AfterStep Planned List

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Introduction

The following is a list of planned features for future versions of AfterStep or features currently in development in CVS.

Current state of affairs

Feb. 28, 2008 - Can't say when release is coming out, I'd like to get aftershow more or less implemented before that.

There were quite a few changes in CVS, mostly bug fixes. Several new things though:

1) ability to have arbitrary desktop size, instead of exact screen increments

2) new ascompose functionality allowing for continuous rendering of tags coming through stdin. That allows for easy desklets implementation.

Planned Features

DONE! Implemented in 2.2.4. ToolTips for individual Menu entries: The goal is to read the "Comments" line from .desktop entries and integrate the comments as ToolTips in the AS Menu (WinList too?). Should the feature include a max line length feature and auto-wrap/auto-formatting?

Modules loading options from Feel and Look: This work is to get modules and AfterStep proper to read configuration uniformly, paving way for better Theme support and overall configurability. Configuration parsing will consist of 3 steps :

  1. Module's specific config file is read, and module configuration is loaded from new Defaults section of it.
  2. Look and Feel files are read and relevant options are loaded from those to override the defaults.
  3. the rest of the Module's specific file is read and whatever options that exists outside of the Defaults section - will override anything set on previous steps.

Themes will then consist only of 'Look' + 'Feel' files plus whatever images and fonts are required that aren't part of the default setup. And inside those Look + Feel files options could be set to alter the behaviour of modules as well as AfterStep's look and feel.

Already implemented in: WinList ToDo: Wharf, Pager, WinTabs

DONE! Implemented in 2.2.4. Internationalization of Menu Entries: Many .desktop entries have UTF8 support in the Name and Comments keys. AfterStep is being designed to support these UTF8 extensions. Eventual support for Menu folders is also planned.

Improve AfterStep Image Manager: Improve layout (overlapping buttons) and alphabetize requestor dirs and entries.

DONE! Implemented in 2.2.4. Add SVG support: Add support for .svg images through librsvg. Many distro icon images included with GNOME are in .svg rather than .png format. As a result, the images aren't showing in WinList and Menu.