Re: interapplication communication

[Rovanion Luckey <rovanion luckey gmail com>]

Here are two suggestions :)

1) When hovering an app in the app well, highlight the corresponding windows

2) Let this feature auto-enable when the mouse sits for more than a couple of seconds on the same app's icon in the app well

(1) is easy to discover, so the user will probably sit on the app icon when looking for the window he can't find. If he can't find that window quickly, (2) is automatically enabled

I'm sort of bumping my own post, hope this is not a problem.
I made a quick mockup of highlighting windows corresponding to an application when user hovers its icon in the app well:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/998584/highlight_windows_on_icon_hover_mockup.png

As already said, after some seconds of sitting on the same icon this could trigger the actual filtering functionality already implemented (i.e.  filter the window previews to only show windows
that belong to the selected application and display a menu which also allows to set the app as "favourite").
Even if you don't like the "auto-enable filtering" stuff, I think the mockup above would be very helpful since it is of course much easier to discover.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for coding Gnome-Shell!! :)

An idea that came to me while watching your fine mockup was this:
When the application icon is hovered, just as described above, after less than 180ms, which is the limit for when the human mind percepts something as instant, the windows belonging to the application should be highlighted.
But when the application icon is pressed the other windows fade/move away and the windows belonging to that application are scaled up. The user can then easily choose between the windows belonging to the application.

This could be the solution for the many windows user.

-- 
www.twitter.com/Rovanion