OSX 'exposé'

Whilst searching for sound playing support code I came across John Duffell’s PBFront module (http://www.duffell.riscos.me.uk/software/pbfront) which brings the pinboard window to the front of the window stack on alt-uparrow. It makes it easy to find anything pinned but lost behind a hundred windows. I use the equivalent exposé function on my iMac many times a day, so it’s nice to have on RISC OS too.

Is it practical to create an analogue of the “shrink all the windows and spread them out to see and pick” function? It works very well on OS X partly because all the window have backing store of the content that can be very rapidly manipulated by the gpu. At least the Pi has gnu*[ <- dammit, GPU]* support so at least one RISC OS machine could have a chance of doing something similar. I don’t care if it isn’t live updated mini-windows. Just a quick way to see all my open windows laid out so I can find the one that is hiding in a corner.

I believe there are (commercial?) utilities for this, but I can’t remember any names.

Not nearly as unnecessarily flashy, but perhaps you may find Switch useful?

And as for bringing the Pinboard to the front, might it be worth looking into implementing the Select Wimp’s Message_ToggleBackdrop in RO5?

might it be worth looking into implementing the Select Wimp’s Message_ToggleBackdrop in RO5?

It’s already there. :-)

perhaps you may find Switch useful?

Funnily enough I wanted something similar in November and being a lazy programmer, wrote one instead of looking: http://twitpic.com/bxobgj/full

Mine opens on Shift-Logo (ie Windows on most keyboards) and also steps through the list bringing the highlighted window to the front (behind the list of course). Return closes, Escape goes back to how things were.

So yes, it’s a failing of the Wimp that there isn’t such a system built in, and a strength of RISC OS that it’s so easy to add.

Is it practical to create an analogue of the “shrink all the windows and spread them out to see and pick” function?

Could be slow. If you don’t want covered portions to be greyed out then each would have to be brought to the front, redrawn, grabbed, and so on… very flickery. One could redirect output to a sprite first and hope for the best, but some programs output directly to the screen so that won’t work, and for any window off the edge of the screen…

So, yeah, I thought about that.

And then wrote a list.

Yes, Switch might be useful enough to serve the same need, but it isn’t as flashy. Flashy is good, sometimes. Actually, the OSX exposé flashiness isn’t just flashiness, it makes use of some of the ‘muscle memory’ mental trickery that the original ‘messy desktop’ metaphor was all about.
I’d guess that one might make an adequate equivalent in RISC OS without having to do anything massively time consuming. How about
a) copy the screen, image process in a simple saturation reducing manner to make it look faded into the background
b) open a no-furniture screen-sized window with said image as background
c) add icon/button things for each open application, roughly sized in proportion to the app’s window size(s) and labelled with leaf filenames where appropriate
d) hitting an icon close the window and makes the chosen window front and active

Might the image processing be as simple as displaying it with a palette that de-saturates colours?

MoreDesk has a couple of features which are similar and potentially useful. One is the main window, which gives a mini view of all your virtual desktops, and the windows in them. You can move them all around via that window. The other feature is the alt-tab which just lists all the currently open windows and allows you to bring the one you want to the front (and give it input focus).