January 19th, 2010
Pinned windows completely messed up the switcher applet, so I quickly made a one line fix. Here’s the new package: switcher_0.2_all.deb
Update: Oh and here’s the source: switcher_0.2.tar.bz2. I forgot to add the license information, but it is MIT. I also forgot build instructions for the .deb package: you have to run build.sh as root which dumps the package as a .deb file in that directory. It is my first .deb package ever, so please be kind ;)
I’ll hopefully clean it all up and put the source up in a bzr repository over the weekend.
I made a Debian/Ubuntu package for Switcher. Please try it out and tell me if it works: switcher_0.1_all.deb
UPDATE: I made a .deb package for Switcher.
I’m used to a fairly minimal config in GNOME where I only run one panel that’s not expanded at the bottom of the screen. It contains only a menu, date/time widget, notification area and the workspace switcher. The window list widget is a bit too big for me and I always run the same apps on the same desktops (in most cases only one or two non-overlapping windows per desktop), so switching between desktops using keyboard shortcuts is all I really need. What’s weird, though, is that I can still get lost without the workspace switcher at times and my setup does make things very confusing when someone else tries to use my PC.
There’s this long standing bug where GNOME’s workspace switcher applet highlights all windows on all desktops as if they are on the selected desktop. This has to do with the fact that compiz uses multiple viewports rather than workspaces and the widget isn’t 100% “viewport aware” (for lack of a better term). It doesn’t look like it bothers anyone else enough to fix it, but it drives me mad.
So.. long story short, I made a new panel applet that acts as a desktop and app switcher combined. It even has that “show desktop” button functionality thrown in and it works the same with desktop effects on or off (that is to say with viewports or workspaces). Instead of the big fat windows taskbar style buttons it uses little icon sized buttons for apps, so I guess you could say it looks a bit like a “dock”.
I haven’t put the code in any sort of version control system yet, but if anyone wants to try it, just download and install these two files:
You might have to log out and back in or kill gnome-panel or whatever so that “Desktop/App Switcher” shows up in the “Add to Panel…” dialog - I’m not really sure how to refresh that list yet.
Oh and you will have to install python-wnck. That’s the name under Ubuntu - not sure what the package name would be in other distributions. It also uses python-gtk2 and python-gnomeapplet, but that should already be installed.
April 16th, 2009
Anything from 10 to 20 percent of all users on the web still use IE6 and the general consensus seems to be that it is too early to drop support for it. But what were the statistics like back when the world dropped support for IE5.5? (or 5.0 for that matter)
My guess is that a significant amount of people were still using IE 5 when sites just stopped working for them and they were forced to upgrade, but a quick search comes up with no dates or statistics.
Either way, with the previous 5 major versions of Internet Explorer and 4 major versions of Netscape Navigator, people upgraded either because a newer version was bundled with their operating system or because sites stopped working. People aren’t upgrading their pirated copies of XP, so what does that leave?
What else changed between then and now? Why were sites allowed to break on older browsers when we all moved to IE6 as the new minimum, but now that we need to move to IE7, it is unacceptable?
