usableDesktop

[Richmond]

I am beginning to hate

get the screenRect

because, while it lets us know how large somebody's screen resolution is,
it does NOT tell us what "GUI furniture" they have lying around such as
taskbars, menubars, docks and so on.

Imagine, if you will, the 2 following scenarios:

1. Windows 7 with a 'small icons' taskbar situated at the TOP of the 
desktop, and an ObjectDock
     set at 64 pixels positioned at the bottom of the screen.

2. Elementary OS  [ http://elementaryos.org/journal/when-its-ready ] 
(which, by-ther-way, is, at least
     at the moment, rubbish) with NO menubar, NO taskbar, and everything 
accessed via
     a 64 pixel avant window navigator dock positioned at the bottom of 
the screen.

systemVersion is going to tell me the OS, and nothing else.

screenRect is going to include all that GUI furniture (menubars, 
taskbars, docks) within the pair
                    of numbers it will give me.

Now, how about having some sort of more useful pair of numbers that 
allows us to make sure that our
standalones can avoid all those things.

On Mac OS 10 (all versions) life is, frankly, dead easy (although rather 
boring) as the menubar is
always (????) at the top of the screen and it is always 44 pixels fat. 
Mind you, the Dock at the
bottom of the screen may be present (at differing fatnesses), playing 
peek-a-boo, or absent.

My fantasy runs like this:

on openStack
    get usableDesktop
end openStack

but I have a horrible feeling that it will remain a fantasy as 
cyberspace is filled to bursting
with lots and lots of window managers (imagine coping with Windows XP 
running KDE as a window manager) and lots and lots of docks.

Richmond.