I am still tinkering with implementing exercises. My ideas are as follows:
1) Exercises shall be displayed within the restbreak window, like this:

+-------------------------+
| i This is yourrestbreak |
+--------+----------------+
| Image  | Exercise info  |
|        | bla bla        |
+--------+----------------+
| [========== RB progress |
+-------------------------+

After displaying a couple of exercises, the image & exercises info row shall be
removed, resulting in the RB window layout we have now.

2) Images. I am still fumbling with this puppet:
http://dotsphinx.dyndns.org/~pennersr/exercises.jpg
Ideas:
- spheres are colored red in problem areas, green when normal.
- for hand exercises, a similar abstract hand (spheres + cylinders) shall be made
- each exercise consists of an animated gif, or multi-frame png, consisting of 2-3
frames.

3) Add a new context menu item: "Exercises", which opens a window
similar (but not identical) to the RB window.

4) Exercises shall be stored on disk like this:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/workrave/workrave/sounds/workrave.soundlist?rev=1.2&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup
One could use XML for this.. but that would add another big dependency. filesize++.

Anyone care to comment?

E.g. ad 1), Workpace does this differently, it displays exercises
in a separate window. Is that desirable?

Ad 1:
The wp restbreak window contains an image, some descriptive text, an a progress
bar indicating the progress of this particular exercise. Integrating all that
information into the restbreak window may make it a bit complicated. And you run
into problems if you want to present exercises without taking a restbreak (ad
3). Then again, If it could be integrated and still look relatively simple, then
this would be a nice approach

Ad 2:
wp exercises consist of at most two frames. wp tries to get the timing right.
i.e. if you need to do a particular stretch for 15 seconds and then relax for 5,
then it will show one frame for 15 seconds, and one for 5. I really like that,
and I think it is hard to accomplish with animated gif.

How will your puppet look in 640x480x256 ??

> And you run into problems if you want to present exercises without taking a 
> restbreak

No, I'll simply create an exercises widget, which can be embedded into the RB
window and an exercises window.

> I think it is hard to accomplish with animated gif.

Not necessarily, because you can specify frame timing information in a gif. 
It's just that GIFs are evil (http://burnallgifs.org/), and we better use PNG or
individual images.

> How will your puppet look in 640x480x256 ??

Umm, smaller? What's the nature of your question...

> No, I'll simply create an exercises widget, which can be embedded into the RB
> window and an exercises window.

Ah... but consistency....
All exercises windows should look the same ;-)

> Not necessarily, because you can specify frame timing information in a gif. 
> It's just that GIFs are evil (http://burnallgifs.org/), and we better use PNG or
> individual images.

Uh... right...
Anyway, I like wps frame timing stuff

> > How will your puppet look in 640x480x256 ??
> 
> Umm, smaller? What's the nature of your question...

Smaller? That's somewhat unexpected.

Given any image (of fixed size and colordepth), I'm wondering if it
will also be displayed correctly on monitors with limited resolution
or colordepth. At any rate, I'd expect them be larger :-)

For example: The dialog used to change screen resolution on W95 is too
large to be entirely displayed on a 640x480 screen. Hence it does take
some effort to increase the resolution :-)

> Ah... but consistency....
> All exercises windows should look the same ;-)

Luckily, there is only one exercise window. Apart from that, there is also one
restbreak window which happens to show an exercise as well. 

Do you _really_ find the two Workpace windows (exercises+rb window) layered on
top of each other visually appealing?

And, speaking of consistency. How about "All Nautilus/Explorer windows should
look the same". Of course not, they are just a shell embedding other components.
The restbreak is a shell embedding the exercises...

> [...concerns about small-screen displays...]

I agree, the restbreak window should not exceed 640x480. However, old machines
are (*unfortunately*) not supported anyway, so this does not help much. Workrave
is just too resource unfriendly, which is something that will not go away
without displeasing Rob.

Hey, you asked for comments.

If wp would cram all info that is currently in the restbeak and exercises window
into one window, it would probably be to crowded, too complex (not to mention
too large)

They apparently made a trade-off and I think the result is statisfactory. All I
ask of you is to make the same trade off.

I may try to run workrave, using a low-resource machine as an X-server only.

As for the rest, I'll shut up already... :-)

Okay, exercises are starting to get in shape now... could everyone please build
with --enable-exercises and give me some feedback? Thanks.

I think exercises have reached enough critical mask to close down this bug...