litestep has gotten to the point where its rather stable, does its job, and is clean.
however, it does now need a few extra features.
what id most like to see is smooth animation support (eg. buttons sliding on and off the screen, popups fading in, osx style wharf that rotates when mouseover'd, things like that. dynamic stuff.
what else do people want from litestep?
you currently can do most of the stuff you mention there, althoug the rotation will need a bit more of work (making the animation frame by frame).
but how smooth is it? from my experiance, the animations are quite jerky
im using xlabel and the animations are really smooth. depens on the configuration you use/the pc you have.
I've seen some nice stuff
You have to tween, but unlike flash you have to do it manually. If you tween 10px at a time it will be jerky if you tween 1px at a time it will be smooth and time is a factor some older pc's don't like fast animation so they don't refresh fast enough. Anywhy animation slows everything down and Litestep speeds them up, so having animations in themes is an oxymoron.
Maybe you can request an app to spit out code for animating lsbox... maybe I will?
"you currently can do most of the stuff you mention there"
Have you seen a theme that has created a osx style warf? I'm keen to see it if one exists.
Try using Y'zDock find it at
http://www.majorgeeks.com
Then use lsyzcontroller module in your theme
anyone explain an OS X style wharf?
the dock, quicklaunch and running tasks share the same space, if an app is running it shows a triangle under it, when you hover an icon it gets zoomed smoothli, togather with the icons next to it, and shows the text above the icon of the hovered app.
You can easily make something similar with xlabel for a quicklaunch, but the taskbar icons cant be zoomed in that fashion.
something interesting about the dock:
http://www.shell-shocked.org/article.php?id=259
Oh, I'm aware of the OS X dock and its general behavior. Where does rotation come in, though--as an animation per dock icon as you click it, a distraction to make appear that a program launched launches faster, when all it's going to do is use CPU cycles and/or memory in the meantime because it isn't hardware accelerated? This is where dedicated, specifically designed programs probably perform better than cooking something using existing LS modules.
Animations are overrated; they are hardly ever useful. The best use of animation I can think of is OS X Panther's Expose. Or sliding windows on desktops in a VWM when switching desktops's (my history is bad, what was it in, Enlightenment the WM?)
I consider the useless/"waste-of-time" variety of animations those which can be added or taken away. You don't want animations for a dock, you want a more well-defined dock first. Say you wanted to make this dock with existing modules. QuickLaunch (Wharf?) would probably be the foundation. Tasks is relegated to just match against the entries in the quicklaunch and show triangular graphics. Suppose you want the dock to be aware per desktop. VWM says "OK, I'll help you out, tasks" (VWM and Tasks modules are getting friendlier lately). It could be easy to work off existing modules, so just have a coder add an exception to allow for this intimacy. But designs more often conflict if you try to combine them. You could just absorb features that other modules provide, but then this gets closer and closer to a specifically designed program, a.k.a 'bloat' when a user wants to use a module for not this newly-added purpose, perhaps for its original purpose. Who does the animation? Add in animation support in the QuickLaunch in this case.
Alternatively you could make from scratch more abstract modules that could better fit together, but then configuration complexity jumps up as a tradeoff, getting even more time-consuming, and besides, what else exists besides a dock that you won't even know you might want to build later so you can know what to make now?
i distinctly remember playing with a demo mac in a shop once, it had many icons in the quicklaunch area (which did precisely what syro says, but also the icons move left or right when you move the mouse to the sides of the area, displaying more icons. just a way to hide icons in a limited area, but looks damn cool.
Try using Y'zDock find it at
http://www.majorgeeks.com
It emulates the launch bar of a mac
Then use lsyzcontroller module in your theme to
control it
..I sort of went off topic there. I'll just wait for LiteStep 0.25 first..
vertigoalopolus: that's exactly what the dock does to sell; it makes a great demo. the dock programs i've tried for windows never seem to run permanently (by my choice). it's the same amount of work to 'wipe' the icons as if they didn't magnify. you just get to see pretty icons in detail when they zoom & shift. it just stands out too much compared to the applications that i run :)