launcher feedback?

[Olivier Fourdan]

Kristian,

This is a general problem on Unix because the GUI is separated from the
OS (unlike some other OS from Redmond where a crash in the GUI leads to
a whole system crash :-p )

Anyhow, CDE, GNOME and KDE have all tried to address this problem with,
IMHO, not much success.

1) In GNOME :

As you've spotted, GNOME use "xalf" to do that. To work, xalf uses
LD_PRELOAD to overload X libraries, especially the MapWindow routine.
When a user clicks on the panel, alf display a visual feedback
(hourglass, or other) and this feedback stays active until a window (any
window actually, not even the desired application) is mapped on screen,
or after a timeout in case the application died and doesn't map any
window.

The major drawback of this is that by using LD_PRELOAD to intercept
MapWindow calls, some applications (like Java apps) do not work ! (I've
seen that happening a couple of weeks ago, on a Mdk8.2 running GNOME -
removing xalf from LD_PRELOAD fixed the problem)

Note that you can use xalf with xfce too, if you really mean it.

CDE uses a similar technique, but as it seems (and as one could expect),
it's more mature in CDE ;-)

2) In KDE :

KDE uses the freedesktop.org standards to implement this. When an
applications is launched from the panel, just like in GNOME, a visual
feedback is started (hourglass, blinking cursor, whatever) and the panel
is notified on the mapping of the application window thanks to the
freedesktop.org hints. This is much more smarter simply because KDE
doesn't need to use LD_PRELOAD so there is no risk of potential
incompatibility with other apps.

As you see, in both case, the launcher feedback is by no mean a real
indication of what is happening : If the application is not present on
your system, you'll see the visual feedback until the timeout is reached
and you'll wait for nothing.

If the application is slow to start, it won't make it faster and once
it's mapped on screen, the user see it anyway.

3) In Xfce :

Just enable the "subprocess diagnostic" so that if the applications dies
unexpectedly or if the application is simply not present on your system,
you'll get notified and you won't wait for nothing, contemplating a nice
hourglass that doesn't mean anything.

The only advantage one could see in the launcher feedback that you find
in KDE and GNOME is that it "looks" like Windows, that's it. But, hey,
that's just "my" opinion. Your girlfriend may not share the same point
of view ;-)

Cheers,
Olivier.

On Thu, 2002-04-25 at 21:45, Kristian Rink wrote:
> Hello all,...
> 
> 
> ...back here after some time, trying to get my girlfriend to get used
> both with computers and with GNU/Linux / xfce, there's one question I
> would ask, here. Basically, the problem I have seen here is that
> sometimes any button from the xfce panel is clicked, excepting a
> reaction, and then, while nothing happens, is clicked again and again
> until finally some program window seems to appear. As we all know, some
> programs take quite some time to start up, especially Netscape or
> Mozilla on a P-166 machine with quite few ram. :] Anyhow: Seeing how
> things are done in KDE or GNOME, is there any way to, in xfce, have a
> feedback whenever a program is started by clicking an icon that the
> program actually *is* starting and that there is no need to start it
> again? Is there any X-only based program that serves this purpose (I
> don't want to use the xalf from GNOME right for that)? Can anyone give
> me a hint on that? :)
> 
> TIA, have a nice weekend everyone!
> Cheers,
> Kris
> 
> -- 
> Kristian Rink  	 
> irc:: irc.sorcery.net (kristian @ #dreamlab)
> fon:: ++49 160 92526188
> fax:: ++49 1212 5 119 57 762
>  
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-- 
Olivier               <fourdan at xfce.org>            http://www.xfce.org
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