Tool tips - again

[Lucas Murray]

On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 6:23 PM, Emdek <emdeck at gmail.com> wrote:
> By the way, are there plans for adding possibility to query KWindowSystem to check if given effect is available (for example check if we are using KWin, have Compositing and effect is enabled in settings etc., just check if we have all needed things to use it)?
> Then checking if task bar previews are available (or mentioned effect for showing windows) could be much cleaner I think (I've read about plans to add preview of desktops to pager, so there it could be also used).

The "non-hackish" way [*] to test for support is to make KWin provide a D-Bus function that returns a list of all active desktop effects, then all you need to do is check if "taskbarthumbnails" or "highlightwindow" is listed. This of course cannot be done in KDE's service name domain [**] if you wanted to keep the possibility of compositor-independence [***] like what the current "hack" provides. This list could then be available in KWindowSystem I guess (Assuming if all compositors name effects the same [****]).

[*] Personally I find the current way better as a compositor already uses X to communicate with windows so using something else like D-Bus just doesn't make sense. We can just add more stuff to _NET_SUPPORTED if there ever becomes "standard" effects such as thumbnails or we can just add our own _KDE_CM_SUPPORTED otherwise.
[**] Unless other compositors want to hijack KWin's service name... Which is not nice at all.
[***] Compiz can write an effect that provides support for it if they want just be setting the required X properties, not sure if they have done it yet though.
[****] Not that there's a lot of compositors anyway... Plasma already assumes that KWin is being used for a lot of things as well.

> Also way to trigger given effect could be cleaner, but it could be hard to create nice and universal API for that...

And this is where things get quite complex if we go the D-Bus way.

-- 

Lucas Murray :: http://www.undefinedfire.com
GPG Fingerprint: 0B88 499E 3F5B 1405 D952  258A AD90 B4F5 90B6 3534

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