Exposé looks interesting

[Martin Grimme <martin pycage de>]

Hi,

Apple's Panther comes with a cool feature called Exposé.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/expose/

It would be great to see something similar in GNOME one day,
maybe as part of metacity or as a separate application.
It's surely hard to implement the smooth animations, but it
should be possible to get some of the features working on X11.

What do you think?


An implementation might look like this:
- have a hidden fullscreen Exposé window
- make a snapshot of every window when it loses focus
- a mouse gesture or key stroke arranges the window snapshots on
  the Exposé window and brings it to front and makes it visible
- using the mouse or the keyboard, the user can select a window
  which gets hilighted then and its title gets displayed centered
  on the screen
- after selecting a window, that window gets focus and comes to
  front, while the Exposé window hides again (smoot fade out?)

OK, this would eat some memory, but most people have memory.
Users with less memory may switch the feature off or run it without
window snapshots (display the icons instead of snapshots then).



Bye, Martin