Suggestions

Dagmar d'Surreal (dagmar@estates.ml.org)
Mon, 13 Jul 1998 12:47:37 -0500 (CDT) 

I've been using AfterStep since just before 1.0 came out, tried several
others, and switched back to AfterStep every time.  I like it.  There have
been times I have been very irritated with the fact that a perfectly good
piece of software looks like it's not being maintained becuase the web
site is setting new records for being slow to update, but that's okay as
long as things are still moving at all.  I was very, very impressed with
the flexibility of the new way of doing the look files, but...  There are
some things that I would like to see, not all of which I can code in there
myself because it's a big source tree.  Most of these are probably 15
minute hacks.

Here's some suggestions for minor tweaks that will get this thing closer
to perfect.

 * Sliders should probably retract faster than they extend.  If this isn't
   set as a proportional amount, it should probably get its own setting.

 * Surely there must be some way to adjust the height of the window title
   bars.  Possibly more digging in the source code will reveal how...

 * Something fishy with using xpms other than what is on the desktop has
   shown up.  Ignore me if this is already fixed, but, when I went and
   made 64x64 thumbnails of my desktop backgrounds, and set those to be
   the specified pixmaps for pager, it goes bewm on startup, and silently
   disappears.  :/  It really should be able to handle separate files.

 * Eek!  This probably WAS fixed in pre7, but MaxSwallowModule does ugly
   things with (for example) asmixer, since it's not naturally 64 pixels
   in height.  Makes the tile short.  :/

 * Strictly a visual thing--it would be nice if wharf went back to the
   old way of stacking itself out of the way, with the buttons sliding
   over each other individually rather than as if they were on a ribbon.    

If these have all been fixed in pre7, just ignore me.  I'll be upgrading
my binaries tonight.  *sigh*.


Just so this won't be all about telling other people what to do, I also
have an alternative set of window buttons, and a few icon overlays I'm
going to be uploading (hopefully to have them added to the default distro)
in a few days.  (I can't think of a good symbol for pin yet.)  I've also
got about a half-dozen other icons to convert over to mini-size as well.
The icon overlay is for marking buttons which start ssh sessions as being
secure connections (little lock and key in the corner), a nice frame for
people to use to make icons that look like embedded pictures so they might
all have a more unified look (mostly a transparent xpm, came in very handy
when I made hi52.xpm and bx52.xpm).  Screenshots of the lot will be
available later in the week.

By the way, sliders with sliders of their own is one of those things that
I *was* going to suggest, but some wonderful person already coded it.  I
do very much like being able to stick apps into wharf buttons on sliders
now, too.  (Well... I saw pager doing it, hopefully it will work with ascd
also.)


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