On Apr 7, 2004, at 1:40 AM, Liam R. E. Quin wrote:
On Tue, 2004-04-06 at 23:19, Ryan McDougall wrote:"Accidental stickings" are definitely a bad thing, and any design should avoid them; I'm just saying they don't directly impede usability (ie: itdoesn't stop you from using your email).Maybe you want a little pot full of needles you can use to sew windows together, just as an older desktop interface had pushpins you could use to keep windows or menus "pinned" to the desktop, a powerful feature when pervasive. So that leads me to wonder if you could make groups of things a pervasive idea gnomishly. I've used a window manager that let you move groups of windows around at the same time - you selected multiple windows by shift-clicking on the titles and then could drag or minimise them all at once. It was a frequently asked question why this happened, as people did it sometimes by mistake. People didn't have the concept of "selected window" different from "window with focus, active window", so although there was some visual feedback, people didn't know how to interpret it.
Funny, I was thinking about the objectification of windows just last night!
My Spring application, a browser-desktop hybrid (OS X), has a feature, Folder-less Groups, that allows users to see and work with grouped items as though they weren't. There's a description and video (QT, sorry!) here,
http://www.usercreations.com/weblog/2004/01/20.html#a429 [1]The interaction design for the feature is very v1'ish, but it might serve as an inspiration for further work.
A major issue in pervasive "folder-less" grouping is that for certain types of items, a group name may be required. How and possibly when to prompt for and display group names presents a large challenge!
Taking this further, I've considered in the past the idea of jigsaw-puzzle style interlocks near the top left and right of each window, so it's obvious you can lock windows together. I think if you make something visually obvious (when it's a primarily visual thing like window locations) people may react differently than if it's subtle and hard to understand :-)
Great thinking!
Liam (rambling slightly, sorry)
Robb (nearly always rambling!)[1] You can peruse the entire series beginning here and working backwards from here,
http://www.usercreations.com/weblog/2004/02/07.html#a481
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