Re: Desktop 'Tape' - New UI Idea

[Benjamin Rich <benxor cracksmokingducks com>]

On Thu, 2004-04-01 at 16:06, Trent Lloyd wrote:
> This is an interesting idea, however I get the feeling navigating it
> would be tedious as the places of variosu things would be constantly
> changing,

Things would always be changing their positions along the tape, but this
is also true of normal DE's - you either arrange windows yourself along
virtua desktops, or you arrange them within one window by constantly
minimising etc. The idea would be that you either navigate by sliding
along the tape, or by using the alt+tab style cycle list, which would
remain pretty static.

> tho I suppose it would all be relatively right, it would
> require a fair bit of magic in the window manager for figuring out where
> to place things like error boxes, preferences etc,

Any dialogue would come up in front of the application that spawned it,
just as happens now. I suppose you could set an option to have error
windows or dialogues appear in front of you no matter where you were on
the tape (just as it also happens now with some window managers), but I
think this would be annoying. An idea I had would be to take the Windows
'hot taskbar item' thing and put it into practise on the tape pager: if
an application spawned an error window or somesuch 3 screens down the
tape, the representation of that window and it's accompanying dialogue
would flash orange in the pager. Another cool addition might to be have
a translucent overlay appear meta over whatever you're doing, featuring
a view of the spawned dialogue somewhere offscreen, and then fade away
after x seconds, to let you know in an unobtrusive manner of a short
error, or that something's happened.

> and how would you
> handle multiuhead in this case, just make the multihead a larger part of
> the "tape"?

Just make the second monitor or whatever the next bit of the tape - I
mean, this is what happens now in most window managers, the second
monitor either allows you to double your current screen res and view the
screen in two physical parts, or it becomes a second desktop
(-workspace).

-Ben

> On Tue, Mar 30, 2004 at 09:43:12PM +1000, Benjamin Rich wrote:
> > I had an idea for a new UI which I think could be implemented in GNOME
> > (or any DE for that matter). It seems to me to solve the big problem
> > associated with graphical 2D DE, namely the onus of arranging and
> > organising windows being left up to the user via
> > minimise/maximise/taskbar/etc. and the problems of the very cluttered
> > nature of 2D environments.
> > 
> > I've written it up in a blog, have a look at it at:
> > http://www.cracksmokingducks.com/?display_article=108053528993243123
> > 
> > Tell me what you think =)
> > 
> > -Ben
> > -- 
> > 
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