Some 4.1.90 usability thoughts

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On 10/14/04 03:19, Jeff Franks wrote:
> 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.

you can use the xfce4-tasklist plugin from the xfce goodies page.  i believe
there's an option to hide the application names, so it should work very
close to how the iconbox works.

> 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.

yep.  this really sucks.  the delay is generating the desktop menu, though
i don't know why the panel is freezing (unless you have the 'xfce menu' plugin
in your pane... or perhaps it goes through it just on load; i'll have to
look into that).  at any rate, i tried a couple things to have the menu
not block as it was being generated, but it caused a bunch of menu
rendering bugs, so i got rid of it.  after the first startup, it caches the
menu, so it's not so bad.

frankly, the autogenerated menu implementation kinda sucks.  i wrote it
without full understanding of the related freedesktop spec, and i just
didn't think a few things through properly.  there are some things about it
that i like a lot, but its performance isn't one of them.  i'm going to
merge benny's menu implementation (well, actually a modification of it, as
it does some things i don't particularly like) after we branch for 4.2.

	-brian