iconbox, panel, etc positioning

[Joakim Andreasson]

On Thu, 6 Mar 2003 16:48:27 -0800 (PST)
manny rosa <manny_robot_freak at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I think it's a great idea to have the panel and such
> snap to the edges of the screen and stuff. It would be
> more flexible then the current implementation. Great!
> But I think it should also allow you pu place item
> where ever you want (like it does now.) oh, what if
> the iconbox can group multiple windows from the same
> application like the taskbar. For example, multiple
> windows of Phoenix show up as one entry in the taskbar
> with a menu that comes out when you click on it so you
> can select a particular window.

This I am very strongly against, and is also my main problem with the
taskbar. It only makes it very slow to select which window you want, and
is only practical in a situation when the taskbar/iconbox wouldn't fit
on the screen otherwise.

As it is, I find the iconbox very useful as implemented, allthough I
have one problem with it. As it stands, many apps don't specify an icon
by themselves, which makes the iconbox only display the "gear" icon for
them. The only way to tell them from eachother is to move the mouse over
the icons and wait for the tooltip to pop up, which takes a while, and
can be irritating. I can think of three solutions for this problem;
either 1) make the tooltip pop up immediately (which I don't know if it
is something hardcoded into gtk and thus impossible to change from an
app), or 2) display the name of the app in an abbreviated form (and in a
small font) under the icons, or 3) have a way of specifying which icon
is used which each app, in a similar manner to window managers like
fvwm, xfwm3 or mwm, which seems to be against the xfce4 philosophy, but
I would nevertheless favour such a solution, allthough I don't know how
hard it would be to implement.  

Regards,
Joakim