DockbarX

Application helpers

Asked by Peter StJ

I was wondering would it be possible to add per applications helpers to the dockbarx, like for example playback control for rhythmbox, status changes for pidgin/skype, pause/start for transmission, bookmarks from nautilus and so on.

This being said, it should be very well considered, especially for applications that create more than one window, like pidgin. For example simple right click should remain just that - right click with the well known menu (which IMHO is a bit ugly, considering the fact that the multiple windows selection window is custom drawn), I am not sure if it would be nice to add menu items to this menu (gtkmenu) or use custom widget. Custom widgets will allow for more than menus to be added by helpers, like media info for rhythmbox/totem, list of not-yet-seen conversations from pidgin and so on.

(Similar feature would be tabs to be seen as separate documents / windows in dockbarx, but this depends on WM and application as I understand so I will not ask for those).

Last question (sorry to include more than one but...) - is there someone working on metacity integration for preview from dockbarx? I mean metacity with composition_manager enabled creates thumbnail for each window (and stores one for minimized windows as well so the problem with compiz not having the window pixmap when the window is destroyed will not be present) thus I think they can be used by dockbarx to implement the preview with thumbnails.

Thank you.

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Peter StJ
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Matias Särs (msevens) said : 		#1

After DockbarX 0.40 is released I will look into adding helpers by adding support for dockmanager. That's a better option than writing own helpers for DockbarX, I guess. I'm not really sure how it's done practically, though. A redesign for the popups and the menus are also planned after 0.40 (time to move towards gnome 3.0 stylewise instead of trying to match the look of gnome 2+ubuntu notifications).

As for previews in metacity, are you talking about the ones you see while alt-tabbing? That code were used by the Talika developer when he developed previews for Talika and I ported that code python and used it in DockbarX x.0.30. It wasn't very stable though and it was way to slow to be usable on not so fast computers. The previews wasn't live either. The compiz/kwin solution was much better for DockbarX since the drawing is done by compiz or kwin and not by DockbarX itself. If metacity offers something similar I would be interested to add support for it.

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Peter StJ (regardingscot) said : 		#2

Thanks, indeed metacity looks for pixmaps of the current state of the window, if it is minimized it looks for older pixmaps and if none if found it uses the application icon and it is very slow generating all pixmaps every time one presses alt+tab (even on not so old hardware, like core2duo on 1.6Ghz), so I guess you are right.