Re: Notification when switching Spaces?
Re: Notification when switching Spaces?
- Subject: Re: Notification when switching Spaces?
- From: Kai Brüning <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 11 Nov 2007 14:49:42 +0100
Hi Eric,
thanks for the explanation. Although many of this can be guessed from outside when thinking about what Apple might think, I always find it very helpful to read solid reasoning. Can't imaging to get too much reasoning about anything, actually.
Kai
>On Nov 10, 2007, at 9:43 PM, The Server Surfer wrote:
>
>>I honestly had no idea that Eric personally worked on Spaces himself.
>
>I don't, actually, but I've worked with the engineers who do, and I've worked on Spaces support in HIToolbox.framework.
>
>I didn't take offense, but I do think your comment was unwarranted, since unless you work at Apple you're probably not aware of what other factors might go into a decision about what capabilities to provide.
>
>>My response stemmed from the fact that it would seem to be fairly trivial for Apple to post a notification when a Spaces switch occurred, and also fairly typical for them to not do so, which is kind of annoying when someone like me wants to play with the new hotness too.
>
>It would be trivial, but it's also not clear that it's something we want to do. Notifications are API just as much as a function call or method are; once we start posting a notification on Spaces switch, and apps start depending on it, we have to continue to support that notification forever. It's entirely possible that a future version of Mac OS X will have some new UI for Spaces that will make it difficult to continue to support a simple notification. We also generally prefer to avoid providing avenues for apps to do arbitrary things in response to UI effects such as Spaces or Expose, because as soon as one app starts doing something on a Space switch, lots of other apps will too, and the end result is that the Space switch stops being an extremely smooth animation and starts getting jerky and ugly.
>
>In general, we prefer to use data-driven approaches, where you tell us in advance what you want to do when a space switch happens ("move this window to the active space", for example), and we take care of doing it for you. That allows us to keep the space switch animation fast and fluid, and also allows us to change the space switch behavior in future releases while still keeping compatibility with what your app requested.
>
>It's true that this does prevent some developers from doing interesting and useful things. The bottom line, though, is that when providing an API, including a notification, we have to think in the long term - is this something we can support for the next ten years? That makes us very conservative about providing new API.
>
>What would your code do, if you had a notification of a Space switch?
>
>-eric
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