Re: Taskbars and application integration.

[Samuel Arthur Wright Illingworth <mazz0 mazz0 com>]

Well, the bluntest answer here is that if a window isn't important to
what you are doing right now, it's good that you forgot it!

 

Not being the active window doesn't mean it's not important to what I'm doing right now.  Perhaps everything you guys use your computer for can be done using a single window, but mine can't.  What if I'm compiling a presentation?  I'd need the presentation itself in OOo, I might need a couple of reports in PDFs, a spreadsheet or eight, and at least one browser window, and these ARE ALL IMPORTANT TO WHAT I'M DOING RIGHT NOW.

If I have a lot of sources of information, or a lot of subtasks to accomplish the job, it gets tricky to remember all of them myself.  Having them listed, even in an icon only way which is how I work now (thumbnails are either too small to be useful or too big wasting space, and text wastes space too, in my experience), is a major memory aid, and consequently a productivity aid.  A visual indication of what you've got going on is just such an important mental thing.  It's hard to explain, but it's important.

 

-- 
Sam Illingworth