panel development update

[Jeff Franks]

Jasper Huijsmans wrote:

>>Jasper, are you planning to, make lil'IconBox a panel plugin.
>>
>>    
>>
>
>Yes. Panel, taskbar and (rewritten) iconbox are currently still separate
>entities in the panel sources, but the idea is to simply make them
>instances of the panel. 
>
>Also, keeping them separate for now allows me to play around with different
>kind of behaviour and compare them directly. 
>
>Supporting multiple panels requires a big rewrite of panel internals
>(all kinds of assumptions are no longer valid, global variables must be
>removed, etc.), so it will be a while...
>
>  
>
I had mentioned this before but at that time no one liked the idea, so 
I'll mention it again. Essentially the icon box is a graphical  task 
manger (large icons only) where as the most task mangers around are 
text-based (application title with a small application icon next to it). 
I thought a great looking alternative to the current Xfce text task 
manager would be making the icon box an optional panel plugin. Once 
added to the panel it could hide itself when no tasks were running, and 
then show itself and expand as one or more task(s) were run.  You would 
most likely need options to display only those tasks running on the 
current desktop, and icon grouping, to minimize the number of icons 
displayed at any one time. Currently, no Linux desktop I know of uses a 
graphical task manager so it could be a first.

Jeff.