[3ddesktop-dev] Re: Shortcuts and grey screens

On Fri, Jun 03, 2005 at 09:36:44AM +0200, Capitán Planeta wrote:

Hi Capitan

> Hi, I'm testing 3DDesktop on my Fedora Core 3 with Gnome, it works quite 
> fine, but I have a few suggestions to improve it:

Which version did you try? I'm asking that because everything you suggested
already is implementend.


> When I use it at the first time, all the floating screens except the current 
> are grey squares. It seems like the screenshot is only done when 3DDesktop 
> has visited the desktop, until then you'll only see grey screens.

You have to acquire all the workspaces. If you've never been on desk 5 for
example, how shall 3ddesktop know how it looks like?. You have three ways to
solve your problem:

- run 3ddeskd --acquire when you start the daemon
- If that hangs rather often, run 3ddeskd first and later 3ddesk --acquire

You can try --acquire=10 in both cases, too.

- Use my patch which copies the first screenshot to all desks when 3ddeskd
is run with the --mirror option. So you can save the acquiration time, but
that only helpful if all of your desks look (almost) the same.

 
> Another thing is that the snapshots are not updated automatically. So, you 
> only see the snapshot from the last time you were on that desktop and maybe 
> things have changed. A nice optional feature would be that these snapshots 
> were updated each x seconds.

We already have that feature. Check the config file and look for
autoacquire.


> Also, I find that 3DDesktop is a nice effect but it is quite slow: press the 
> shortcut key to launch it, wait for the zoom out, use the arrow keys to 
> select the desktop, click Intro and wait for the zoom in. I think it would 
> be better if you could pass parameters to the program so you could switch to 
> the desktop of your choice. I mean, something like running "3ddesktop 3" if 
> you want to go to your 3rd desktop. This way, you could assign F9 to desktop 
> 1, F10 to desktop 2, F11 to desktop 3, and F12 to desktop 4 and this way you 
> can switch desktops quickly while still having the cool 3d effect.

We already have that feature. Use the command line arguments --gotocolumn
and --gotorow.

Please check the docs, the config file and the output of ./3ddesk(d) --help,
there are a lot of information in there. I'm not sure whether there are any
manpages shipped with the tarball, but you can find manpages in my 3ddesktop
debian package.

Best regards

Mathias Weyland

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