Version: (using KDE 4.2.2) Installed from: Mandriva RPMs The new studies has shown that humans brains gets stress chemicals when doing multitasking (parallel working). And the orientation for all tasks decrease dramatically (no matter are you women or man) when compared to work when human concentrate only one task by time. For many users there is a great feature on KWin effects and it is called the "Dim Inactive" what does what it says. But we are not always using only one application by time, we might have multiple monitors and/or two applications side by side. Other window can be the source of information and other what we are working on. Currently we can not use this great KWin plugin then, because the other window gets dimmed down. But, we have had long time features for KWin for situations like this, the "Keep above others" when right clickin window decoration -> Advanced. This allows us to "group" windows to three different layers, "Keep above others" "Keep below others" and the normal. Suggestion is to make the "Keep above others" to act like Active window. Or we need new menu option there to allow window stay clear when using this KWin effect. Like sometimes you have video playing same time as you work, like webcam conversation and you are working sametime, but this means that window where the video is, gets dimmed down and it looks ugly and user can not regonize it so well. Situations like this, there should be easy way to override the dimming when needed and if possible, make it default for that application by the Advanced settings. We have already on advanced Window/Application settings the possiblity to save Window to have different features, like "Accept focus" or "Stay above others". There could be new function to be "Do not Dim when Inactive".
Missusing keep above others for different things is IMHO opinion a bad idea. The "Do not Dim when Inactive" sounds ok to me. I'm thinking of implementing a generic way to get window specif effects settings for KDE 4.4. This could be added easily that way.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 184990 ***