Re: minimize-to-tile would make for a more seamless experience

[Andreas Wallberg <andreas wallberg gmail com>]

I always liked how Window Maker and others minimized windows to small
boxes. IMHO, it sounds like it would fit the Gnome Shell workflow very
well indeed and integrate with the overview nicely. Good idea!

Best regards,
Andreas

On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 8:07 AM, Christian Jäger
<christian jaeger rub de> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> thanks for bringing us gnome-shell! I'm quite enjoying it right now
> thanks to the GNOME:factory repository in the openSUSE build-service.
> Still, I could just imagine how it could be even better.... ^_- Please
> listen to a small suggestion that I think would make daily use an even
> smoother experience:
>
> ATM I find myself switching to activities overview  very often just to
> find a minimized (or obscured) window. As others have pointed out, this
> has two disadvantages:
>
> 1. Mouse-travel: To go all the way up to the top-left corner admittedly
> quickly  becomes second-nature; still I don't really think it's an
> improvement in usability over the previous state of things (GNOME 2's
> panel).
>
> 2. Window-management on the active desktop: While on the active desktop,
> windows now behave as they have before; i.e. they overlap and obscure
> each other. The difference to GNOME 2 is that ATM there is no way to
> tell whether a window has actually been closed or is only obscured by
> another window or minimized. This makes  me often face the decision
> whether I should try to move windows around on the active desktop in
> order to try and look for a 'lost' window or whether I should just
> switch to activities overview.
>
> My idea would be to relief users of that dilemma by 'seaming together'
> the management of opened windows on the active desktop and switching to
> the activities overview. The idea is, if you minimize windows, they
> would not 'disappear' but shrink to a tile on the desktop to look
> exactly like they would in the activities overview.
>
> If the active desktop behaved like that, most inactivce windows could be
> easily found by moving the active windows a bit to the side. Minimizing
> all windows would be tantamount to switching to the activitie overview,
> so in my opinion it should do just that: minimizing all windows should
> be just another way of triggering the activities overview. So it would
> provide an intuitive way to the overview for users who have too many
> windows open to easily find the obscured one by moving the active window
> aside.
>
> Minimizing windows to desktop tiles would not only solve the 2 problems
> outlined above but also represent an improvement in two more respects:
>
> 1. It would effectively replace the old 'desktop' metaphor with the
> activities overview.
>
> 2. It would seamlessly integrate window-management on the active desktop
> with the wholly new gnome-shell experience we see in the activities
> overview.
>
>
> I'd be more than happy if you liked the idea.
>
> Again, gnome-shell already is the best new desktop-environment I've
> seen, and I'd also prefer it over GNOME 2 just the way it is.
>
> Greets,
> Chris
>
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