Most work on my PhD thesis is done and I like to provide you with the results from our research at Uni Auckland on Stack & Tile. At BeGeistert 023 (October 2010) I conducted a user evaluation of Stack & Tile to answer the question whether stacking and tiling within an overlapping window manager bring any benefits to the user. At the end of last year I used a web survey to investigate if and how Stack & Tile is used by actual users.
Hi,
as part of my PhD thesis at the Uni Auckland I would like to do a web survey about Stack & Tile.
Stack & Tile (S&T) is an extension of the window manager used in HAIKU. S&T allows the user to stack windows on top of one other or tile windows beside each other.
With the questionnaire we would like to gather some information about how and how often people are using S&T.
Recently I spend some time to develop ALE the Auckland Layout Editor and now it’s getting time to release a first testing version! ALE is a tool for developers to create GUIs. These GUIs can then be loaded from an application. This first version is still very basic and I hope I can get some feedback what can be improved and which features are most needed. It mainly focus on layout creation and less on editing view properties.
Just saw on Haikuware that there is another GUI for setting a decorator. First, I’m happy that people are actually using this “hidden” functionality to write custom applications. However, after Alpha 3 I changed the decorator API which broke all other decorators.
The reason for that is that the stacking feature of Stack and Tile is now integrated into the decorator. In other words all decorators have to support Stack and Tile now!
Having started my PhD at the University of Auckland two years ago I think it’s time to provide a brief overview for the Haiku community about what I am doing here. Since a complete overview would result in a pretty big post I intend to split it into multiple smaller posts. Fingers crossed that I remain motivated enough to keep writing :).
The topic of my PhD is “User Interface Customization” and covers three aspects.
