[sugar] Window manager support for standard applications

[Eben Eliason]

On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 1:13 PM, Marco Pesenti Gritti
<mpgritti at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 5:21 PM, Wade Brainerd <wadetb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 4:11 AM, Marco Pesenti Gritti <mpgritti at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> 11 replace matchbox with a more traditional desktop window manager, with
>>> the ability to fullscreen windows when appropriate.
>>
>> I've been using the Awesome window manager[1] on my XO lately for standard
>> X apps, perhaps it should be up for consideration?
>>
>> It's really fast and light, supports a mix of fullscreen and floating
>> windows plus unlimited virtual desktops.  It also has a tiling mode for
>> people who want that, but it's completely optional.  I use it as a tabbed
>> window manager and ignore the tiling.  Recent versions are also scriptable
>> using Lua, which isn't Python but at least is very lightweight and fast.
>
> If I'm not mistake Awesome was the most likely candidate in the list Scott
> posted some weeks ago.
>
> Personally I'd still favor metacity, if we can convince upstream to take
> patches to implement the functionalities we need, mainly because I trust the
> code and the maintainers. Also the Ubuntu netbook team seem to be going down
> that way.
>
> But I'm happy to defer the call to whoever takes the task. My only strong
> feeling is that we should choose a window manager which supports the various
> standards well.
>
>
>>
>> Another thing to consider is adding support in Sugar for various
>> freedesktop.org standards,
>
>
> The changes I outlined above adds support for the startup notification spec
> and to desktop files.
>
>
>> like system tray applets.  If someone is using Skype, it would be great
>> for them to get their status icon in the Frame, and have the Frame
>> automatically appear when they get a call.  Same goes for an email client
>> with a new mail notification feature.
>
> Eben, what do you think about this? How would you integrate it in the frame?

Some belong in the devices section of the Frame, and some do not.  The
Speech device, for instance, provides a service which is independent
of any activity itself, and fits here nicely.  I see the devices
section of the Frame providing, basically, devices *and* services.

Skype, on the other hand, is an activity, and should not be confused
with a device/service.  However, the notification system (now in its
infancy) is something I would like to extend to activities in a future
release, allowing activities to create notifications when they provide
an advantage to the kid using the activity.  Skype (orChat, as another
example) could certainly take advantage of this API to notify when a
call or message arrives.  We can, of course, use a standard
notification protocol to implement this.

We may also want to consider a method of extension to the palette
itself, to allow activity developers to augment the activity palette
with status information.  This would be a related but separate
addition, I think.

- Eben


> Thanks,
> Marco
>