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List:       kde-core-devel
Subject:    Re: Improving task manager interaction
From:       Martijn Klingens <martijn () martijn ! homeip ! net>
Date:       2001-10-01 8:24:15
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On Mon, 1 Oct 2001, Richard Moore wrote:
> I've done a lot of thinking and a bit of research about this so far.
> I've coded a few prototypes (some hacks to kasbar, and a 1st cut
> taskinfo class), but I haven't started coding the real thing yet. The
> biggest challenge has been to figure out how to maximise the
> compatibility of this with the existing standards.
>
> So far I have come to a number of conclusion through this research:
> -- snip --

> 11. A document has (at least) the following state flags:
>    - bool active      // The doc is being worked on by the user
>    - bool modified    // The doc differs from the copy on disk
>    - bool ready       // The document can be edited
>    - bool busy        // The doc is currently busy performing an operation
>    - bool progressInfo // The doc can tell us how much of the op is done
>    - bool needsUser   // The doc is waiting for the user to talk to it
>    - bool changedOutput // The document has been changed by someone else
>
> 12. A task has (at least) the following state flags, and also
> inherits those of a document:
>    - bool hasMultipleDocuments        // This task contains >1 document
>    - bool hasDCOP             // This task can provide a DCOP id

An idea that Rob Kaper came up with and that I think is pretty nice is to
have next to the modified flag a 'status' icon. Then it would be possible
in a game to show a set of dice next to the app's icon if it's your turn.
For many other apps it would also be quite useful to have such a thing.
KMail can show an icon if there is new mail. Konq can show a progress bar
showing how much of a page is loaded, etc...

Might be worth implementing?

And something that I would like is to remove the distinction between
documents and tasks, though I understood from your mail that you are
planning that already.

What I would like is to have all my konsole sessions still use a single
window as they do now, but not have their own "task bar", but instead add
an entry to the normal task bar for each session.

Since I sometimes have multiple konsole windows and sometimes multiple
sessions I often find myself pressing alt-tab when shift-arrow is needed
and vice versa. Not quite intuitive IMO :-) But again, I think you already
planned this, I just wanted to mention it in case you didn't.

> -- more snip --
> > I'm very interested in working with a group of people on this because
> to work, it needs to be pretty much universal. What do you think of the
> above? Am I on the right track?

For what I could actually understand it looks good. But there are some
pretty low-level parts that I didn't completely understand yet ;-)

Martijn

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