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

I see.

(paddingpaddingpadding)

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)

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...

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).

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.

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...