tinyminds.org is featuring an interview with Shamyl Zakariya on the development of SlicKer, an alternative to KDE's Kicker panel. "SlicKer intends to provide similar functionality [as Kicker], but in a more modular, task based kind of approach; one "card" per logical function. There will be a kmenu card, a taskbar card, a system tray etc card, and so on." Conceptual drawings and a first actual screenshot are available. "I can honestly say that I'll be releasing an alpha for CardDesk in a month or two. When I say alpha, I mean feature complete, but not necessarily API stable or for that matter, stable (as in, not crashing)".
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Sorry, but proper transparency isn't an option under XFree, and likely won't be for a while.
Technically, yes, the core alpha compositing code is in place, but the actual X11 display system isn't designed to support transparency. I don't think we'll see it ever, personally, as it would involve a huge amount of work, with little or no tangible benefits aside from eyecandy.
I appreciate the suggestion, though.
Work for this is already underway (see Keith Packard's web site). XFree86 5 should see this released (i'm told this may be the release after 4.3).
Rich.
The tabs in the left-bottom corner do not seem that big, so they would never be a real problem.
For the right-bottom menu, why not make it like a "hidden kicker", thus an arrow button. If you click it, the button-bar opens, and when you do something (in the screenshot, for example, change the sound volume, check your calender...) it automatically hides again.
My suggestion is using hot key witch raise the cards above the othr apps:
Like pressing somthing like ctrl+shift or somthing, and then the cards are viewabls, then chose the relevent card and leave the keyboard...
when you not press the chosen key, the cards are coverd by other open windows..
Unfortunately, the 'conceptual drawings' link is down right now, and the account hosting the screenshot is over-quota. Does anyone have these images in their cache still? Any chance of a mirror?
they updated the slicker sourceforge homepage. check out
http://slicker.sourceforge.net/screen.php
I know this is unrelated, but is there any ongoing work to reduce widget flicker in KDE? For example, when I switch between tabs in Konqueror in KDE 3.1rc5, there's a bit of flicker, with a blank background, and then the page is drawn to the screen. Or is there something that might be wrong with my X setup?
Thanks
maybe I've been indoctrinated by the ever-present horizontal bar (taskbar, panel, whatever its called) at the bottom of the screen of windows, and kde ... whenever I come across panels which don't fully extend from the bottom left of the screen to the bot. right- panels, which in other words leave a gap at the base of the screen (eg, Mac OSX, or in KDE when users adjust the panel to not take up the entirety of base of the screen, and in this slicker) ... I don't know how users overcome the awkward look of maximized applications in such setups (I actually don't know how Mac OS X handles this)
Anyway....
It seems like, in slicker, a maximized application would leave an awkward gap of desktop in the middle at the base of the screen..
Otherwise, I've never seen a more beautiful panel...
(speaking of beautiful, the new mozilla-xft blows my mind)
philip
OS X is designed in such a way that I almost never feel a need to maximize a window. I don't really know how to describe this, but the application design really does make it so that I don't need maximization.
Screenshots of card applets in development are on http://web.umr.edu/~dgaston/
I want this desktop ;-)
Please give us this in KDE 3.2!! That would be wonderful!