Archive for the ‘window managers’ Category

One step closer to useful

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

UI usability is consistently my no. 1 time-suck. I’ve ‘wasted’ countless hours config’ing and reconfig’ing GNOME panels into assumed-need sorts. I’ve given up and returned to Mac & heeded again the siren call to Linux’ potential simplicity.

My latest spin *was* playing with screen-maximizing UI’s: task-bar-less environments, panel-over-top window-titlebars, then I turned wanna-be tablet with the iPen.

But I’ll not deny, the best ‘inspiration’ has been the non-existent-yet(?) Microsoft Courier. Here’s a list of the bits, related & not, which I’ve come up with:

Dual-pane

My 13″ macbook is nearly-exactly 2×9″ screens. Yes, this is very Courier-esque. Especially if I use Linux’ dragbox in between panes! But the benefit here is window management. In Xwindows-land, there’s lots of these things called ‘window managers’. They’re supposed to, y’know.. manage windows. What do they ACTUALLY do? Place windows in wierd locations & sizes which require you to use a taskbar, alt-tab or expose’ your day away. I’m not down with that. Time for a ’tiling” window manager. Yet I’m just looking for 2 panels, and on a 13″ screen, that’s plenty. If I config my window-placer-thing to throw some of my apps on the left, I (craziest idea ever) can expect them to be there. I know where they are! Which leads me to my next point..

Priority

Since I’m not fussin’ with my 9 windows that are open, wondering where to look for ‘em (something a taskbar is supposed to do, but doesn’t supply the requisite window-parallel usage scenario).. anyways, since I’m not wasting time placing windows, I can focus on what I’m supposed to be doing: being a human with responsibilities over resources and being creative and learning. Those are the categories my applications have taken: email, calendar & files on the left, OpenOffice, Journal & Web on the right.

Lists, lists, lists!

Perhaps this is more iphone-y than anything, but there’s some goodness to be had with the removal of clutter (and there’s plenty on the web!) Yet, I use google calendar & email all day long. I don’t need another cal or mail app, I just need a browser open with these bits in it. But even these apps aren’t clean. Facebook, Yahoo Mail, Google Mail, Google Reader AND Google Calendar ALL have sidebars. Why, oh why do we need sidebars? They take up sooo much screen real-estate, especially after you scroll.

Bad:

What you get when viewing web-apps half-screen'd or in portrait

What you get when viewing web-apps half-screen'd or in portrait

Good:

Ahh, mobile: a clutter-free web-experience!

Ahh, mobile: a clutter-free web-experience!

You just have to load the mobile versions of the webapps you use. To find them, I viewed them on my phone & checked the url. I’ve also found the ‘print’ versions of yahoo news to be similarly readable.

Conditions: sure forcing all my windows into 2 locations (left/right) & 2 states (half-screen or maximized) is ‘limiting’, but I’m a limited human! I need some parallels here to stay sane. I can’t be moving & resizing windows all day long.

Perhaps I’m just getting old, and will eventually regress into the old lady who only has one window open (maximized) at a time. Until then, this is a good compromise.

Posted in Information Design, Linux, Software, Tech, desktop theory, interaction design, life-of-a-geek, limited computing, openbox, ubuntu, window managers | Comments Off

Courier, please deliver soon, or I’ll make you out of Linux!

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

Everyone’s all abuzz with Microsoft’s latest leaked prototype: Courier. On an off-note, it’s hilarious to contrast the handwritten everything with the king of monospace fonts! (and previously, my latest interest has been the long-awaited crunchpad.)

But there’s 2 things I’m here to mention: my dream & the obvious rising behind Courier.

Why Courier is Obvious:

First off, how many people do you see carrying around a notebook/folio of some variety? Everyone. The business guys do it for their contacts, dates & files. College kids do it for their class notes. Artsy-kids do it for their scribble-pics. Christians have a habit of doing it for their Bible study/sermon notes. Everyone.

Second: netbook+eReader. Limited computing strikes again, and awaiting for a convergence.

Third: Intel’s atom platform (and I would argue ARM even more!) is ready for this kind of thin-and-goodness. Especially with ssd’s (heck, I’d be happy with an SDHC!)

