Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

Is this possible?

It would be so much easier to scroll along a 3200 pixel wide screen than to move from one 800 pixel-screen to the next and to the next. It would then also be possible to move only as far as your next widget or shortcut, i.e. stop halfway between screen 1 and screen 2.

I am a complete noob re Maemo but why are there 4 screens, and why not 1 very long one?

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

Hmmm good question but afaik its the way Linux in this case Debian based OS work you cant change that. Ubuntu has 4 desktops as well..not sure though

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

i was thinking the same thing the other day, then we could utilize the space between each desktop....more widgets and short cuts
or spread them out so that the screen looks less cluttered.

sometimes it's more convenient to scroll through seperate screens
so it would be cool to include a setting to switch between scroll modes... e.g continuous / set (dunno what to call the 4 desktop mode lol)

anyone think it's possible. would be like how the menu scrolls

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

it might be a possibility using Matan's modified-hildon-desktop package. i know it allows such features as disabling the desktop edit, allowing up to nine desktops ans well as mapping keyboard shortcuts to desktop functions. possibly there may also be a way to disable "snap" and institute a more smooth-scrolling desktop transition. just a though.

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

I always found 4 screens is the best solution. I can categorize my widgets and short-cuts so I only have to look in one place for all my web widgets for example.

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

How about if there are 'sticky points' that behaves like weak magnets only when the desktop is positioned near one of the (current) boundaries?

So if you scroll it slow enough, it'll 'click' into position like the current default boundaries... but if you scroll fast\strong, it's possible to scroll through 2-3 screens at a time.

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

The scrolling you are suggesting would be pretty awkward. When scrolling, you are pressing and holding. When releasing the pressure on the screen, you'd want the desktop to stop moving, so you can tap it to launch an app for example. It could work for some but you will have to 'concentrate' on how far you are sweeping instead of the 'easy-going' swipe-swipe, or swipe.

Also, some people want their desktop to be highly flexible i.e. other background for each desktop, or even geeky things like moving desktop (already existing for N900)

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

I truly don't see what the difference--or benefit--would be other than aesthetic choice. Seems awkward to me.

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

The meego internet tablet looked like it was continuing single screen. Looked nice

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

This is wrong on so many levels. :(

No reason you can't, but you'd have to be using a desktop that supports it. For a while I ran a 3 wide, 2 high desktop using fvwm on my N800 back in the day -- you could certainly do the same on an N900. You could probably, with enough work, also hack the hildon-desktop to support it (which is presumably what you're after), but you're talking a lot of work for IMO not much gain.

In practice, the main reason people use large virtual desktops is not so they can pan half-way between them and look at widgets in odd locations on the screen. It's usually so they can use an app with a larger than screen window (and in fact this was part of the reason I ran fvwm that way). Since windows in hildon are always full-screen, this doesn't apply, and I think most people would rather a given widget is either off-screen, or right where they put it, not moved because they only scrolled a half-screen.

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

Harmattan offers this

http://www.slideshare.net/peterschne...ogy-highlights

Slide 9

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

Intriguing idea. I recon, technically, it should be doable. The necessary parts are open sourced, aren't they?

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

So I can put my 2 cents here since I was trying figure it out when I was working on Flaemo. Yes this is bloody Flash. But because of this fact Flash developers always facing performance issues. (That's why we are developers and problem solvers instead of programmers :P - chill out it was a little joke only)

But the way how Maemo desktop works make a lot of sense to me. I haven't seen a code at all. I guess it should tell me nothing anyway. But base on observation of behaviour I was trying to represent this behaviour as close as possible. Also I've been trying many different approaches. All I can say this is only for performance reason. Less elements on the screen under constant control, less performance impact. (pretty much Divide and Conquer is working here) That's why is more efficient handle 4 separate screens and make impression they are one strip rather other way around.

I know for user It could be cool to have more funky space and effects but they would never stop complain about battery drain instead and choppy movements. Don't forget that people behind any programmable solution doing stuff for reason. Doing decisions and very often compromises. I have no any little single bad world to say or complain about how Maemo (Linux desktops) functioning itself.

In fact it's very simple and it took me 4 classes (objects) to represent this in Flash. Because is simple is efficient and cool. Using this same approach you could have 100 desktop if you like without huge performance impact. Imagine this on one desktop.

And Another one example? Why you thing Google map is reading images only in area you already looking at? What you saying is like Would be cool to have huge Google Map of the entire World in max zoom and just scaling it and dragging around. If you can do a math this task is simply impossible to achieve by any broadband network and the best PC available on the market.

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

I think it is probably using standard X virtual desktops.

So when you slide, all that is really happening is a bitmap is taken of the current desktop, and transitioned to a bitmap of the next desktop, while behind the bitmaps the actual widgets are being rendered. Once the slide completes, the bitmap is removed to show the real desktop underneath.

It is an illusion. The reason I bring this up is it may appear to be just a case of switching off the "slide and stop" way the current desktop switching uses so you could have half and half for example, but it isn't really working that way - you could not interact with the widgets because they are just images of widgets.

It would take a bit of a rewrite of the desktop code. Still, nice idea though. Something 3x3 would be cool, with a button to zoom out to the "full desktop" so you could zoom in on a bit of it.

I think realistically the widgets already consume too many resources so this is asking for trouble.

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

I'm not sure what you mean; AFAIK X has no "standard virtual desktops". That's why every virtual wm on the planet implements them for itself. If I've missed something, please correct me.

