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Hydra: A lightweight OS X window manager with a powerful API

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Re: Hydra: A lightweight OS X window manager with a powerful API

#141

Post by chrisoverzero »

weavie wrote: post #117
omaranto wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't there is anything too surprising about this. "User Experience" isn't something you can measure on a single line, there are different aspects to it. I'm not an expert but I think the following are some of the things that users can appreciate: 1. That things work smoothly. 2. That things look pretty. 3. That it's easy to figure out what a program does when you first use it. 4. That it's possible to control the…

Maybe its just because I came from Windows, but I generally expect hitting the maximize button to take the app to take up the whole screen space. On OS X, some apps do and some don't. This violates #3 for me. Another one is minimizing a window and then Alt-Tabbing to it (whatever the Mac equivalent is..) doesn't bring that window back up.. You are just left staring at the same app. This violates #1 for me.

Maybe it is indeed because you come from Windows, but OS X doesn't have a Maximize button. The green light of OS X's traffic-light configuration is Zoom. But it's becoming Full Screen in Yosemite, so that should be closer to what you want out of the button.

As to your second point, that probably has the same cause. On OS X, you Cmd-Tab between applications, not between windows. Within an application, you can Cmd-Backtick between windows, but I don't think there's a navigatable collection of all windows across all applications.

Re: Hydra: A lightweight OS X window manager with a powerful API

#143

Post by euank »

geon wrote: post #137
euank wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not like the "API should be completely transparent" and "API must not be bloated". I personally think APIs exist to hide complexity. They should make sense, they should be usable, but they need not be transparent. Let's have a rather contrived example. In SDL, you can call SDL_Init(). That does a lot of things, and what it does differs on windows, linux, and OSX. I absolutely don't want the more transparent API…

You can't really compare a platform speciffic "window manager" to a multiplatform 3D/2D rendering api.

It was the parent I responded to who said all software should strive for this. My argument is not against the philosophy of the window manager in this instance, but rather against applying it everywhere as the parent seemed to think would be good.

So no, you can't really compare those, I agree, but it was not me who brought in an arbitrary piece of software, but the parent comment.

Re: Hydra: A lightweight OS X window manager with a powerful API

#144

Post by sitkack »

prof_hobart wrote: post #140
colinramsay wrote: post #4

This looks great, but my favourite thing might be the Principles section: > Hydra must be stable. It should never crash > Hydra must be lightweight... never use more than 10 MB of memory > API should be completely transparent > API must not be bloated I think these principles should be the standard to which we all hold our software. Looking forward to testing this out! Edit to say: it would be really great to see som…

I'm not sure I fully agree. For example > Hydra must be stable. It should never crash It's clearly better to have an app that never crashes than an equivalent one that crashes all the time. However, making sure that your app is 100% crash-free isn't a zero cost thing. It takes time and effort to (often, a lot of both) to get to a completely crash-free app, meaning that the app either costs more, takes longer, or has…

For a window manager, crashing is kinda a pain depending how it restarts. Maybe another way to state the implicit goal would be

> Hydra must gracefully and rapidly restart should it crash w/o losing any user data.

And then maybe it could do this be serializing state into a sqlite or redis instance. We always to be careful of muddling the goal and the mechanism.

Re: Hydra: A lightweight OS X window manager with a powerful API

#145

Post by prof_hobart »

sitkack wrote: post #144
prof_hobart wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I fully agree. For example > Hydra must be stable. It should never crash It's clearly better to have an app that never crashes than an equivalent one that crashes all the time. However, making sure that your app is 100% crash-free isn't a zero cost thing. It takes time and effort to (often, a lot of both) to get to a completely crash-free app, meaning that the app either costs more, takes longer, or has…

For a window manager, crashing is kinda a pain depending how it restarts. Maybe another way to state the implicit goal would be > Hydra must gracefully and rapidly restart should it crash w/o losing any user data. And then maybe it could do this be serializing state into a sqlite or redis instance. We always to be careful of muddling the goal and the mechanism.

I agree. Like I say, there are some instances where zero crashes is absolutely the right goal. It may not be absolutely mandatory for a window manager (in the way it would be for a self-driving car), but I can understand why someone would want this as a goal for this app.

My point was more that I don't think it's a sensible standard for all software. I hear this kind of thing quite regularly, usually by non-technical managers, often in a way that seems to suggest they think bugs are either the result of pure sloppiness, incompetence or downright malice.

Re: Hydra: A lightweight OS X window manager with a powerful API

#146

Post by karlb »

jsmeaton wrote: post #132
notduncansmith wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like he might be talking about this: http://projects.jga.me/layouts/ Github repo: https://github.com/jgallen23/layouts I personally find that I don't need anything more than what Spectacle gives me (splitting windows is really it). That said, I love me some Alfred workflows. Alfred is the single best software purchase I've ever made.

I did find that one and tried it out, but it doesn't have multiple monitor support. I'll stick with spectacle for the moment. My alfred workflow library is incredibly sparse at the moment, so if you have any other good resources you'd like to share, that'd be great.

I use Alfred a lot, and I've installed a lot of workflows, but I don't use many of them.

The one I use the most, by far, is "Plain Text Paste," which I use almost every time I paste anything (I use the hotkey CMD-SHIFT-V). It's here: http://cachefly.alfredapp.com/beta/Plain%20Text%20Paste.alfr...

The only other workflows I use regularly are hotkeys to open websites I visit regularly, like our own website and our WordPress log-in control panel.

I'd too would love to hear which workflows other HN readers use a lot.

Re: Hydra: A lightweight OS X window manager with a powerful API

#147

Post by talkingquickly »

karlb wrote: post #146
jsmeaton wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did find that one and tried it out, but it doesn't have multiple monitor support. I'll stick with spectacle for the moment. My alfred workflow library is incredibly sparse at the moment, so if you have any other good resources you'd like to share, that'd be great.

I use Alfred a lot, and I've installed a lot of workflows, but I don't use many of them. The one I use the most, by far, is "Plain Text Paste," which I use almost every time I paste anything (I use the hotkey CMD-SHIFT-V). It's here: http://cachefly.alfredapp.com/beta/Plain%20Text%20Paste.alfr... The only other workflows I use regularly are hotkeys to open websites I visit regularly, like our own website and our Word…

Thanks for sharing that, solves a problem which bugs me on a daily basis!
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