I started to work on DM3 long time ago, but I never manage to compile it on Visual Studio 2003. Since Weird173 is my good friend I constantly poison him that we should do that although he was always saying he doesn't have time for that Yesterday he told me that he is trying to compile it on VS2003 (after I told him that DM2 was download of the day on lifehacker.com). He got the same strange errors when trying to convert the project to VS3 but as we are talking here about the man who keeps compilers in its finger (he even edited standard C functions and compiler to suite his own weird needs) I guess this will be peace of cake for him. The point is that Chynese guy (FlyFlancy) that did massive amount of work in DM2 will not continue to work (he added plugins and many other things) and Weird173 itself is a father of 2 kids one to be just 2 months old, so he could never find time beside regular job for this.
Anyway, DM3 was thought out in our conversations to collect some cool thing we learned so far, most of all from CLCL where engine is separated from GUI, so people would have very small, and very fast window manager. The problem is to create new engine for plugins, switch to C++ from C, and carefuly thought out what will be main application role and what should be left to plugins. All things that are on DM2 wiki wish list are generaly easy to implement - I did more then half in some other projects, Weird too, others are collected goodies from other small utilities but nothing serious.
I would really like to see DM3 alive, but I can not garantie anything to you guys. Weird is convertable person and I can't do it alone - it is big project and system utility witch is beyond of knowledge of single person. Let me inform you that I noticed while looking the code of CLCL that Jap did this app during almost 10 years.... and the one could easily say: what ? its just a clipboard manager... nothing serious...
2CoMiKe
No close is, like I said, peace of a cake.
DM2 have C plugin API. Weird mentioned that he want to change it to C++.
2Squire
What you have in Opera, can not be done in Windows.
That demands that we acctually keep applications open on close, and just unhide them after you notice you need them again. This presents serious problems, since closed applications will still be visible in taskmanager and consume resources. The way to hide them from process list means you have to create rootkit.
Acctually, it can be done with some limitations:
- time limit (apps are kept for, lets say, an hour)
- process list (the apps will still be visible in proc list )
- memory (will consume memory - I guess cool XP function Suspend Process can come handy here in saving system resources but, this is to complex and needs experimenting )
But I doubt that more things will be lost doing this then gained...
I tried too many times to initiate this project. Maybe this is false alarm again...
So, the point is: don't expect anything.
And if DM3 finally comes you will be very happy about it.
Its like Duke Nukem thing...
