Comments on: Google Summer of Code

By: natio

natio — Tue, 13 May 2008 23:25:12 +0000

Thanks for taking on this project. Looking forward to giving it a test drive once its near complete. Hope you will look into getting it to work on multiple screens as well.

In any case good luck with the project

By: Thomas

Thomas — Mon, 05 May 2008 15:20:47 +0000

Yeah, background stuff is always underestimated by anyone who’s not into it

By: James Sharpe

James Sharpe — Sun, 04 May 2008 20:34:42 +0000

Yeah most of the background changers just change the GConf keys on desktop switches; doesn’t allow you to do anything more advanced with effects and the like.

I do like the idea of a drag and drop type interface as Karl suggested but I’m not so sure about having it as a modal dialog, I’d like to keep it as a tab within the Appearance capplet. Obviously with a d n’ d interface you need to provide an accessible alternative that can be controlled via the keyboard.

I think that most people underestimate the backend of the system, I believe that providing proper integration for this through libwnck and friends will make it a lot easier for userspace apps to be developed that provide a custom interface. Once an api for making changing the wallpaper on multiple workspaces is in place its not going to be too difficult for others to contribute UIs that make people happy

I’m also wondering whether to attack the idea of having workspace ‘profiles’ as suggested by Niklas Mattisson: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=113640
Then you’d assign backgrounds to profiles and then specify what profile to have on each workspace/monitor (because this problem equally applies to multimonitor setups too).

By: Thomas

Thomas — Sun, 04 May 2008 18:22:49 +0000

Roman Cheplyaka: Most of these programs I’ve seen don’t actually set multiple backgrounds, but change them when you change workspace. This approach is unusable for compiz and similar, as you will often view multiple workspaces at once.

I like very much what you are doing James. The watermark idea is great, and I hope you will support some kind of transition effects for the background rotation.

Will you be considering something like Karl Lattimer multiple backgrounds configuration mockup: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=89620 ?

Well I dare say you are a brave guy. I guess one of the reasons nobody have gotten to do something about this issue yet, is that no matter what you do, many people will be angry. I sensitive area I think, but you shouldn’t mind. It is excellent that somebody does something now.

By: Roman Cheplyaka

Roman Cheplyaka — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 04:36:00 +0000

It’s interesting for me, as I recently implemented per-workspace backgrounds for xmonad window manager. (Actually, it’s a little C program, and it requires minimum support from the window manager, so can be easily used with other WMs). However, there is indeed memory usage problem, but it can be fixed easily, just a matter of my free time.