GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 147419
D-BUS fullscreen toggle messages
Last modified: 2010-02-17 00:44:18 UTC
Attaching a patch to metacity to send D-BUS messages whenever it toggles fullscreen mode. The messages are meant to be intercepted by another program that will apply a policy based on the change to fullscreen. The policy can be to turn off the screensaver and other focus stealing programs so that when a person is watching a movie or giving a presentation in fullscreen they are not interupted by these applications. Havoc should have cleaned up versions of these patches, so this is really just a reminder. ;-) Along with the D-BUS patches I'm attaching a test python program that demonstrates the fullscreen mode.
Created attachment 29466 [details] [review] configure.in and Makefile.am patches
Created attachment 29467 [details] [review] D-BUS C file
Created attachment 29468 [details] [review] D-BUS Header file
I have an interaction model posted up at my gnome.org address detailing how this system should work from a user perspective. here's the link: http://www.gnome.org/~clarkbw/GNOME/lhf/general/fullscreen/
Since we'll be branching any minute, we ought to take a look at this
The dbus part looks reasonable, the one macro-level thing I'd change is that the fullscreen state should be entered on transition from 0 fullscreen windows to >0, and left on transition from 1 to 0. i.e. if I fullscreen two windows, then unfullscreen one, it should not leave fullscreen state. Simply keeping a count of fullscreen windows in MetaScreen probably handles this? There may be a better way. Also, should we consider whether the fullscreen window has focus; currently, we let the fullscreen window go below other windows if it loses focus. In that case we could send the dbus messages on focus in/out events, with invariant that we send "fullscreen on" on focus in to a fullscreen window, and we send "fullscreen off" on any focus out if fullscreen is currenlty on. But one problem there is you may want to stay in fullscreen mode if you focus a dialog opened by a fullscreen app.
I'm going to guess that Havoc's comments count as review; if not kick us so that we can get this in as we're getting close to branching time...again.
Feature freeze is only a few days away... Is this bug still relevant? If so, the time is know to act on it. :)
I'll assume that's a 'no, it isn't still relevant', but feel free to reopen and provide any further needed information. ;-)
I'm still interested in the issue. Recently I tried a new work style that involved making greater use of fullscreen apps, for the screen real estate. I had no idea that fullscreen disabled notifications, and discovered that I was missing IRC notifications that I expected to get. The proposal included a UI that would notify the user that several preferences were changed when entering fullscreen change, and it allowed re-enabling notifications if you wanted them. Personally, I think it could get old to see a tooltip each time I enter fullscreen mode, but I think there could at least be a preference option *somewhere* that allows you to choose if you want notifications on during fullscreen mode.