Anybody else ever tried fast-user-switching as context-switching?
On both Mac and Windows, Fast User Switching is implemented and used as 'Mum Dad and all the kiddies can now get to their stuff quickly'. Am fairly sure that this is a 'Unix-y thing', though cannot remember if I used to play with it in Linux in my abortive crash-and-burn attempt to switch to Linux in 1999. I started out on the Mac trying to use this as context-switching (it's entirely my machine, I can use it in whatever demented geeky way I like). I found that the 2-3 seconds it took to switch between my main user acct and my creative writing acct effectively put me off using it. The other day, when setting up a blog for my 'Dumb Script Kiddy tries to grow up hobbyist-programmer' stuff, I suddenly realised that the reason it took me 2 or 3 seconds to switch to my creative writing acct was probably because Skype was in the startup items and Skype is a resource hog. Because context-switching between my main user acct and my blog acct (with nothing but mail and news loaded) fairly *flew!* This actually started me thinking of going back to the idea with minimal programs loaded. I asked Adrian if he's ever thought of using FUS as context-switching. "No," he said. He has different contexts: work, social, climbing, &c, but the immediacy of having e-mail immediately available pulling everything together and the fact that you don't see the e-mail coming in from the other acct means that trying to organise it the way I was thinking of, wouldn't work. Have been trying it as 'geek fun', but actually fear Adrian may be right, because the 'oops, in wrong context, e-mail this to the other acct' thing is all too easy to achieve. Would you advise me to keep trying it as a playful geeky thing or get in the habit of having everything on my main acct because of this real-world 'notification' issue that Adrian pointed out? Regards, Ruth
Ubuntu has Fast user switching, as does any other distro that uses a recent version of Gnome, KDE may have implemented something similar as well. However it sounds like what you really want to be using is workspaces (I think KDE may call them virtual desktops) These have been with Unix/Linux since pretty much the dawn of the GUI and I think Apple have something called "spaces" which does a similar thing. But essentially you have a number of desktop areas (usually 4 but it can be changed) which you can switch to and from easily using a keystroke or a small applet at the bottom of the screen called a pager, the pager can also show the window outlines of each screen so at a glance you can see which of your desktop areas are empty. I and I suspect many others tend to use this in a very similar way to how you describe, so I will have things like email, irc and skype on one desktop, open office with a half written document on another, perhaps some long running copy operation or download running on a 3rd and so on. Although I must admit I use this a lot less since having dual head (twin screens) because now I just tend to keep all communication related things on one screen (email,chat, skype etc) and the real work on the other. Generally now I only flick desktops to stop the chat etc distracting me. The advantage this has for a single user over fast user switching is that applications can be quickly moved from once desktop to the other without losing their state (generally it is a right click option on the application taskbar or with gnome at least you can actually drag them around using the pager at the bottom of the screen) or it is even possible to set an application to be available by default on all of your desktops (can be handy for things like chat clients) If you have an email client that can put a new message notification on the taskbar or panel then it will be visible on all desktops when a new message comes in Also on any machine made this decade desktop/workspace switching should be as close as it matters to instant. Whereas fast user switching will at the very least dump you back at the login screen so you can select which user you are switching to.
On Wednesday 20 June 2007 08:53, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Ubuntu has Fast user switching, as does any other distro that uses a recent version of Gnome, KDE may have implemented something similar as well.
However it sounds like what you really want to be using is workspaces (I think KDE may call them virtual desktops)
These have been with Unix/Linux since pretty much the dawn of the GUI and I think Apple have something called "spaces" which does a similar thing.
But essentially you have a number of desktop areas (usually 4 but it can be changed) which you can switch to and from easily using a keystroke or a small applet at the bottom of the screen called a pager, the pager can also show the window outlines of each screen so at a glance you can see which of your desktop areas are empty.
I and I suspect many others tend to use this in a very similar way to how you describe, so I will have things like email, irc and skype on one desktop, open office with a half written document on another, perhaps some long running copy operation or download running on a 3rd and so on.
Yes, I certainly do this.
