Why are windows placed in columns?

[Florian Kuhnt <florian kuhnt gmx de>]

Hello!

Since end of 2009 I have been watching the development of the
gnome-shell. It has made large progress and a lot of features have
appeared that I haven't ever dreamed of. A few weeks ago I switched to
the shell on my surfing&socialising notebook and I very like it.
Thanks for your work!


The only thing I haven't ever understood:

Why are windows in the overview placed in columns?

I haven't found reasons for this on the design pages and only very few
discussions in that direction. Is there an official opinion? Wouldn't
it be better to have a more native positioning and sizing of the
windows?


Recently I started using my own patched version of workspace.js that I
also attached to this bug:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=615378

The behaviour is not yet perfect and the code isn't very nice as well.
But it gives already a nice impression how it could be in a future
implementation.


Is there interest for further work in that direction?

If so, could someone give me some hints for using better library
functions and so on? (I just hacked a bit in the code and used
lookingglass for logmessages since I couldn't find a real howto or
documentation how to construct a nice development environment (IDE)
for gnome-shell). Help would be nice!


Best Regards,

Florian