someone came on irc today saying they had a friend who would switch to kde if only they could make the taskbar blink indefinitely when a window demanded attention, ala gnome. this seemed like a silly thing to let get in the way. but seeing as i was already 5 hours into boring administration tasks any sort of hacking sounded really great so i spent 10 minutes adding the feature. after lunch with the p-man i tested it out and then uploaded the patch to my site.
with that patch you can edit your ktaskbarrc to have an entry like this:
[Appearance]
AttentionBlinkIterations=1000and it will blink forever. anything less that 1000 and it will blink that many times. hooray.
other than that i did a metric butt-load of paperwork and organizing, two loads of laundry and spent some time outside with my son who is taking off for a week's vacation in california with his mom on wednesday.
7 comments:
Not to be nit picky, but why not something like "-1" as blink forever. That "just makes sense" (TM) to me, and just in case someone really did want their bar to blink some number of times >= 1000.
-1 occured to me as well. but -1 (which is sometimes tested for by <0) is used internally to represent another state for the button (specifically, not demanding attention).
it also meant fewer odd if/else statements since the blink count simply rises to a level then oscillates. kept the patch small and easy.
as for someone who would want to blink the button more than 999 times ... i'm not sure there's a useful distinction between 1500 and "just keep blinking", to be honest ;)
FWIW, I believe that the taskbar blinking in GNOME is more like a slow pulse, and thus pleasant to the eye and unobtrusive regardless of how long it does it... Hmm, I wonder how hard it would be to make it themable in KDE and outGNOME GNOME... :D
That's funny. I always considered the endless blinking task buttons (or jumping dock icons in OSX) as extremely annoying in every GUI.
KDE has the best solution imho: blinking three times and than just an inverted button. Perfect.
I can't believe someone actually wants terror task buttons. People are strange. :)
Well, hello there. Found you by way of the six foot four Frenchman, aka Hub.
Speaking of RSS... I added your blogger feed to LJ:
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/aseigo_rss/profile
Hope you don't mind... just makes it easier to stalk you from Ottawa-Hull, yanno?
:) Nancy
Is there "glossary" or something where all these little features are listed? I bet there are millions of little things like this that most people would never know about. How about "The Idiots Guide/Reference to Millions of Hidden Features".
It would be nice to be able to drill down to specific features by application or some other way so its easy to find these things. I'd hate to have to use something like msdn.m$.com, its terrible for finding things.
Hum, shouldn't the flag for the number of times to blink be separate from the flag for demanding attention or not?
Just a thought,
Ben
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