OT: Mark made my day!

[Thibaut Varene]

On 4/21/05, Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen at canonical.com> wrote:
> * Eric Dunbar
> 
> | Focus-follows-mouse is a "niche" market which will never catch on
> | simply because it adds too much clutter to the computer using
> | experience. And, the "exception" or "niche" should never be that which
> | drives GUI design.
> 
> A problem here is that focus follows mouse and per-application menu
> bar on top of the screen is mutally exclusive.  (I've tried it with
> Mac OS and it really, really sucks.)

I'm not that certain. I'm a MacOSX user and a focus follows mouse user
on Linux. I can think of a somewhat "proper" way to combine
menubar-on-top and focus-follows-mouse:

State that focus doesn't raise windows.
State that the top-most window (the last one raised) gets menubar 'focus'.

When moving the mouse around, the menubar doesn't change unless you
raise another window (by clicking on it or switching to it using
alt-tab).

I think that's one way to make it work (especially for people like me,
who like to have a topmost window and do something in a background one
without selecting it). I'm aware that this is probably not what
everyones do, but I just wanted to show that it is not necessarily a
mutex.

Of course, we're targetting the limited set of people knowing and
willing to use focus-follows-mouse, and thus they can "get used" to
such a scheme, imho. It doesn't need to be "obvious" to the newbie,
for, as Eric pointed out, it's a niche market.

My 2-OT-cents

T-Bone

-- 
Thibaut VARENE
Ubuntu, Debian and Kernel Hacker

<jbailey> Insert tab A into slot B doesn't take too long to figure
out.  Leave a couple horny kids in a room for an hour, they don't need
instructions.