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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: [kde-devel]  3 D Desktop
From:       Wout Mertens <wmertens () cisco ! com>
Date:       2003-12-10 9:16:04
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Yesterday at 20:58, Tim Jansen wrote:
> On Tuesday 09 December 2003 16:12, Wout Mertens wrote:
> > When a window loses focus, it smoothly becomes transparant. You can
> > double-click on the title bar and that rotates the window, where you'll
> > find a sticky note that you can write stuff on :).
> > The bar at the bottom contains live snapshots of the running windows.
>
> The demo just fails in a very important point: how does it make the desktop
> more effective to use or easier to learn? That's the problem that all the 3D
> desktop attempts did not solve, they rather make your life more difficult.

It doesn't :) It's a showcase of technologies.

Although I wouldn't mind being able to slant windows that I'm just
passively monitoring. That way, I have more screen real estate left, and
I can still see what's going on.

The transparancy-on-focusout is a mixed blessing: You can see other
windows, but everything becomes hard to read. I'd rather be able to set
what the window should do on focusout, like slant, shrink, become
transparant or nothing.

The memos on the back are just silly.

> Notes on the back of a window belong to the most useless ideas I've ever
> heard... the excessive use of features that seemed to be hidden under
> keystrokes rather make it much more difficult to learn. They did not solve
> the problem that users do not know their options, but rather made it worse by
> not showing them... The CD app is useless (do you know what picture is on a
> audio CD?), does not scale (how do you browse through 100 CDs?) and could be
> done in 2D - 3D is only used as an effect.... showing live snapshots of
> windows may be useful in some cases, but for text it is completely unusable,
> since you can't recognize a window full of text when scaled into a 64x64
> bitmap... they completely ignored Fitt's Law (the bigger an area is the
> faster it is to click, and areas at the border have a near-infinite size) and
> instead let clickable-objects float on the screen.

Well, I'll grant you most points, but I disagree on the snapshots. Two
text windows will have different places where the text is. So instead of
having two Konsole buttons, you'd have two different-looking thumbnails
that you can recognize enough to select the right one.

Fitt's law could be used here by increasing the active window size. (Or
shrinking all non-active windows and increasing the default font size,
more likely)

Having a more dynamic desktop like Lookingglass promises that sort of
capabilities. The X extensions keithp is working on promise the same
thing.

> I'd rather go from today's WIMP model to something that is simpler, like
> ratpoison (the WM, not the poison), and not make it even more complicated.

Yes, but ratpoison is ugly. No offence meant :)

I like some eyecandy now and then, if it doesn't get in the way too
much.

Cheers,

Wout.
 
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