My Little Dream:

I’m a fan of the UI-customizability of Linux. Always have been: it’s what keeps me away from MacOS. Right now, I’ve got a toolbar that has everything I need in it: time, calendar-on-click, applets & a task-switcher. All this overlays the wasted-space of window-titlebar. Most of the time I maximize my apps, so I can focus. But there are somethings that should be a sidebar: notably a tabbed filemanager (since I already have a tabbed term thanks to tilda).

lxpanel-coloredAnd there’s no reason why a quick photo-viewer, calculator, contacts & datebook cannot also be in this sidebar (especially if cache’d & synced from Google!) All this sidebar stuff is too perfect. Why not make a Window Manager that runs specific apps in specific ‘frames’ (yes, like HTML old-skool style). The frames are resizable & collapsable. Ths is so (similar but) much more useful than a tiling WM.

Next up, I’ve never, ever understood file dialog boxes. I do however understand Delicious’ tagging. It auto-generates recommendations, and why not do this for files?  Linux is built for this: symlinks.

And while we’re at it, why not kill off scrollbars & make everything grab-and-draggable. Just use a modifier key (or both-click). Then we can have the app be like a magnifying glass, with the edges smushed to show you how much more you have down there (in preview-style).

As for all this journally stuff, Xournal is the single-best program I have ever, ever, ever encountered. Multiple-layers? yup. Print to PDF? Yup. Wanna add a new page? Click the ‘next page’ button. It could remove all it’s menus if it just had a ‘preferences’ dialog box. It is the model for any journaling program.

Lastly, mouse-gestures are very hot lately. I don’t use them because I’d like ‘em to be like Courier: context-specific AND list suggested actions, instead of always acting on its own.

Dreams, dreams, dreams.

All I’m sayin’ is if ASUS puts out an Intel Atom dual-screen netbook/eReader next year, or even this year, I’m putting my dreams to work. Just need to solve 2 problems:  the sidebar thinger (update: “devilspie” might be halfway there for me) & handwriting recognition (and I’ve got a prototype system coming this december when classes are out!).

Posted in Information Design, Linux, Software, Tech, coding, desktop theory, interaction design, life-of-a-geek, limited computing, window managers | Comments Off

Read Google Calendars from Orage!

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

Holy crap! My fav toolbar calendar is more than just a calendar! It does alarms & full ICS input & output! With a little scripting & cron, I get the day’s events with one click!

#!/bin/sh
cd ~/tmp
wget http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/--your-private-gcal--url/basic.ics
mv basic.ics calname.ics

Just repeat the wget & mv for all calendars, add an hourly cron job & add the files to orage’s preferences/foreign calendars tab!

Love is simplicity!

Posted in Linux, ShellScripts, Tech, codeRelease, desktop theory, life-of-a-geek, openbox, ubuntu, window managers | Comments Off

A Better Openbox transparency

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

I’m lately in love with openbox for it’s simplicity and lack of screen-coverage. Sure I could have setup my desktop within xubuntu, but I wanted to expand my horizons.

My original theory was for netbook application, maximizing screen real estate & reducing the hard drive & processor use. But lately, I’ve been toying with xcompmgr, hardly a ‘wise’ use of resources.

While Urukrama has a wonderfully extensive Openbox config page, I didn’t find the “make all inactive windows 60% transparent” like I was looking for.

A little googling gave me the solution I was after, but it was insanly processor/battery intensive! (That’s what ya get for writing an infinite loop! ) At first I tried putting a “sleep” command in the loop, and that did tremendous wonders for retaining processor use, and slowing down my frantic computer-work pace. Still, I wasn’t pleased.

