Re: miniapm patch (fix premature exit) & questions & intro

on Fri, Sep 27, 2002 at 03:25:17AM -0400, Greg Alexander wrote:
> 
> miniapm seems to exit whenever you close the informational
> pop up window.  I'm not an expert as to what the generated
> DestroyNotify event actually means, but minisys (for example)
> doesn't watch for DetroyNotify and just has a while (1) loop
> so I figure that's the way to do it.  Enjoy the attached
> patch relative to the cvs version.
> 
Hmm, This doesn't happen to me.
How are you killing the popup ? with xkill or something ? You just
need to click it to close it. 
Thanks for the path though, and it does make sense to apply ! To fix
at least when killed with xstroke.  

> I have a couple projects related to MatchBox that I'd like
> to undertake, at least one of which is pretty important to
> my enjoyment of my ipaq.
> 
> First off I want to make my own text input mechanism.
> I played around a little bit with mockups on my palm pilot
> and I have come up with a stroke system based on a 3x3 grid,
> discarding the parallel to handwriting, that seems pretty
> usable.  The trouble is I think it really requires a dedicated
> screen region, and it has to be square so I don't want to put
> it in the dock (I assume the dock would have to become as tall
> as the square, which is unideal).
> 

Why not make the window a toolbar type, like xkbd or GPE's minicalc
and NMF ?
How does your stroke system differ to Xstroke ? 

> I think ideally I want a window that is stuck on top and not
> associated to any particular application from matchbox's
> perspective.  It should be a free-standing window that can be
> dragged around (or minimized) when it is in the way.  Is it
> possible to get stock matchbox to manage a Window in this
> fashion?  My initial guess is that my input program would
> have to interact with matchbox the same way the dock does.
> I'm very naive to the way X and window managers interact, so
> if nobody answers I will probably go off and explore for myself,
> I was just hoping someone who knew about matchbox could give
> details first...?
>

If you set the window transient for the root window, you'll have an
always present draggable window - though there'll be no minimise
button - you may have to hack something in to your app to do this.
 
> The other change is I want the title bar to include, rather than
> the title and left/right (next/prev) icons, a list of icons (even
> if they are just numeric) representing each window so you switch
> just by clocking on the window -- this is more like hitting
> ALT-Fx at the console in big PC Linux.  No idea where to start
> on this but I figured i'd let you all know it was something I'm
> interested in that might show up once I get more comfotable with
> matchbox and X.
>

A better solution may be to run matchbox with the titlebar hidden and
display your list of apps in the dock. 

Thanks again for the patch;

  -- Matthew Allum