Some 4.1.90 usability thoughts

[Jasper Huijsmans]

Hey Jeff,

Jeff Franks wrote:
> I've been using 4.1.90 on Fedora FC3 test 2 for a few weeks and I have a 
> few usability thoughts that might be worth considering, at some stage.
> 

Hehe, nice careful formulation ;-)

> 1. It would be user friendly for left handed people to be able to add 
> the pager the to left side of the task bar instead of the right.
> 
> I'm left handed and I hold the mouse with my left hand. More often than 
> not the mouse cursor comes to a rest on the left side of the screen (the 
> opposite to right handed people). It is a lot easier and more 
> comfortable for a left handed person to move the cursor up the screen to 
> the left side of the task rather than diagonally across the screen to 
> the opposite corner.
> 

Interesting, Im right-handed, but have my mouse on the left (RSI), but I 
never thought of that ;) Guess I'm so addicted to scrolling on the 
desktop to switch workspaces, I never use the pager.

Yeah, being able to change the order would be nice. I still think the 
taskbar could use a clock as well.

> 
> 2. Lil' Star Iconbox would make a good panel plugin.
> 
> The Iconbox functions similarly to the task bar and would offer users a 
> different desktop experience if they could optionally add the Lil' Star 
> Iconbox to the panel as a plugin, and optionally hide the taskbar. Some 
> people like to (or need to) maximize screen real estate for the 
> application(s) they use so having this optional desktop arrangement 
> might prove beneficial.
> 

Ah, yeah, the icon box... To be honest the icon box is more or less 
unmaintained and should be replaced with something based on the 
netk_tasklist functions.

I believe the tasklist plugin on xfce-goodies provides the functionality 
you're looking for.

I would like to be able to use multiple panel, which would indeed make 
the icon box redundant (provided there is indeed an iconbox plugin for 
the panel). However this requires a serious redesign of the panel and 
therefore will take a bit of time.

> 
> 3. I've noticed that when Xfce 4.1.90 starts for the 'first' time there 
> is a 10 to12 second delay after the task bar and panel appear before the 
> desktop becomes usable. To the user it seems that the desktop is frozen 
> because it doesn't respond to button clicks on the desktop, menu or 
> panel. On subsquent log offs and log ons (while not rebooting) this 
> doesn't happen. Is this a bug or is there something going on in the 
> background.
> 

My guess is that this is due to the applications menu being generated. 
I've heard about this, but I have never witnessed it myself. The 
solution is of course to get rid of all the useless crap filling up the 
menus that you never use anyway ;-) Oh, wait, no, solution is to not 
block when generating the menu, but that apparently is not so easy,

Thanks,
	Jasper