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Topic: «3 bugs, 2 suggestion » on forum: Beta Testing   Views: 10927
 
David Lomas
Advanced user
 
 Posts: 377
Joined: 03/16/2006
Posted: 04/21/2006 07:39:39
 
 
 Bugs / oddities:

1. I've created a specific window rule for the calculator (calc.exe) in Win 2000. But its name was listed as 'Calculato' and I couldn't get it to use the full name 'Calculator' I didn't realise to start with that there was already a predefined rule with this name. Seems odd that you can create 2 rules applied to the same window/application, but there's no notification that you've effectively duplicated something - and I guess you might run into difficulties working out which rules are being applied...

2. Setting the startup position options from the drop box only refer to the first head on a multi-head system - it would be good to be able to put applications onto any specific head (or at least put a note on the dialogue box that 'bottom right' means 'bottom right of display 1'.

3. I recetly installed Ewido Anti-Malware (you can download a free trial here), which uses are rather odd 'custom' interface. Although AWM works through the taskbar, it doesn't add buttons to the window itself. Not sure if its even possible looking at the window...

Suggestions:

1. How about a 'rolldown' option - for example when I have the Calculator positioned at the bottom of the screen, it would be great if it could 'rollup' but then move the 'rolled-up' title bar down to the bottom of the screen, so its not floating in the middle of nowhere.

2. Not sure if this is possible, but how about a 'shrink' option. What I'm thinking of is that sometimes I want an app out of the way a bit, but still need to see if something in its main window has changed - e.g. a defrag has finished, etc. Rollup is too extreme (no visual indication of changes), but redrawing the whole window at 25% its original size would be sufficient - you might not be able to read anything but you could see if anything has changed. Not sure how practical that would be - you'd have to monitor window content changes and redraw a bitmap, etc... Something like a window-by-window version of Expose on the Mac - check out this page for some dodgy Windows equivalents. Just a thought...
 
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Alexey Fadeyev
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 Posts: 1436
Joined: 09/30/2005
Posted: 04/24/2006 03:53:51
 
 
 David, thanks for your feedback. Here are my comments about it:

Bug/oddity #1: there is nothing odd in creating different rules for the same application because actually our rules define not the single particular window but the set of windows. For example, you can start two copies of Calculator and they both will be processed according to the same rule. Therefore as there is no way to exactly define a window as we can't strictly control which rules user creates and what windows he binds them to. The only thing we strictly controls is the rules' names as you could make sure by yourself.

Bug/oddity #2: The full multi-monitor support is already on our to-do so please be patient. The note about the primary display will be added to Help.

Bug/oddity #3: AWM tries automatically detect a particular window's style and if it is not appropriate for adding the title buttons (e.g. window doesn't have title at all) then no buttons will be added. I would recommend to use the system menu in such cases.

Suggestion #1: We already received many suggestions about the many ways of auto-arranging the rolled windows. Wait for the next releases to see some of them implemented.

Suggestion #2: And this feature is already suggested too. There exists a technical possibility to implement it so as I said before please wait for the future releases.

Thanks again for the interesting feedback (hope not the last one).
 
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David Lomas
Advanced user
 
 Posts: 377
Joined: 03/16/2006
Posted: 04/25/2006 11:36:39
 
 
 Thanks for the update - look forward to seeing the new developments!

Just on bug 1 - not sure I fully understand your reply. I can see the point of having 1 rule being applied to 2 copies of the calculator, but what would be the point of 2 rules being applied to a single copy of the calculator?  Presumably when an application starts and you process the list of rules, you could identify if the launching application matched against more than one rule and warn the user? Otherwise, how does the user know which rule is actually being applied?

Finally, I'm sure its been mentioned elsewhere, but the ability to export as well as import window rules would be really useful. I know you can copy the file, but keeping 2 systems synchronised more easily would be really helpful. Maybe you could even use the Skype API to do this automatically the way Skype does with contact lists!

Cheers,

Dave.
 
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Alexey Fadeyev
Administrator

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 Posts: 1436
Joined: 09/30/2005
Posted: 04/26/2006 00:51:04
 
 
 Well, I tried to explain that although there is no sensible reason to have two different rules for the same window but we can't automatically restrict such situation. Anyway, your last question gives me another idea: we will indicate which rule was applied to a particular window in our "Modify window rule" menu item by adding there rule's name so it will look like "Modify Calculator specific rule". I believe it should be enough to remove many questions.

As for the export feature, we plan to add it in one of the releases following the 4.0.
 
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