So here, without further ado, is my xcompmgr+transset-df+perl script for setting all non-active windows:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

# This script is a modification my M.Wallace of the
# original written by Andrei Perhinschi
# and is licensed under the GNU GPL license
# http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

# Much thanks goes to Daniel Forchheimer (http://www.forchheimer.se/)
# for creating transset-df and the eutotrans
# script from which this script gets its inspiration

if ( !defined $ARGV[0] || !defined $ARGV[1] || !defined $ARGV[2] ) {
die "Usage: focustran-once <unfocused value> <focused value> <refresh value (secs)>\n";
}

# default values
$trans_val = $ARGV[0];
$opaque_val = $ARGV[1];
$sleep_val = $ARGV[2];

# grab all window IDs
@win_ids = `xwininfo -root -all`;
foreach my $win_id ( @win_ids ) {
unless ( $win_id =~ /has\ no\ name/ || $win_id !~ /0x/ || $win_id =~ /Desktop/ ) {
 $win_id =~ /\ \"/;
 $win_id = "$`";
 $win_id =~ s/\s//g;
 push @id_lines, $win_id;
 }
}

#print "ID_LINES:@id_lines\n";

# find my active window
my $active_id = `xprop -root  | grep "_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW(WINDOW): window id # "`;
$active_id =~ /\#\s/;
$active_id = "$'";
chomp $active_id;

# set the active window to non-transparent value
system ( "transset-df --id $active_id $opaque_val" );

# make all other windows transparent
foreach my $win_id ( @id_lines ) {
# set active window to opaque_val and old window to trans_val
if ( $win_id ne $active_id ) {
system ( "transset-df --id $win_id $trans_val" );
 }
}

Then just add these lines to ./config/openbox/rc.xml (around line 302 for me):

    <context name="Client">
      <mousebind button="Left" action="Press">
        <action name="execute">
        <execute>perl ~/bin/focustrans-once.pl .6 1 0</execute>
        </action>
      </mousebind>
    </context>

Trouble is, I use mouse-raises windows, not click-to-focus! Anyone got some help for me, be it X11 active window or openbox mouse-motion-detect?

Posted in OSS, Software, Tech, codeRelease, desktop theory, openbox, ubuntu, window managers | Comments Off

Gnome Shell: genius!

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

Sometimes, just one in a rare while, someone has a good (understatement) idea. I’ve been trying for a long while to understand what a good, innovative, productive computer workspace would looks like. One that captures the needs of the task at hand, centralizing focus on that task, removing distractions, while providing context-relevant information on which to collaborate.

Friends, I introduce: Gnome Shell.
overlay_mode

I really cannot express the genius I feel seeing this. The traditional desktop workspace is the down-n-dirty ‘workbench’. I imagine myself as Dr. Manhattan putting the pieces of the project together in this area.

Not to be lost in the mundane work area, (and, just like the mind!) there is also this overlay, which could hold the sub-tasks, associated projects and documents and email (all through tagging).

The mind, when organizing and planning has such an ‘overlay’, but when ‘in the zone’ of working on a task, interruptions and excess information is hassle. I can furthermore foresee another screen like the overlay, where you’re in planning mode, an overarching taskmanager. All the while, the user status on IM shows the availability for interruption (and optionally the task and how long/deep (subtasks/due date) you are into completing it!)

I like this. I only hope Gnome 3.0 will be the start of something huge across all Desktop vendor-designs. The cluttered desktop of windows-everywhere must end.

Posted in Futurism, Information Design, Linux, OSS, Project Management, Software, Tech, desktop theory, interaction design, window managers | Comments Off

Year of the rat?

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

GNOME has been locking up nearly daily for me lately. And I’m not a fan of an unusable nautilus, gterm or gedit. I tried KDE4, but alas, it just plain sucks. We’ll see what 4.5 turns out for them. I tried E17, which wasn’t bad, but it lacked some basics. So today I give XFce a whirl. Again. It has been at least 6months since I last tried it, and last time required too much setup to get started. This time however (with all the packages installed), I had to crash out of GNOME and dump in, and when I did, was I ever surprised! Thunar is workable! An application menu already filled! Compiz options that MAKE SENSE! it’s amazing, and now my default wm. It feels light an responsive, not clunky and crashy like poor old GNOME This isn’t about features anymore, it’s about perception. I love gnome’s features. Fact is, the important ones stopped working consistently about 2 months after I installed it. Gnome-vfs? No lovin’. Nautilus crashing? Not my kind of wm. Just for kicks I installed an old BeOS theme and kicked on the ‘Focus follows mouse’ option. So great. XFce: I’ll get back to work now.


				


				
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