8th September, 2008S.

 Greetings,

First of all, thanks for all the great work!

I was wondering — is it planned that 1) the shadows should wobble along with the windows instead of remaining stiffly rectangular, and 2) the intensity of the blurring should be proportional to the window’s opacity, like for the shadows?

Thanks. :)

8th September, 2008Dennis P

Are you talking about cycling through windows on a desktop by bringing them to the front one after the other? Then it would be great if they all wobble except for the one that was originally the front window before you started the window select cycling. That way the wobbly effect gives actual usefull user feedback and those who said kwin is wasting effort on useless eyecandy would have to eat their rice paper hat.

8th September, 2008Dennis P

It would also be informative if all windows except for the one with focus would wobble and you could drag them to their desired location without giving them focus. You could place them behind another window (behind any window which is stacked above it) as they wobble and upon release they would wobble into full transparancy notifying they are hidden behind a window right there, before they are faded 99% you can click them to give them focus.

While dragging you could perhaps cycle through their position in the stack using the scrollwheel.

8th September, 2008Jonathan Thomas

I think it would be neat if the windows could wobble a bit when they’re maximized/unmaximized like Compiz does.

Thanks for all the work you’re doing for KWin compositing! I really believe it is becoming a viable competitor to Compiz, even if it doesn’t have the 1,000 different effects. KWin takes the best ones and does them well, all the while integrating with KDE beautifully.

8th September, 2008Dennis P

Just plain insane would be the ability to do, uhm. How should we name it? U-turn unfocused window restacking. Awesome :-)

You take the focused window and you drag it around, it is solid perhaps it has some translucency. You click another window into focus and drag it around the same way then you focus on the first window again by clicking it. It is simple and KDE is easy to use for everyone.

Then there is U-turn unfocused window restacking. You take a shortcut by dragging an unfocused window around without first selecting it. It wobbles and remains in its location in the window stacking order. As you drop it behind a window stacked above it, it fades and wobbles like a cartoon ghost disappearing behind / through a wall. But what if you want that window in front of that other window without cycling its position on the window stacking order with your scrollwheel? Then you make a U-turn and move the window away from the other window and straight back towards it again. Instead of wobbling its border underneath the other window border it wobbles above it: the unfocused window you are dragging has been moved up the stacking order to just above the window on which you made a window border U-turn.

What if you can’t grasp at all what just happened and are simply annoyed that your windows seem restacked in strange ways you don’t get? Then there is [CTRL]+[Z] to undo the rearranging session. Unless you click your window with continued focus then the undo goes to the application.

8th September, 2008Lucas Murray

“1) the shadows should wobble along with the windows instead of remaining stiffly rectangular, and 2) the intensity of the blurring should be proportional to the window’s opacity, like for the shadows?”

— S.

1. Will be fixed sometime before 4.2 beta
2. Already available in trunk

“I think it would be neat if the windows could wobble a bit when they’re maximized/unmaximized like Compiz does.”

— Jonathan Thomas

Interesting, I never noticed that the KWin version doesn’t do that. It looks like there’s a missing hook somewhere in KWin core, I’ll look into it.

Dennis P,

I have read your comments several times over and I still don’t really understand what you are trying to explain. Window walking/cycling is what happens when you press Alt+Tab, how would adding a wobbly effect improve this functionality?

8th September, 2008Dennis P

 Lucas,

In an [Alt]+[Tab] list your current window is the top one on the list, when directly cycling through windows (which I don’t know if you have implemented) there would be little feedback on when you have reached back to the beginning of the stack. Having all windows wobble to the front and the original focussed one pop up solid would by a clear indicator that you have seen all windows, allowing the user to conclude that the window they are searching for may be hidden on another desktop or in a multi tab window.

This would keep users from cycling all windows a second time because they had not noticed the cycle was complete and cycling a third time to try to remember and find the window which was originally at the front / had focus.

I think you meant to ask: Adding a wobbly window effect after selecting from an alt-tab list would have zero user feedback and just be eye candy. Which is true of course.