Scale5x Report 1

Kapil Hari Paranjape [kapil at imsc.res.in]
Sun, 11 Feb 2007 09:13:27 -0800

[[[ Hello, I've been attending Scale5x. Here is my first report. - Kapil ]]]

Don Marti spoke about the "Going beyond User-Friendly to User-Intimate with desktop tweaking power".

He bagan the talk with a description of how various platforms and GUI's have evolved the Human Interface Guidelines and this was a bit worrisome since I didn't want to hear much more about those. But I need not have worried--he was just setting up an obstacle so that he could show us the ways around it!

Thomas Adam would have found this talk interesting since the subtext of this first 3/4 of talk was "How can we make Gnome/Metacity behave more like fvwm/scwm/sawfish when we want it to?" Marti gave a number of tips on how to use the tools "xev", "xwininfo", "xlsclients", "xsel" and friends to make it possible to provide a command-line/keyboard/scriptable interface to applications have only dialog boxes and mouse clicks.

In the last quarter of his talk Marti talked about some new ways of interacting with the computer. The simplest of these are the extra keys on laptops which are not handled by the keyboard driver. More unconventional are things like the hard-disk acceleration detection driver on some laptops; you can use this to detect the orientation of your laptop to flip the screen. A rather cool idea was using your hand to cover the wireless antenna and have a program that detects Wi-Fi signal strength use this in some way--for example, as an application launcher or even a "theremin".

Marti then outlined some dangers of this way of tweaking the interface:

	(a) Your computer truly becomes personal. Soon no one
	else can use it and you can't use someone elses computer
	either!
	(b) This kind of programming really sucks up time without
	necessarily contributing to the community ... unless you give
	a talk about it or write an article explaining things.

All in all a fun talk and a fun way to start the day.

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Thomas Adam [thomas.adam22 at gmail.com]
Sun, 11 Feb 2007 20:13:58 +0000

On Sun, Feb 11, 2007 at 09:13:27AM -0800, Kapil Hari Paranjape wrote:

> Thomas Adam would have found this talk interesting since the subtext
> of this first 3/4 of talk was "How can we make Gnome/Metacity behave
> more like fvwm/scwm/sawfish when we want it to?" Marti gave
> a number of tips on how to use the tools "xev", "xwininfo",
> "xlsclients", "xsel" and friends to make it possible to provide a
> command-line/keyboard/scriptable interface to applications have only
> dialog boxes and mouse clicks.

Heh. Thanks for the thought. I don't necessarily agree with Marti that Metacity [1] should behave like sawfish or FVWM, choice is a good thing. Don't forget that Metacity on its own is limiting for a reason in that it was never really meant to really be used outside of the GNOME framework. Some people would claim to the contrary, but it's still true. GNOME's way of working is entirely with the user, guiding them through every mouse movement.

Yes, there's some merit to having a scriptable means of working, but it's by no means for everyone. The fact that you'd need to use disparate tools such as xlsclients [2], xwininfo, etc., to possibly even attempt to create something that's scriptable, is in my mind not really something worth attempting; in order for that to be successful it has to be integrated into the window manager somehow. I bet Marti didn't mention 'xwit', did he?

-- Thomas Adam

[1] You can't call it GNOME, since it's really Metacity which is the window manager in this case.

[2] If you're relying on this to give you an accurate depiction of which clients are connected to $DISPLAY, don't bother.

-- 
"Wanting to feel; to know what is real.  Living is a lie." -- Purpoise
Song, by The Monkees.

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Kapil Hari Paranjape [kapil at imsc.res.in]
Mon, 12 Feb 2007 07:03:51 -0800

On Sun, 11 Feb 2007, Thomas Adam wrote:

> I bet Marti didn't mention 'xwit', did he?

Actually, he did. I should have said that he mentioned a number of tools. For details one must look at the slides of the talk at the scale5x web site.

The Gnome environment does seem to have a tool rather like "FvwmCommand" --- it is called "devilspie".

Regards,

Kapil. --

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