This actually started me thinking of going back to the idea with minimal programs loaded. I asked Adrian if he's ever thought of using FUS as context-switching. "No," he said. He has different contexts: work, social, climbing, &c, but the immediacy of having e-mail immediately available pulling everything together and the fact that you don't see the e-mail coming in from the other acct means that trying to organise it the way I was thinking of, wouldn't work.
Have been trying it as 'geek fun', but actually fear Adrian may be right, because the 'oops, in wrong context, e-mail this to the other acct' thing is all too easy to achieve.
Would you advise me to keep trying it as a playful geeky thing or get in the habit of having everything on my main acct because of this real-world 'notification' issue that Adrian pointed out?
Regards, Ruth
I find that simple virtual desktops (not FUS) work very well for creative writing - moving the distractions off the screen etc. can be very useful. That's bad creative writing, mind you - YMMV. Where I've use a separate account for writing, however, that's really *because* it's slightly less convenient for distractions - ie fast user switching is quite slow, or if I want to sign into my instant messenger or work on that python problem I'm itching to solve, it's not done by absent-mindedly clicking the icon etc. I still use separate accounts for testing desktop apps - they sometimes like to interact with apps or mung data. To keep in touch with my own apps I use su -l runlevelten then run kmail &, amarok &, kopete & and so on and pop them on desktop 3 - I still get my alerts/mails in realtime from my other account, reasonably insulated from the desktop I'm running, and instantly reachable. Most desktop environments seem to let you do stuff like this. Maybe something like that would suit you? Regards. *A different theme for each account doesn't hurt either, I use a nice purple one to differentiate my "real" account.
(bouncebouncebounce!) This list is so cool! If I tried to go to my Mac user-group and ask that, I'd get 0 response within 100 miles, because they are all ghetto Mac users despite the rise of 'switching' in the past few years. They wouldn't know what I was on about, and Adrian says 'Why indeed should they?' He has a point.
However it sounds like what you really want to be using is workspaces (I think KDE may call them virtual desktops)
Aha! Enlightenment moment! One of the big beautiful things Leopard -- the next Real Soon Now (spring...cough cough...July...cough cough...October) big version of OS X to compete with Vista -- has is 'spaces', which is virtual desktops built in. Want! Want!
These have been with Unix/Linux since pretty much the dawn of the GUI and I think Apple have something called "spaces" which does a similar thing. Now you've jogged my memory, I think the situation is that 'spaces' is available as an add-on at the moment, but it'll be a big built-in part of Leopard. And for my 'consumer in Aqua (Mac window manager AFAIK)' 'beginner open-source geek in Darwin (Mac open-source terminal/shell command-line)' mental model, that means, wait until it's in the OS properly and get into it then, because Apple will have done the hard work of making it comfortable and pretty, it'll tie in in a cleaner way, and there will be books and user groups for dumb users involving using Leopard as a dumb user.
(sits on hands...must not buy Leopard...must not buy Leopard...oh that's right, it's not available yet anyway).
I and I suspect many others tend to use this in a very similar way to how you describe, so I will have things like email, irc and skype on one desktop, open office with a half written document on another, perhaps some long running copy operation or download running on a 3rd and so on.
Yes, I certainly do this.
As you say (and as Adrian also says), this means that trying to kludge FUS to work as context-switching is not sensible, but that the behaviour I actually want would work as virtual desktops in a seamless manner, without the 'oops, wrong context' and 'type in the password to flick through accts' thing.
I find that simple virtual desktops (not FUS) work very well for creative writing - moving the distractions off the screen etc. can be very useful. That's bad creative writing, mind you - YMMV.
(gigglegiggle) This would make sense for me.
Where I've use a separate account for writing, however, that's really *because* it's slightly less convenient for distractions - ie fast user switching is quite slow, or if I want to sign into my instant messenger or work on that python problem I'm itching to solve, it's not done by absent-mindedly clicking the icon etc. That would also make sense for me. I know of at least one tiny Mac app which is designed for creative writing in that 'take all the eye candy off the screen' way, so we're obviously not the only people with discipline problems.
