[compiz] Thumbnail plugin

[David Reveman]

On Mon, 2007-01-08 at 19:34 +0100, Stjepan Glavina wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> With some help from Quinn_Storm, iXce, maniac103, mikedee and
> KristianLy :), I've managed to modify switcher.c and make a new plugin:
> thumbnail.
> The plugin shows thumbnails of windows when cursor is moved over a task
> button in taskbar.
> 
> Screenshot:
> http://pix.nofrag.com/b0/7a/051d45e25bfffed09eeb9b00e383.jpeg
> Download:
> http://forum.go-compiz.org/viewtopic.php?t=377&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
> 
> David, what do you think about it? Is it good enough to be moved into
> official compiz repository?

I had a quick look at the forum thread.

The appropriate way to do thumbnails like that would be have it
completely done by the task bar application by making it use composite
extension to name the window pixmap and draw the thumbnail. Anything
else would be a bit of a hack. The problem is that Render extension
acceleration isn't good enough and the compositing manager might add
window decorations and such things that you might want to be visible in
the thumbnail but the task bar application is of course not aware of
those things.

I suggest that we add a plugin and a simple interface that allows any
application to request that a set of client windows should be composited
on top of a different client window.

E.g. a task bar application that like to show thumbnails in task bar
item tooltips would before mapping the tooltop window set a property
like _COMPIZ_COMPOSITE_CLIENT on the tooltip window to the client window
that should be thumbnailed and the position and size that should be
used.

A compiz plugin will simply read this property and make sure that the
requested client window is composited at the requested position. This is
similar to what the switcher plugin is doing and probably very similar
to what you had the thumbnail plugin do initially.

Task bar applications will need to be modified to support this of course
but I reckon that for decent desktop environment integration that's
required and not necessarily something we should try to avoid.

Anyhow, I think the thumbnail plugin that you've written provides some
very useful functionality and if nothing else it's very good for
exploring how we can best provide this kind of functionality. I'm
interested in including functionality like this in the main compiz
repository once we have a good solution for it.

Let me know what you think about the my suggestions and keep up the good
work.

-David