Shelf workspace: an alternative way of hiding windows?

[coulamac <aigiskos yahoo com>]

Perhaps an alternative way to hide windows is to have a dedicated "shelf" workspace for windows to be placed for later use.  Rather than a minimize button, there could be a little shelf icon button on the window's title bar.

_______________________________________________________
|[shelf]                                             [x]|
|_______________________________________________________|

When you hit the shelf button, the window would be transferred from the current workspace to the shelf workspace, which would be visible from the Activities overlay view.  (You might want to give the shelf workspace a different background, like a wooden bookshelf picture, to differentiate it from the other workspaces.)

In addition, you might want to offer a visible shortcut for users to quickly get back a window placed in the shelf workspace.  A shelf icon button on the panel next to the Activities button could bring up an overlay view of the shelf workspace only, and the user could bring back one or more shelved windows to the current workspace just by clicking on the windows in the shelf overlay view.

Panel:

_________________________________________________________
[Activities][shelf][current app menu]                    
_________________________________________________________


To help the user track where the window went, the window could animate to the shelf button before disappearing from the screen.

The user could also get the shelved window by clicking on the Activities button and moving a shelved window from the self workspace to one of the other workspaces.

This way, we would still be working within the workspace paradigm, but users would have a quicker way to hide and unhide their windows than just using the Activities view.

Thanks for reading.

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