I still use separate accounts for testing desktop apps - they sometimes like to interact with apps or mung data. To keep in touch with my own apps I use su -l runlevelten then run kmail &, amarok &, kopete & and so on and pop Ow! Hairy! them on desktop 3 - I still get my alerts/mails in realtime from my other account, reasonably insulated from the desktop I'm running, and instantly reachable. Most desktop environments seem to let you do stuff like this.
Maybe something like that would suit you? Again, because of the consumer *and* geek position I'm starting from, possibly not as well as the 'wait for Leopard' idea, but it would be cool & elegant if I were less of a beginner geek.
*A different theme for each account doesn't hurt either, I use a nice purple one to differentiate my "real" account. That's the way I tried it under XP, which was Infinitely Less Cool: one main mundane-name acct skinned-up to be visible, creative writing on the other acct... The Mac one is More Prettier.
The one thing I can see that I use where different user accts would make sense is that I currently run more than 1 blog for different contexts, but suspect that FUS wouldn't 'buy' me enough usefulness to make that much sense. Regards, Ruth
On 20 Jun 2007, at 10:26 am, Ruth Bygrave wrote:
(bouncebouncebounce!)
This list is so cool! If I tried to go to my Mac user-group and ask that, I'd get 0 response within 100 miles, because they are all ghetto Mac users despite the rise of 'switching' in the past few years. They wouldn't know what I was on about, and Adrian says 'Why indeed should they?' He has a point.
Hey! I'm a Mac user and I know what you're talking about! I agree that most other mac users probably wouldn't know what you are on about - this is why I unsubscribed from the NMUG mailing list! Thanks, Dave -- David Reynolds david@reynoldsfamily.org.uk
(sorry about the length of this; I'll settle down in a few days when I've got over my, 'I had nobody to talk to about all this stuff for the last n years' problem) On 20 Jun 2007, at 10:50, David Reynolds wrote:
On 20 Jun 2007, at 10:26 am, Ruth Bygrave wrote:
(bouncebouncebounce!)
This list is so cool! If I tried to go to my Mac user-group and ask that, I'd get 0 response within 100 miles, because they are all ghetto Mac users despite the rise of 'switching' in the past few years. They wouldn't know what I was on about, and Adrian says 'Why indeed should they?' He has a point.
Hey!
I'm a Mac user and I know what you're talking about!
(giggle) But the 'path' I had to follow to get to somebody like you wasn't as obvious as I originally thought. The local Mac user group for Ipswich is made up of 1) Professional photographers who all know each other very well, 2) Dumb users whose friends and family all have Macs, and 3) the local geek. The local geek was an *astonishing* amount of help pointing me at where to go when I bought a secondhand clamshell ibook on e-bay (as an auxiliary user machine for Applescript script-kiddie stuff and ordinary user stuff and oh I want it to run Panther at least please because then I can have a go at using Darwin) and I didn't realise where to go to get the downloadable one-step-at-a-time don't-pay-any- money updates for putting it up to late-OS 9. (The main problem I had being that I assumed OS 9 had proper Mass Storage drivers, because whenever I see a USB drive it says, Mac OS 9 upwards. But it's more like the Win98 braindead-kludge for USB Mass Storage, in fact. When I one-stage-at-a-time patched it up to 9.2 and updated the firmware (ow! hairy!) (which is where it suddenly started seeing Mass Storage in the way I'd expected to start with) I could then clone Panther from something else and it worked like a charm). The one remaining problem it has is that I *think* the boot-loader is still OS9 and I don't really know how to fix that (or if it's possible or indeed necessary). Since I never intend to run OS9 on it ever-ever, because it would be 0 use for the things I 'assume to be there', there seems to be no point in leaving it with an OS9 boot-loader, but I don't know if there's any sense in trying to fix this...or if it's in fact too low-level to mess with. But the local geek is also 'Mac-ghetto'. A lot of the first Spectacularly Dumb User questions I had to ask were cross-platform things of the I-don't-particularly-like-Windows- but-I've-been-using-it-for-20-years -- how do I deal with the learning-curve? kind. For whatever reason, I never came across a single user in my increasingly-frantic visits to three