So you like Network Manager...

Just a tease.

Awn-testing packages and Cairo-menu rewrite

So as you may be aware the awn-testing ppa is now providing packages based on rewrite code. Note that this does not mean that we've merged rewrite into trunk quite yet. We haven't been flooded with bug reports yet, I'm not really sure if that's a good or a bad thing.

I've been doing some work on the cairo-menu rewrite. Just working on getting the gnome menu up and running properly at the moment. Note the startup notification support (which I added in at the same time as I was doing it for Taskmanager) I will also be adding a xfce menu option (it will be possible to switch menu library at runtime). Beyond this, I also intend to have a custom rendering mode for menus that will override the standard gtk menu appearance... I suspect this is going to cause me massive headaches.

Anyway, here's a screencast. For some reason gtk-record-my-desktop has become gtk-record-a-slideshow... so I had to use xvidcap, the results are acceptable, but not great.

Expand the bar to emulate a panel

For those who, for some bizarre reason, miss their panel we offer an option to expand the bar. Which in conjunction with the new expander applets allow a fair amount of flexibility in the layout of the bar.

And here's the screencast:



Next post, I'll probably return to talking about the taskmanager and some of the choices regarding the default configuration.

Taskmanager, Disabling Icon Changes.

If you don't like apps marring your carefully chosen icons by trying to provide information, then it is possible to disable this behaviour. Making use of the disable_icon_changes key can keep the icon specified in the launcher's desktop file in place at all times (if there is no desktop file then the taskmanager will continue to use the icons provided by the application).

Taskmanager: Customizing Icons

So, A quick tour of the new Taskmanager Customize Icon feature.

A few notes:
1) Only available when desktop lookup has been successful or there is a Launcher. (The goal is for desktop lookup to work, so I'll treat failures as bugs instead of changing this requirement... at least for now).
2) Available through context menu. Taskmanager is diverging from the standard drag and drop an icon file mode. With good reasons, This will keep the drag and drop of files into a launcher sane (the application is invoked with those files).
3) I think icon issues should be dealt with in the installed icon theme. But as we know there are always egregiously ugly misses with icon themes and not everyone has the knowledge/time/rights/inclination to modify their chosen icon theme. So we have this.

Taskmanager Window Grouping

Continuing with our little screencasting extravaganza here's a clip that demonstrates grouping behaviour with gnome terminal, OpenOffice and Gimp.



As an additional note the following have been pushed into Taskmanager in the last day;

1) Drag of files over windows (activating the window).
2) Drag and drog.
3) Customize Icons context menu item.

So you like your Taskmanager classic?

Continuing the demonstration of various configurations of 0.4 Taskmanager.

This is, more or less, the classic 0.[123].x behaviour. Next up, a closer look at grouping.