Re: Window Management

James ''Wez'' Weatherall writes:
> > I also like ion very much. What do you mean by "dumb"? I've found a
> > few aspects of ion that can make it hard to use, but most should not be
> > too hard to fix:
>
> I found a few problems with ion and xvkbd:
>
> - It attempts to resize the xvkbd application, resulting in a weird,
> stretched keyboard.

I have seen xvkbd go into strange states if I resize it a lot. This is
almost certainly a problem with xvkbd, (good X programs should accept
the size they are given). But, xvkbd can also shape up nicely under
ion:

        http://thump.east.isi.edu/ipaq/ion/ion-pyditor.png

> - It does something awkward with the keyboard focus which prevents xvkbd
> from actually working! (for me, at least).

I like the way ion handles focus, but it does force you to use xvkbd's
focus feature. See the green key in the screenshot above, (labelled
Fo)? If you click on that then you can select a window to get xvkbd's
keystrokes. This isn't painless, but it does work.

> This forces you to use fscrib or equivalent. I've used fscrib a
> bit but it's a pain when I forget the incantations. :)

You might give fstroke a try. Do "ipkg install fstroke" if you are
running familiar v0.4. No live documentation yet, but you can look at:

        ftp://ftp.handhelds.org/pub/projects/xstroke/release-0.2/

for a postscript rendering of the strokes or even a 320x240 png that
could be popped up on the iPAQ.

[snip]

For my other ion suggestions, I've started a dialogue with the author
of ion. He has been quite responsive already. Archives of our
discussion are viewable under the "ion on handheld computers" thread
at:

        http://rt.fm/ion/archive/2001-05/

> > > I've come up with a combination of a window manager layout and
> > > an app launcher/dock layout that might be sweet, based on
> > > experience designing a simple iPAQ user interface as part of my
> > > PhD. I can post a mock-up of it if anyone expresses an interest.
> >
> > I would be very interested, for one.
>
> OK. I'll post some mock-up images of a suggested layout this weekend,
> zipped to avoid offending modem users... Actually, I might hack together a
> Python script that does an example GUI. :)

Great. I'll look forward to this.

> > Well, I use ion and fstroke. Another user-interface thing I have been
> > doing is to use gestures to launch programs. Right now I do this by
> > holding down an iPAQ button mapped to Alt, performing an fstroke
> > gesture bound to a key, and using the ion Alt-key binding to exec the
> > application of interest. This is working quite well in practice.
>
> Interesting. I'm of the opinion that the user should always have
> the fallback of going to a simple tappable menu to get things.

Agreed.

-Carl
Received on Fri May 18 11:52:27 2001