on page 3 is logins to a different development server at work.
        Everything on page 4 is mozilla windows
        Everything on page 5 is a python project I'm working with.
        Everything on page 6 is a C++ project I'm working with
        Everything on page 7 is a scratch, used for any kind of general shit - untarring, unzipping, running a ps, whatever.

        You
  • This is a troll, I warn you in advance. That is, I am going to deliberate provoke you to think.

    Looking at the incredible screenshot of Expocity for Metacity, I think to myself: how can anyone work with such a confusion of information in front of them?

    My hero, Dijkstra (anyone who could live with 5 successive constanants in his name must be cool), once said "GOTOs considered harmful". We know where that led us to...

    Anyhow, I believe the desktop Window metaphor has outlived its usefulness. It dates to the earliest metaphors of visual computing, but continues today only because it has become dogma. Let me list some of the ways it does not model a true desktop, such as you or I sit at every day and work on.

    First, a true desktop has hundreds of objects on it, varying from piles of CDs, documents, bills to be paid, loudspeakers, mouldy cups of coffee... This is the real working environment of most creative people, a cluttered mess that makes perfect sense because it maps our projects. You've all had that sense of panic when someone "cleaned your desk?"

    Second, in a real desktop, you add new stuff, it covers old stuff. This is normal and natural and necessary and the only way to filter the real work from the junk. If it ain't screaming at you, it's not serious.

    Thirdly, the objects on a GUI windowed desktop do not match the actual objects we work on. I have to look through my email client to find important emails, I have my bookmarks in Konqueror, I have that hot dossier on a disk somewhere.

    There has to be a better way.

    What we need is a unified desktop that represents the real objects we work on, in a way that mirrors the manner in which we actually use them.

    A desktop that hides information which needs to be hidden, and exposes the information which needs to be visible. A desktop that shows everything, from incoming emails to useful web bookmarks, to documents and toys, newsgroups, and devices.

    I've specified this desktop in
    journal [slashdot.org] entries [slashdot.org].

    Putting my money where my mouth is, we're working on a prototype that will be unleashed on the world sometime early next year.

    • Re: Window metaphor considered harmful (Score:5, Funny)

      by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @07:31AM (#7556614)


      > There has to be a better way.

      Yes, I prefer the metaphor of a fishbowl where applications swim around at random, and instead of moving a "pointer" with your mouse you move a little net that you can use to fish out the application you want to look at more closely. This powerful metaphor combines the best features of a game with dynamic, organic organization of information, and teaches children visio-spatial coordination as well as fishing skills.

      For troublesome applications such as viruses you can trade your net for a speargun, and to log out you simply toss a handgrenade into the tank, killing most of your applications and stunning the rest, without having to think through a bunch of unintuitive menus.

      All rendered in 3D and accompanied by sound effects, of course.

      • Nice idea! But instead of using a "net", you could use a "fishing rod" with different types of "bait", depending on the type of application you want to catch. Also, the applications could grow in size depending on their importance, and the big ones could "eat" the smaller ones - thus creating a self organising system.
      • Nice idea, but no-one actually organized their thought processes using fishbowls. You're barking up the wrong tree, so to speak.

        Take any creative person. Watch how they organize their work. Typically it's always the same: a physical layout on a desk or some other space, pieces of information organized as notes and documents, stacks and heaps, and matching the mental model of a project or projects.

        It's not complex, simply allow people to stick arbitrary items onto a desktop and handle the whole so that
    • What we need is a unified desktop that represents the real objects we work on, in a way that mirrors the manner in which we actually use them.

      Putting my money where my mouth is, we're working on a prototype that will be unleashed on the world sometime early next year.

      You're too late [toastytech.com].
    • You mean something like this? [toastytech.com]
    • What we need is a unified desktop that represents the real objects we work on, in a way that mirrors the manner in which we actually use them.

      I disagree here. Why limit yourself to the functionality of rela objects? You use a desk one way ebcause there is no other way to use it. You pile papers up because you're constarined by ravity to do so. How about if I could lift a paper and stick it in mid-air, and do this with lots of papers... then I would have a clean desk to work on, and I could look up and gra
      • Why limit yourself to the functionality of real objects?

        For the simple but vital reason that this is the way our minds work. Our brains are evolved to handle the world in terms of discrete objects, and we break even the most complex concepts down into models of "things".

