Wednesday 14 February 2007

Bubbles & more

I have actually been doing some Awn hacking today, and here are some updates:

  • "Text Bubbles" feature is now implemented. You can choose the colour and alpha.
  • "The dock" style arrows have also been implemented.
  • Arrow colour and alpha can be changed.
  • Updated avant-preferences to handle the new options.
*Update* forgot to mention that these features are in SVN, so feel free to test them!!

Heres a clip of the text bubbles (google video page):



No auto-hide just yet, still trying to get rid of the bugs, but hopefully I can commit this soon!

I wanted to know if you guys would be interested in a 'tile' instead of just a text label when you hover over a icon. So this would be like:


--------------------------------------------------------------------
| | | Application Name |
| | icon | Launcher details/Window Name |
| | | Some other useful info |
--------------------------------------------------------------------


This would be constrained to a certain width and height, But I think it would look quite sweet. It will also be useful when I get round to adding the DBus backend for apps to control their icons.

Let me know if your interested in this feature, and I'll code it.

27 comments:

Fredp said...

IMHO that would be very cool. Great work as usual, thank you very much for dock-like arrows! :)

Another tiny request: would it be possible to have the separator disappear when there is nothing on its right? Not so necessary, though.

I'm also glad to hear extremely interesting news about MayB in the wiki: I'm the author of that mockup, and it would be awesome to see it becoming real. :D

Mike Jones said...

very cool, is this out in the svn yet?

@fredp I am the one who suggested mayB for this dock, and want to say those mock-ups are beautiful. Also wanted to ask you if you saw my gaim like mayb mock-up? maybe you coudl make a cleaner mock-up of it, cause mine doesn't look half as good as your mock-ups.

Neil J. Patel said...

@fredp: I am working on the separator problem, so will update when its done. I saw the MayB, great work!! Hopefully this can be a reality, once I get some time to write the dockapp code.

@mike: Thanks! It has actually been in Awn since day one, but I commented it out because the drawing was horrible! And yes! All this is in svn ATM. What do youthink of the 'tile' idea instead of the standard label?

Britt Selvitelle said...

I think the tile idea is fantastic, with maybe a gconf option to the current implementation based on feedback.

The use case I have is: I have 5 gvims open.

I want to hover over them and see:

1st. What file I'm looking at.
2nd. What path the file is within.
3rd. The app.

On one line, it's very nice that file is first, path second, since that solves my concern, but tiled may make it even easier to scan over this info.

Anonymous said...

Nice idea Neil, definitely worth coding, if you ask ;-) What options would you possibly want to add?

Unknown said...

great work.
i just have a comment on the tiled bubbles, we don't need to see the icon again as we already have it on the dock itself, maybe a screenshot would be more useful, only if the application is running of course.

Andres said...

the ¨tile¨ feature would be great.

Good job with de project!

Fredp said...

@mike: I like your idea very much (actually it is more or less what I wanted MayB dock to become :D ), and I tried to make a mockup of a docked "gaim" with MayB style, but placing it on AWN. Due to my current wallpaper I switched to white background, as dark gray didn't look good at all, but I think it's still nice-looking. Here you are: http://img365.imageshack.us/my.php?image=dockedgaimva5.jpg

Unknown said...

thanks for update
and +1 for tile idea

regards

Jack Kerouac said...

Strange,

I have svn upped in my avant-window-navigator and used the ./autogen,sh make and sudo make install and no changes. I killall avant-window-navigator, restart and still nothing new. I've done it a couple of times now. Weird.

Andres said...

@patrick: did u ¨make clean¨ before ¨make¨? if not, u should ;) hope it works.

Jack Kerouac said...

@andres: nothing. It's weird, becuase I have only have this problem once before and it corrected itself when I repeated the whole process. This time, I have repeated the process like 6 times and it keeps telling me I'm 'At revision 115.'

Unknown said...

hi,
great work Neil !!!!

I have just compiled awn at revision 116, but the text bubble seems to be in a z-order lower than any running application, is this intentional?

Anonymous said...

You should make it so the text bubbles are drawn above all other windows.

Anonymous said...

For me the bubbles are drawn above other windows.

Great work neil :D

Andres said...

i just updated, and now the windows stopped maximizing behind awn, now it maximizes like above it... like osx, is this a bug or a feature?

Anonymous said...

First, let me say that Avant rocks.

Its the best desktop utility Ive come across in YEARS for Linux.

And yes, the tile feature will be awesome. But just kick those bugs by now, because the app is already great. Kudos.

Anonymous said...

I just got the latest svn update...
But now all maximized windows leave out the space of the dock just like a gnome-panel!

could an option to enable / disable this feature be implanted?

It really anois me that the windows wont take the full space...

~sorry if my english is bad ^^~

Anonymous said...

Hi Neil! This is the best dock for gnome!

I'd like to have it always visible on my desktop except with maximized windows.
(I don't like auto-hide too much). Is possible to do this? Tanks

Neil J. Patel said...

@Andres : its a feature! but I svn committed without having the ability to turn it off ! I'll fix this tonight.

@marco & anon1 : The bubble should already be drawn above other windows (as they set the corrent WM hints) but I know that they don't in some dsituations. I am trying to fix this.

@andreas : you'll able to turn it off tonight! Soz!

@Cacioppoli: I don't quite understand hwta you mean, could you elaborate a bit more on your request ?

Anonymous said...

@Neil
AWN, up to now, remains above all the window even though they're maximized. So, for example, when you have a full page of a program (i.e. firefox, gimp...) you still have AWN at the bottom of the screen. A solution could be the auto-hide feature.
But i'd prefer an option such as:
"Keep behind maximized windows".
So you can have AWN visible with no windows (or minimized one) and a full page with maximized windows.
I belive my english could be ugly so I prepared an image to explain.
http://img501.imageshack.us/img501/2894/immaginehg4.jpg

Unknown said...

hi all

@neil : is there a way to know each time a new source code is out. Or just the revision number to know when we have to update ?

great work again

thanks

Anonymous said...

This is fantastic!

Anyone know how to make it start after Beryl has completely loaded on ubuntu so I don't get a big black bar across my desktop?

Anonymous said...

@jbus
I think this should work.
realize a smal script and add it to your gnome session

code(example):

$ gedit start_dock
(then copy the following lines)
#!/bin/bash
sleep 2
avant-window-navigator &

You can in/decrease the sleep time according to your needs.

Unknown said...

For some reason, with Friday's svn, minimized windows don't maximize and come to the front when clicked. Maybe it's just my system.

Hey, while we're talking about wishlists, and since you're a Beryl user, rather than text bubbles, or maybe in addition to, could you incorporate the mini windows from Beryl to get that nifty hover preview that you get from a menu bar?

Anonymous said...

I was wondering if it'll be possible in the future to change the icons of the launchers.

Thank you

Anonymous said...

I think it would be cool to have Beryl's live window preview instead of a static icon in the bubble. Live window preview is one of the things I miss most from using gnome-panel.