Re: Loss of controllable icons that represent open applications

[Ryan McDougall <NQG24419 nifty com>]

On Mon, 2005-21-03 at 13:09 -0800, Andre Gaytan wrote:
> Gnome Community,
> 
> Sun is currently using the Gnome desktop in our Java Desktop.  Most employee's
> are being "encouraged" to use this desktop.
> 
> However the loss of being able to locate icons that represent open applications
> is a huge loss on JDS at Sun.  CDE user's have grown accustomed to organizing
> their desktop for quick reference of open applications.  So ...
> 

Are you describing the old Unixy methods of minimizing an open window
into an icon that rests on the user's desktop? Currently we minimize
windows to a panel applet currently called "Window List", or optionally
a Mac-style applet called "Window Selector".

I believe minimizing to icons is not done because one might confuse a
window icon with a file or launcher icon, however that is just an
educated guess on my part.

The best method for managing windows, by far, has to be MacOS X's expose
functionality. And despite the fact that you make a good case for the
spatial-memory feature of minimize to icon, we are far more likely to
see something like that on GNOME than we are to see the return of
minimize to icons.

> Could someone please let me know who to direct this request?

Bugzilla is where you put feature requests, but what you're asking for
is a pretty broad, cross module behaviour change that I think will see
resistance due to questionable benefit (when going forward with
something new is a better idea than backwards with minimize to icon). So
you really need to start working on getting buy-in from a number of
places if you want things to change, probably the window manager and
Nautilus (it draws the desktop/icons) people to start with.

You can discuss in detail the user interface aspects in
usability gnome org, but discussion there can often become
pie-in-the-sky if no one wants to actually implement ideas with code.

You can try desktop-devel-list, but before you go there you need to have
your case made pretty solidly, and you homework well done.

> Thank you,
> 
> Andre
> 

Hope that helps explain a couple things.

Cheers,
Ryan