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from TraditionalGUIGroup:
Task Widget: (Apple's Menu,Win95/NT TaskBar,OS/2 (pick one), 3rd button on X,et al) It should be noted that some OSes use one widget to show tasks and another to launch them
Also include ___Step's Wharf/Dock, Be's Tracker (which covers most of the behaviours of the others
Have I lost you yet?
On a related subject, I have a particularly stong idea about the design which I will elucidate up front. I think that with the tools available to us in Java, and particularly those in Swing, we can design a system that is completely configurable. What this means for the traditional GUI group is that once we hash some things out, we should be able to define basic objects for each of these components, and inherit and extend them as suits us. This could mean that we could have a generic Win95-esque desktop as the default (just an example) and we would provide several instances of most objects. Bear with me, and example is coming. EG:Let's say we've a class jos.UI.Taskbar (a win-like taskbar, see fvwm95) which inherits from jos.UI.TaskWidget. (or use interfaces, which is probably better) If I didn't like that as part of my JOS desktop, I could go change something in some dialog or another and use jos.UI.McMenuBar (an Apple menu clone ala WinMac) instead. Or, if I was a better hacker than I am or I were paid to do it, a custom menubar thing could be hacked, implementing the interface however you want. This applies to every thing in the UI, and in fact this sort of extensiblity is the basis for the UI design (ie abstract Shell, anything can inherit or perhaps implement it's methods, etc)
This would also define how other Shells work in the system, of course, and is hardly limited to here, but this is where I was.
This isn't just for people who endlessly reconfigure their desktop. This extensibility would pay off in accessibility as well. Text readers or device drivers for special interfaces could implement interfaces, allowing the blind, deaf, etc to use the system.
Maybe most of this rant belongs in jos-gui or elsewhere. Feel free to move/copy it, just leave a marker...
Have at it. Oh, and do ask about guis you're not familiar with. How do you do images on Wiki?
I most definitely agree about the configurability of the StandardGUI. We just need to make sure we create really good interfaces, so we don't prevent people from creating the taskbar/widget they want. This may mean having to implement a larger subset of features than we see a need for... (if that makes sense).
I'm not sure if there is an easy way to do images. Maybe there could be an FTP directory created for uploading images to JOS? I'm going to try and do animated gifs for the captures I take from the SGI stuff.
If need be, I can setup an FTP directory for us on my remote site, then we can link to it from here.
-- MasonZhwiti
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