Have anyone tested the unsinkable dialogs? Any comments? Just to remind you, the two dialogs I've been working on - toolbox and fill/stroke - are now not only transient but unsinkable (stay on top of the topmost document window when there are many). Also they remember shape and position within session so you can turn them off and then on again without losing your layout. (What remains to be done is an all-dialogs-toggle; I will do this shortly.) Inserting the same into all other dialogs is a boring work, and I want to be sure that these new features work perfectly with these two dialogs before I spread them everywhere. So please test heavily and report any problems or concerns.
By the way, be prepared for a possible flame from Gnome developers. Here's what Havoc Pennington writes in his book:
" A transient dialog is one that appears and is dismissed relatively quickly. (GnomeDialog is really meant for transient dialogs.) Some "dialogs" are just small windows, such as the tool palette in the Gimp. These persistent ("floating") dialogs should be minimizable without minimizing the parent, and they should not be forced to stay above the parent window."
Which IMHO is very wrong: it does not matter how long a dialog stays open, it only matters what you do with it. A tool palette makes no sense without a document to apply these tools to, and therefore must be "transient" to stay on top. Unfortunately someone chose this wrong term ("transient" meaning "temporary") and this seems to affect many programmers who underutilize transient windows making their interfaces almost unusable (GIMP is not the only example).
Also checked in today:
- space switches to selector temporarily; another space switches back. This required writing a new set of functions to switch tools (tools-switch.c) but now it's much easier to do
- ctrl-` and ctrl-shift-` opens the toolbox
- misc fixes
I may be absent for some days - need to reboot to windows to do a project in Xara/Illustrator :) Feel free to leave comments on wiki.
--bb