        The goal of a computer user interface should be the elimination of effort and suffering. Very zen. I believe this means making it work the way our minds work, not forcing us to use artificial models.

        The mind most definitely uses multi
    • Sounds like what you are talking about is a tabbed desktop. You know, like the tabs in Mozilla.

      Well, that's what I want in my desktop anyway.

      I don't like the little icons to switch desktops, I want tabs at the top and an Expose-like desktop viewer that shows all the desktops at once. I can move desktop to desktop like that or by using the tabs.
    • So my understanding of the state of the art, as understood by real UI people [bell-labs.com], is that windows should tile on the screen instead of overlapping. If your windows don't all fit on the screen, you need a new screen.

      This is the way I do it: Have 9 virtual screens (natively in GNU/Linux or via Altdesk [astonshell.com] on Windows), with each screen bound to one of the keys in the 3x3 square defined by Q-E-C-Z (Ctrl-Shift-q for screen 1, C-S-e for screen 3, C-S-a for screen 4, etc.)

      Rows are for machines: Q-W-E is the local machi

  • That was fast (Score:3, Redundant)

    by HeghmoH ( 13204 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @07:13AM (#7556546) Homepage Journal
    Panther has been out for, what, a month? Good to know the Mac is still worth copying, at least....
  • ratpoison [sourceforge.net], a keyboard-controlled "anti-desktop" wm largely modelled after GNU screen, has this feature in CVS since about one week.

    However, it was added without patching the wm itself and thereby bloating its code. Instead, since ratpoison can be fully controlled via the commandline, the "expose" functionality (to be found in the "contrib" directory as "rpshowall.sh") was written as an external shell script which tells ratpoison to split frames in a certain way. Through ratpoison's freely definable keybi

  • Copyright or Patents? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by xirtam_work ( 560625 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @07:40AM (#7556637)
    Does apple have a legitimate defense against people ripping off it's innovations like this?

    I know that lots of readers here believe that they should be able to copy ideas from other peoples software and make an open source or free alternative, but does this kind of blantant copying harm the cause?

    I would rather see innovation from the Linux and open source commnuitities that doesn't merely try to implement what other companies are already doing.

    Apple deserve much praise for their recent work on OS X in my opinion. Simply duplicating work that they've invested time, money and effort in research and development.

    It think this dilutes their efforts. Imitation is not always the sincerest form of flattery.

    • Ah, but is it truly innovative? Much of the functionality of expose has been around for years, albeit not in an all-in once package like expose. I remember back in the windows 3.1 days, there was an option to tile all open windows, and one of the XP powertoys gives a miniature snapshot of the window you're about to tab to upon hitting the task switching command. Yes, apple deserves kudos for putting the pieces together, but they weren't the inventor of those pieces. Everybody steals from everybody in the co

  • Bad idea (Score:3, Funny)

    by fr0dicus ( 641320 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @07:51AM (#7556678) Journal
    This just shows in summary how poorly designed (aesthetically) most GNOME applications are. All the applications look the same! You can see the brilliance of Apples work with expose because each application has a unique appearance.
    • I thought that was bad. I thought applications were supposed to look the same. You Mac losers kept bitching about consistency and all that. Jesus christ man...
  • for info, cvs is at
    cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome co metacity
  • Surely there's gotta be a better way to link to a project than just to a ftp directory full of source archives?

  • I just tried it (Score:5, Informative)

    by gbowland ( 97425 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @08:22AM (#7556801)
    It's a very, very evil hack. It works, for some definition of working - it'll make your Metacity very, very slow. It hooks into Metacity so that every time a window is exposed or does a redraw, it recalculates a thumbnail of the window.

    This means dragging a window over multiple other windows will make the window manager unresponsive for quite some time! Anyway, hitting the magic button does produce a pretty thumbnail though.

    This is definitely not useful in the real world, but still cute :-)
  • ...does it run on Windows ?
  • Wow, now you can see all your different open porn windows at once! Go technology. ;)
  • ...does Ontogeny Recapitulate Phylogeny in window managers?
  • What have they done to Wilbur!? Oh the humanity! He doesn't have pupils anymore. Oh woe is me!!! ;P
  • A topic in the gentoo forums [gentoo.org] tells of how to make an ebuild that will get the cvs source, patch it, build it and install it in your gentoo box.

  • Uh oh (Score:3, Funny)

    by poobie ( 69404 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @11:36AM (#7558317) Homepage
    "I think George Lucas is gonna sue somebody."

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