TopDesk 1.3.1 is out. A list of new features and bug fixes can be found on the TopDesk page.
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on Sunday, May 1st, 2005 at 9:00 am and is filed under TopDesk.
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Excellent! It does seem to have fixed the crash on resume from suspend!
But I think the ordering of the windows still needs some work. If I have five windows open, whenever I invoke Topdesk they should always line up in the same postions regardless of which one was most recently active. As is now the positions change – which requires one to hunt for the window you need as opposed to remembering the position from previous uses. If it helps any, this is the behavior of Apple expose I believe…
If all the windows are different sizes, then the window positions will be the same each time. The only time the window positions will change is when there’s two or more windows of the same size (usually maximized windows), and their z-order changes.
Although it’s beside the point (we’re not trying to copy OS X Exposé wholesale, just provide a similar kind of feature for Windows XP, so not having the exact same behaviour as Apple is not much of a concern to us) OS X Exposé doesn’t remember the position of the windows from previous uses. In fact, even when all windows are of different sizes, the Exposé window positions aren’t always the same. If you’ve got access to an Apple machine, you can try this for yourself by opening up a bunch of windows and hitting F9 a few of times, selecting a different window each time. You’ll see that the Exposé window positions change depending on which window is the active window.
I can see that changing window positions would be a bit of a problem with 15-20 windows open at a time, but I personally don’t have a problem with it when there’s less windows open. Is it a huge issue for you, or more of a “nice-to-have” feature?
Does anyone else have an opinion on how tiled window positions should be handled?
Bugreport: To front on secondary screens has stopped working in 1.3.1 (worked in 1.3.0). I.e. if I select another window that n the current one topdesk sides back the windows but the clicked window is not put on top. It works on the primary screen.
This is on a XP with three screens.
Peter, can you submit a bug report detailing your graphics card/driver and what applications you’re running?
So after playing with expose on an imac I now see what you’re talking about – the order does indeed change at times based on the foreground window. (Although in my tests it does seem to change the order less than topdesk does.)
So I suppose my suggestion would now apply for both Topdesk as well as expose. I’d prefer to have the option of forcing all windows to the same order as long as no additional windows are opened or closed. Any changing of order disrupts my workflow while I hunt for the window in question. It’s a nitpick I guess, but think of it this way – if one were using a 30″ monitor but the windows periodically changed locations would the jumbo monitor be as useful?
I wouldn’t say that this should be as big a priority as insuring that all of the bugs are worked out of the existing scheme. But an option to maintain order would be nice – maybe this could be the behavior of the ‘grid’ layout? (although a fixed ‘spatial’ layout would be the best IMHO.)
Hi, I discovered your software 2 days ago, and spent … 2 days playing with it ! I’ve tried some other exopsé-like too and wasn’t satisfy with them. Also I was pleased to see that you update yours quite often.
Now I’ve got a few suggestions :
The first time I launched Topdesk I thaught that the windows previews were buggy : for example IE was showing the wring webpage.
and sometimes it doesn’t update at all …
Then I noticed the “enable live windows update” option, but the problem is that you have to hover something like 2 seconds on the faulting windows to get the update
Why don’t you refresh the previews when exposé is activated ?(i mean when just before tiling the windows).
What about adding an exclude list for programs we don’t want to see exposed ?
And for the eye-candy part :
)
- make all previews transparent, not only minimised windows (maybe vary the transp %age)
- let the user choose the hover-color
- add a “hover-zoom” like in entbloess (quite useless
- get a snaphot of the desktop including background and icon, not just the background !
PS:The handling of the tiled windows is perfect for me
Dave, the problem with maintaining order all the time is that the position of a tiled window is based on the order it’s fed into the layout manager. We determine the order by sorting the windows according to certain attributes (such as window area), so to guarantee that a window goes to the same position each time, we need those window attributes to be unique. In the case of maximized windows, the window area isn’t unique, so we fall back to using the z-order of the window. If we used another attribute that was unique and didn’t change to sort windows that were the same size, we could tile the windows to the same position each time. We’ll experiment with various window attributes to try and achieve this.
neFAST, we don’t refresh the previews when Exposé is activated because it would take 1+ seconds to do so if there were more that a couple of windows open. Minimized windows won’t update with the live preview option because we can’t grab their image when they’re minimized. The implementation we have at the momement is the best we can come up with at the current time, but now that all the main functionality has been implemented, we’ll start to investigate ways to get around the problem. We’re hampered by the window image grabbing being so slow, but we may be able to come up with some tricks to keep the windows more up to date.
Hi
I have the same problem as Peter – ie multimonitor support is broken – when you select a window on any monitor other than the primary, the selected window isn’t brought to the front.
Is there anywhere that i can download version 1.3.0?
Thanks
Dave, people who have experience this issue have told us that right-clicking on the window works. If you can make do with that for now, we’ll have a patch out as soon as we can.
It certainly does…. look forward to the patch
Thanks, great piece of software… tried a bunch of alternatives and TopDesk wins hands down…
I certainly agree with everyone else in that this product is really useful and certainly the best in its class. (and I’ve tried all of the others.)
Regarding a unique identifier of windows: this may be overly simplistic, but couldn’t you simply use the title of the window? You’re already gathering that data to overlay the text on each window. I’m not sure that sorting based on alphabetic order is the best idea, but you could simply use the attribute to track which window was sorted where.
Another idea: why re-compute the sort order every time topdesk is called? Why not save the sort order then in the interim if no windows have been added or subtracted revert to that previous order? This might have the added bonus of furhter speeding up activity when repeatedly invoking topdesk.
Dave Marks – Great. We’ve found the problem (along with the weird Explorer CPU usage problem people are seeing) and are testing the patch at the moment. I can’t promise when it’ll be out (it depends on how the testing goes), but I expect it’ll be soon.
Dave Joneston – The unique identifier is only used in the case where two windows are the same size. At all other times we use the area of the window, so that we get the “best-fit” of all the windows on the screen. We can’t use the window title, because windows can have the same title, but we could use the window handle (the number that Windows XP uses to identify the window). We’re going to try this out in the near future once 1.3.x is stable for most people. Re-computing the sort order takes very little time, so we do it every time we tile to save memory. TopDesk already uses up 10-15MB+ to store the window images, so we’ve tried to save memory everywhere else in the application.