Nice theory -- ever consider testing it?

One might start simply by looking at it while sliding; you can't implement parallax with a single pixmap, so your explanation is obviously oversimplified at the least. Could be done with two pixmaps, of course, so that doesn't prove that you're completely wrong, but I bet if we cared to we could find out for sure in less than 5 minutes.

Since one can hold the desktop "between screens" indefinitely (just drag it to one side and don't release), all you'd need is some widget that will update without user intervention. Say, the media player applet -- seek to 10 seconds before the end of a file, then get to the desktop, drag and hold it halfway. Ok, I just went and did this (which took less time than it did to write up what I was going to do), and somehow the media player applet smoothly updated to the new file's title/artist info, and even scrolled it while being floated back and forth between desktops... a nifty trick for a pixmap, eh?

Now to me, this all makes sense, given that the same level of graphics acceleration for traditionally slow (and thus often cheated) wm eye-candy is seen elsewhere (dashboard), and that the need of hardware acceleration for the core desktop was the whole reason why Fremantle couldn't run on the N8x0.

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

i don't know about that because i can click a widget/short while the desktop is still sliding.

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

@paulkoan as Benson said. Nice guess but I am sure is not working that way either :)

@Benson really? I'm new to maemo. If I was able to represent it in old flash 9 and is not GPU accelerated in any case. It was a key of incompatibility for N8x0?

I am really surprised.

Would you like to know how did I achieve that in flash?
I can even provide source code for slide desktop mechanism if somebody is interesting in.

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

Unless later Xorg versions have expanded on the X protocol I think you're right.

X rendering is based on a root window which is something else than "a desktop". Typical "virtual desktoping" is done by manipulating and remembering which window should be displayed where depending on which virtual desktop is to be seen as active.

The Maemo approach is something else, just as you show with your experiment.

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

Ooh. Looks like I made some assumptions before posting :)

Yeah, my apologies, by "Standard X" I wasn't really referring to X I guess but in the way virtual desktops are implemented under wms are fairly standard in how they achieve what they do, even if X is not doing the work.

So I assumed that Maemo was doing a similar thing. Even if not - the issue of parallax and changing pixmaps and pixmap overlays is trivial. Take a look at Compiz or KDE compositing to see what you can do - you can even have video running on the Cube while you switch desktops - but this is still not a real window that you can click on and interact with.

The compositing is done over the top. I think the same thing happens on Maemo, and ultimately the X is told what to render while the swipe happens. Even the act of clicking on an icon mid swipe isn't that big a deal - just subtract the swipe position from the normal screen position and "click".

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

On the contrary, While being on the cube, screenobjects can be manipulated, interacted with and moved around. I once tried this back in the days on Ubuntu 5 or 6. Was fun but no use, so I went back to Windows.

Well, no. As said, it's hardware-accelerated. Check the wikipedia article on how compositing is achieved. There are no pixmaps involved, at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compositing_window_manager It's rendered in the buffer, manipulated, and then drawn. Not the other way round.

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

all widgets are pinned to a grid and with a couple of x and y formulas you can let them slide. Giving the widgets a higher x and y formula, make the backgrond seems to come loose from the widgets, making them laying on top of them.

If it were really a bitmap made by the n900 then it would for sure be very stuttering and it wouldn't be so smooth. making a screenshot hitting ctrl+p results in a 5 second full load of the CPU. imagine that you scroll 10 times through all homescreens in a few seconds. the n900 couldnt keep up with that for sure.

As i said earlier the widgets move apart from the background, so again its not possible with a bitmap

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

I see.

(paddingpaddingpadding)

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

Id prefer to have the scrolling screens, but would like a static area where you can put any widget in which wont scroll with the desktops and just stays static (similar to the bottom bar on the iphone)

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

Mainly because of the excellent Exchange support back then. Hmhm... and Office 2007 which got released. And now on 7 it's all fine.


But what we wish for/are discussing should be doable by modifying hildon-desktop no? Thus speaking: natively. I imagine removing the mechanisms which make the view "sticky" shouldn't be too hard to find in the code. But then again I'm not programmer and didnt look at any code at all concerning the N900...

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

Me neither know how it works on Maemo but it should be doable. Be cause it is doable under Linux.

Also it should be under a trigger. (i.e. no float automatically when swiping. Maybe with a designated key on the keyboard or under the "widget customizing mode".

If it is put under a trigger it could be usable. I am thinking Gimp.. or just while browsing. But then the problem would be the that the maximized widow would be to small (i.e just a desktop).

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

Because it was implemented using hardware acceleration -- not that it necessarily couldn't be implemented other ways. Also, supporting arbitrary X11 behavior makes things more general and so harder than in Flash.

At any rate, Schaggo's got it right as to how the present implementation works. I think there's no major obstacles in making hildon-desktop support it, just would take some grunt work by someone who wants it.

Re: Why not have 1 continuous homescreen (instead of 4 discrete screens)?
 

I gave this a second thought. Wouldn't this also be the key for some kind of portrait homescreen support? If there wouldnt be any distinct ancor points for the different views or even defined views at all, the canvas (eg. visible area) could be freely rotated at will.
Of course, when rotated, objects would only occupy the upper half of the screen since the native vertical resolution of the device (and thus the "height" of the area where object can be placed) is 480 pixels. But since the width would be a strip of 3200 pixels without any constraints otherwise - instead of 4x800 pixels as of now - it would not matter how much - widthwise - of the strip would be on screen. Intriguing...