© 2004
Canonical Ltd.
•
Terms of use
•
Data privacy
•
Contact Launchpad Support
•
Blog
•
Careers
•
System status
•
73416ba
(Get the code!)
I've recently started using awn on Gutsy and latest (as of Aug 24th) code from bzr and have a few problems with auto-hide that may not be bugs in code, but implementation features done in a way that seems not-quite-right to me.
I've enabled auto-hide, because I really can't afford to loose that much of my screen to something that I use only 90 seconds a day. (The fact that I use it only 90 seconds is cool, because the alternatives take up much more of my time)
Basically, I want it there when I want it, and I want it gone when I don't want it. I'm not trying to impress anyone, just trying to get my work done.
It makes perfect sense for it to auto-hide when my pointer approaches the bottom of the screen and then go away when my mouse moves a certain distance away from the doc.
Right now, if I move my mouse pointer within about 5px of the bottom of the screen, it appears. Perfect.
However, when I move my mouse pointer away, it stays there. If I move my mouse slowly over a couple of the icons then move it away vertically, it hides again. (problem 1)
Also, sometimes I get two bars at the same time or within a few seconds of each other. Sometimes they're identical, sometimes the icons are in different places. You can only interact with the awn on top (problem 2) See attached screenshot where I've added two arrows to draw your attention to where you can see the icons overlapped from the two separate bars. They usually don't pop-up at the same time, so you can see one bar sliding up over the existing bar.
Another issue, which compared to the two above is quite minor, is that moving your mouse pointer anywhere along the bottom of the screen causes awn to pop-up. This interferes with the compiz-fusion scale plugin that I have set to activate for the bottom right corner of the screen. Also, if I interact with plugins in the status bar of my browser, such as firebug or greasemonkey. (problem 3)
I like awn a lot, and like I said, it has the potential to speed up things.
Here are some suggestions for the auto-hide feature:
First, read http://
Reading that article made me curious about a feature... instead of it hiding completely, I wonder if there's a way for it to shrink so that only 5px or so of the bar is available along the bottom of the screen. Applications that need attention would bounce up off the bottom of the screen to get your attention. See http://
The benefit of this is that the area you need to mouse-over to see awn would be well defined, so you'd only need to have the mouseover region be the actual bar, also, it would be ever present but take very little of the screen. And finally, this is the biggie, it would make you very aware of programs that need your attention without needing sound. For example, if you stepped away for a moment and someone IMd you or if you alt+tabbed right when a program popped up a dialog and you didn't see it.
It might annoy people if the icons are constantly bouncing full height, so maybe they only slowly bounce up to about 15px above the bottom of the screen so that they just peek up over the edge. That would take some experimentation I'm sure.