Re: ANN: GWorkspace 0.6.5

[Chad Hardin]

On Jun 5, 2004, at 2:16 PM, Michael Baehr wrote:

> I personally think we're going in the right direction with the dock
> (being an OS X fanboy and all) but it is, indeed, going to be extra
> screen clutter until we have a dock that can _fully replace_ the
> WindowMaker dock's functionality.  Right now, it doesn't seem to work
> as an app switcher (I click on the application icons and I go to
> Desktop.app, not to the app I intend to, forcing me to use the
> WindowMaker dock still).  Also if it is restarted, it forgets which
> apps have already been launched before that restart, making it not
> very useful to maintain the current state of your workspace.

This is not the Dock's problem, but it is an artifact of the way 
GNUstep itself works.  You see GNUStep does not keep track of which 
applications are actually running.  Instead what happens is that as 
each application is started it sends out a message saying so.  The Dock 
notices this message and at that time it knows the app has started.  
Naturally, any applications which are launched after another 
application will not receive the message that the other application has 
started.

If the Dock is the first thing to be run and it never crashes, it will 
work fine.  But what happens when it DOES crash.  Also, other apps may 
be interested in the same information, so the Dock shouldn't be relied 
upon as the authoritative source of this information.

Perhaps another daemon is needed to keep track of which apps are 
running, I think that this daemon would end up fulfilling the actual 
roles of each application's NSWorkspace object; NSWorkspace would then 
become a proxy for this daemon.  Such a daemon would have to be very 
simple and straightforward to minimize bugs and crashing.


Comments?

Chad


> As far as the desktop portion is concerned, it doesn't seem to
> understand symlinks (in the recycler or on the desktop itself).  I
> would love, for example, to have an icon for my home directory there
> but that does not appear to work at the moment.
>
> I am, in any case, looking forward to Desktop.app being more fully
> fleshed out and usable.  Right now it is mostly eye-candy (not that
> that's bad either, mind you :D )
>
> > If you stick to splitting GWorkspace up into more modules in the 
> > future,
> > may I suggest a Recycler.app to go along with the others? 
> > Alternatively,
> > an option to chose whether the Recycler should be in the dock or on 
> > the
> > desktop (as before, so to speak) might be dandy, too. And the dock 
> > needs
> > to be disableable for those who don't like docks to begin with.
>
> I agree with this.
>
>
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