On Wed, 2005-09-28 at 12:00 +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
I expect it will be helped by the new developments in X display that should make it faster and easier.
Yes I am waiting to see what eye candy gets rolled into Gnome..I hear that late builds of KDE now use some of the new extensions to do fancy effects.
Whilst not a lover of too much bling...I like a bit (if it doesn't hit the system resources too hard) and Apple in particular (since OSX) have a knack at having eye candy type things that actually help the user interface to some degree.
For example in Office for Mac undocked toolbars go transparent if left untouched for a while....So if they are inadvertently over part of the document it doesn't matter because you can easily type under them, I would love to see Gimp do that..
Also rather than just stealing focus, if a dialogue box on a buried or minimised program appears the Dock icon bounces...little bounces mean that the program is waiting for some sort of user input...big bounces mean that something nasty has happened or an error box has appeared. The level of bounce is set so that even if the Dock is set to autohide the icons "peep" up at the bottom of the screen. I really like this behaviour as it is visible enough to grab your attention but not so intrusive that it stops you from finishing what you were doing in another app.