or four Mac user groups who was coming from where I'm coming from -- wanting to use the Mac as a 'fun non-commercial no-viruses consumer box for playing with', 20 years or so experience of using Windows, likes The Unix Way but is scared of the 'distro soup' and 'you are your own sysadmin' thing in Linux. In the Mac world there is a very frustrating amount of advocacy- zealotry. I can completely get why they feel beleaguered, but it means that somebody like me is a 'bad fit' for Mac user groups, even if I love the whole 'comfort, design and fold-away Unix' idea. I'm fairly sure I'd be able to find people a bit like me in California, but I didn't think this was much use to me... So when I spoke from cross-platform experience, I suspect they saw it as a bit more of an attack than was meant. I kept hearing 'But It Just Works', which was absolutely utterly infuriating from my problem-with-mixed-network printing issue. I have no prayer of removing Adrian from his 'welded to Windows' approach -- and I knew nobody except the Mac-ghetto users at the user groups who used Macs. I don't want to pry anyone away from their platform-of-choice anyway. I just want to be able to gently tweak without being my own sysadmin and building from source: -------geek joke------------ "Make" "Shan't" "Make --please" "Not a chance." "Compile --and try to check your own dependencies" "Are you root? Well are you root then? Am I bovvered then? Does my prompt look bovvered?" -------/geek joke (referencing Catherine Tate's 'bored teenager' sketch) This is the first venue where I've felt able to talk about any of this...
I agree that most other mac users probably wouldn't know what you are on about - this is why I unsubscribed from the NMUG mailing list! I'll stay subscribed to it for Dumb User questions, for which it's quite good.
Regards, Ruth
On 6/20/07, Ruth Bygrave <rbygrave@ntlworld.com> wrote:
Where I've use a separate account for writing, however, that's really *because* it's slightly less convenient for distractions - ie fast user switching is quite slow, or if I want to sign into my instant messenger or work on that python problem I'm itching to solve, it's not done by absent-mindedly clicking the icon etc. That would also make sense for me. I know of at least one tiny Mac app which is designed for creative writing in that 'take all the eye candy off the screen' way, so we're obviously not the only people with discipline problems.
Ha ha ha! Douglas Adams (author, famous Mac user) used to complain about that too. Can you hear those deadlines WHOOSH past? Tim.
Ha ha ha! Douglas Adams (author, famous Mac user) used to complain about that too. Can you hear those deadlines WHOOSH past?
yep! 'I love deadlines' the same way he did. (Incidentally, I know there are intelligent Mac users: Stephen Fry is one (bet he'll be one of the first users to get a new box with Leopard -- he said on, Douglas Adams was one, the people doing the O'Reilly Mac-dev stuff are Ferociously Intelligent -- it's just that at the user-groups I met Mac-ghetto-all-the-way people and none of them could quite get where I was coming from, even if they tried) Regards, (...valiantly trying to rein in own desire to talk too much...) Ruth
I still use separate accounts for testing desktop apps - they sometimes like to interact with apps or mung data. To keep in touch with my own apps I use su -l runlevelten then run kmail &, amarok &, kopete & and so on and pop
Ow! Hairy!
Haha, possibly - it's not that bad though - and I bet you could turn the idea into an icon/launcher of some sort on OS X. As for your issue, do you not have more than one browser app installed? I find using a different browser for each account useful in such situations, although that may be less convenient if you don't have second/third browsers installed. On Wednesday 20 June 2007 12:45, Ruth Bygrave wrote:
Ha ha ha! Douglas Adams (author, famous Mac user) used to complain about that too. Can you hear those deadlines WHOOSH past?
yep! 'I love deadlines' the same way he did. (Incidentally, I know there are intelligent Mac users: Stephen Fry is one (bet he'll be one of the first users to get a new box with Leopard -- he said on, Douglas Adams was one, the people doing the O'Reilly Mac-dev stuff are Ferociously Intelligent
*coughlinuscough* -- There are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary, and those who don't.
participants (5)
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David Reynolds -
Ruth Bygrave -
Ten -
Tim Green -
Wayne Stallwood