1. Provides feed back while loading X applications Xalf can reliably detect if newly mapped windows are belonging to a particular launched application. It does this by overloading the Xlib function XMapWindow with a version that signals the tracking xalf process. Xalf provides (currently) four different types as "indicators", described below. Invisible Window: Xalf creates an invisible window, to be used in conjunction with a standard task pager like Gnomes tasklist_applet or the KDE Taskbar. The name of the window is the application name within parenthesis. The small window icon (KWM_WIN_ICON) is set to a small hourglass. This indicator is default. Splash screen: An generic splashscreen is displayed during application launch. Mouse cursor change: Xalf adds an hourglass symbol to the mousecursor for the root window and the Gnome panel. Note that the cursor is not changed for the Gnome foot-menu windows. Animated star: An animated indicator resembling the look of that on SGI/Irix machines (a kind of yellow star blinking while loading a program). From Debian 3.0r0 APT