410 - April 11th, 2005

About April 11th, 2005

New chair 01:57 am
Thanks to some discussions with Jennie last night I have spent a little of the recent Desktop Manager donation money on a new chair for my desk. My previous chair was some horribly twisted (and slightly stained) typist's chair that had almost fallen apart and was probably doing untold damage to my back. The new one is a nice black leather 'executive'-style one with arm-rests, tilting and high-back oh my. The rationale for spending DM money was that my productivity would increase if I could sit back and ponder without hurting myself and with a comfy chair it is more likely I'd be inspired to write some more code. It appears to have worked today. Anyone tracking the new DM subversion will note that the hot key preferences window has been finished and actually works (good grief!).

Screenie )

Artistry 05:27 pm
In an inspired bit of work avoidance today I've been playing with making icons in Inkscape. It is quite a nice SVG editing app and, with a little care, can be used to make some fairly nice icons. I've found I need a few more DM icons and, to go with the re-write, I though a change of icons might be nice. My current effort is below. I hope they are fairly clear in their meaning.
w3c is OK

In my pants meme 08:09 pm
*opens up iTunes and looks at party shuffle* All the entries with 'in my pants' appended:
  1. When Doves Cry in my pants
  2. You're the One That I Want in my pants
  3. Always on My Mind in my pants
  4. Tomorrow Never Dies in my pants
  5. Crazy For You in my pants
  6. Somebody to Love in my pants
  7. She Caught the Katy in my pants
  8. Behand My Camel in my pants
  9. Manic Monday in my pants
  10. Sleep Alone in my pants
  11. In Your Room in my pants
  12. Love Cats in my pants
  13. Stayin' Alive in my pants
  14. Nothing Really Matters in my pants
  15. Don't Stand So Close to Me in my pants
  16. I Will Survive in my pants
  17. Africa in my pants
  18. The Survivors in my pants
  19. Shape of My Heart in my pants
These depressingly made me LOL on a few occasions.

UI thoughts 11:23 pm
Just had a bit of a brain-wave whilst on the bed with a headache thinking about Desktop Manager. The problem with the <=0.5 versions is that sticky window support is a little cludgy and hard to activate. Ideally, thinks I, one should be able to edit windows just as if they were objects in some editing program. That made me think of the 'standard' OS X way of implementing property panels as 'inspectors', i.e. floating panels whose contents change with the currently selected object. Hence I present the new way of modifying windows in DM >=0.6. There is now a 'window inspector' which may be popped up and reflects the current front-most window allowing one to modify it as necessary. I'll probably add 'move to desktop' to it as well.
Desktop Manager window inspector

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