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

["Christian Jäger" <christian jaeger rub de>]

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