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Courtesy of Sean Gleeson, we present to you the Autorantic Virtual Moonbat™. Just try having a discussion with it. It’s even got configurable options!

But then Raster says sleep is for the weak, so…

I finally found and fixed the bug with desktop switching last night. (Apparently Raster could have easily identified this bug but he chose to make me feel the pain instead.) Borders were being automatically freed on window unmapping regardless of whether they were visible or not, hence the apparent data corruption. Virtual desktops work well enough for general use now. You can have any number of desktops, iconified windows are restored to the current desktop, and selecting a window from the window list automatically takes you to that window’s desktop.

Meanwhile Raster doesn’t seem to perceive a situation in which we dynamically add/remove containers on the fly, so the multiple desktops idea is shelved (for now at least). I actually did implement this in code, but there were two problems — the need to add code to automatically reparent windows being moved to another container, and the fact that all the modules presently only handle one container, so extra containers lack shadows, ibar, clock etc. In any case I think having zones and multiple desktops will do well enough for most users. Possibly we could have overlapping zones on the same screen – so you could hide zones if you wished, and stack them any way you wanted, even resize them….this would essentially give you multiple desktops E16-style, but in a more powerful way…

News from the coding front: A fair number of long-standing Entrance bugs have been squashed. One of the more notable ones had to do with locale support (date and time display). Entrance should now correctly display the date & time in your system locale.

E17 virtual desktops are almost here. The E17 desktop paradigm is somewhat different from what you’re used to — in fact, attempting to make the extended window manager hints spec fit around it might prove to be slightly challenging. E17 will have multiple desktops with virtual roots, ala E16. Each desktop, or “container”, will have one or more “zones”, the default being one zone per head in a Xinerama setup. It may be possible to have multiple zones on a single screen as well. Each zone will have its own background edje and its own set of client windows. Each zone has one or more virtual desktops, and each virtual desktop may have a background that is different from its zone’s background. Seems complicated, but it’s really quite simple to understand in the end.

I have almost finished getting the basic features for this going in CVS — right now there’s a data corruption bug we’re trying to track down that affects switching between virtual desktops in a zone.