Panoramic desktop

[David Boddie]

[Apologies to those of you who are subscribed to both kwin and
 kde-core-devel as you may get this message twice.]

For the last few months, as part of my day job, I've been working on
various additions and changes to KWin. These have been based on some
of my employer's ideas and previous work on the usability of desktop
environments. Some basic usability testing has been performed by my
colleagues, the results of which should get written up in the near
future.

The main direction of the work has been the addition of viewport
support to KWin through patches to kdebase/kwin and kdelibs/kdecore.
These changes were made to support a model of the desktop in which
the desktop surface may be represented by a ring of connected
screens. This model is supported by a suitable pager application.

I realise that this sort of virtual desktop is not likely to become
part of the mainstream KDE distribution so, with this in mind, I've
put up some web pages which provide some more detailed information
and an overview. The source code (currently, patches against files
in CVS) is there for those who feel adventurous and want to try it
out.

    http://www.sleepydog.net/Resources/KDE/

Comments and constructive criticism are welcome. I'd particularly
like to know whether my corrections to the viewport handling in
kdelibs/kdecore/netwm.cpp are reasonable.

Have fun,

David

-- 
David Boddie
Software Developer, SleepyDog, UK

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