Re: AppIcon patch revisited

[Robert J. Slover]

Richard,

Thanks for the response.  I read ahead to get all of
the current responses to this thread and want to thank
Dan Pascu for clarifying the dock app behavior for me.

My suggestion was meant to point to a compromise with
X behavior that dock apps already seem to live with, 
and by extension users of Window Maker already 
understand.  I think any compromise arrived at should 
not violate 'the principal of least surprise'.

I was focusing on dock apps since that is the one case
I know of where an 'icon' expects interaction to be
possible.  It has been a while since I read the ICCCM
(and I'm definitely *not* an X developer) but IIRC it
allows for 'icon windows' but then specifies (in 
addition to letting the window manager handle map and
unmap) that a client should not expect to be able to
receive events via the icon window.  This is at odds
with treating them as any other window.  The current
crop of dock apps allows for this by reserving some of
the decoration within the 64x64 region as a 'handle'
for the window manager.  As Dan explains it, this is
as simple as not using the whole tile. I do think that
is a comfortable compromise.

I think Window Maker is doing the right thing in the
way it treats icon windows.  If they need to act just
like other windows, we shouldn't tell window maker 
that they are icons (but I think that gives the 
behavior we had before).

All in all, I don't smell any smoke or flames, this 
to me seems like a very healthy discussion.  I would
love to see GNUStep apps actually behave within their
specified environment (Window Maker) before the next
major GUI release.  It seems that through the efforts
of Sungjin Chun (thanks!!) and yourself in recent days
that correct behavior has very nearly been reached. I
was attempting to suggest a compromise to achieve the
resolution of what I believe is the final problem (eg
interact with Window Maker as an Icon while retaining
the capability of receiving input events).

Additionally, I also do not consider allowing for some
buttons within the icon window as all that strange of
a thing. The popularity of dock apps certainly implies
utility in the feature.  I'd like to have GNUstep dock
apps in the future...I just got wmtimer going on my 
Sun at home and hacked out the nasty GTK gui to do it.
It'd be nice to fix it to use the defaults database for
config instead of a .rc file and add a GNUstep GUI to
change those settings...but then, It'd be nicer just to
rewrite it for GNUstep and do away with all of the bad
platform-specific hacks I had to do to get it to run on
Solaris in the first place.  So, I'm protective of the
feature because I'm looking forward to it ;-).

It is your baby though.  I'll never flame you since
you contribute so much and all I've ever done to date  
is suggest a thing or two.  I thank you for your 
efforts.

Regards,



--Robert

Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
> 
> I'm not sure why you would want to do that ...  and my concern
> is primarily with undocked appicons and miniwindows ( I kind of
> assume that being docked will result in some odd behaviors).
> I'd really just like the appicon and miniwindows to be handled
> like other windows ideally.
> 
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