Illume!

[Nicola Mfb]

Hi!
DISCLAIMER: I really appreciate E-developers, and I think E* stuff is
really nice, modern, elegant and powerful, my assumptions were born
after googling, reading mailing list archives, digging a bit in the
Illume code and coding some fr applications. For sure I missed a lot
and I'm not an X11 guru, so I may be wrong in some of all points I'm
going to illustrate!

I noted some things:

*) it does not support some window manager hints (trying to close,
toggle fullscreen etc from an external application e.g wmctrl) does
not work
*) " standard systray (I know this is a very hot and boring topic, and
it will supported when and if the specification will be fixed)
*) " docking windows, so any workaround for running trayers (or any
other dock window) etc. is unuseful
*) the config dialogs often does not fit well on the screen (or at
least out of box)
*) some not so important issues

Many of those have workarounds:

*) to close a fullscreen window, toggle fullscreen, etc you may to
bind aux or power button to some illume actions (for eg. system
control menu), but freerunner has only two keys so I'd like to not
waste them and bind one to an auxiliary application that will show an
utility menu that let you click on "toggle fullscreen, close, kill,
etc." with wm hints
*) to have systrayicon-like you are forced to write some E gadget,
that's nice for new applications and for developers using E stuff, but
not for existing applications or guys using different toolkits

About docking I do not know any workaround (the only one was patching
illume to force a fake virtual keyboard to be always showed, but it's
just an experiment), and IMHO them may be very usefull for some tasks.
Suppose for example a gps app that show a 480x64 permanent dock window
on the bottom of the display with satellites, speed, etc, while you
are able to switch between other applications.

About config menus I do not know if that's only a matter of theming or
some code rewriting.

As it *seems* (note: seems!) that illume development was a bit slowed
down when some e-guys left openmoko, I'd like to have some
clarifications about it's development status/roadmap and about the
process of SHR/OM2009 defacto standard adoption, as this may
influences the meaning of the "stable" upcoming releases and their
flexibility.

Please do not STONITH me I want only to understand better how things
are going in this exciting world and be corrected where I'm wrong :)

Best Regards

    Nicola