Re: [Usability] Changing the taskbar semantics

[Daniele Levorato <daniele levorato infocamere it>]

On Wed, 2004-09-01 at 00:16, Maurizio Colucci wrote:

Well, it seems a good idea but I have some doubts... (see bellow)

> Why? Because different instances are usually meant to be visible one at a 
> time, whereas child windows of a single instance are meant to be all visible 
> at once.

> 
> Take gimp for example: gimp has a single instance with many windows. The 
> windows are meant to be visible at the same time, so you would never use the 
> taskbar to switch between them.  You would just click inside them. 

This is not always true... I'm thinking about glade, gimp and cinellera
(an appl for video editing)... they have multiple windows and I'm used
to iconify or raise some of them depending on the task I want to do...
just to save Desktop space...
So here I agree with Kalle...
Moreover when an application is ment to have multiple windows that
should all be raised or iconified together then a common design patter
is to use an MDI application design (an application with a inner desktop
and several inner windows... it stands for Multiple Document
Interface)... but if it's very common in Windows and Java applications
it's unusual for GNOME (perhaps there's even a HIG against?)... however
with the new docking system...

> On the other hand, two mozilla windows are not mean to be visible together, so 
> the taskbar is useful to switch between them.
> 
> 2. Gnome should automatically allocate a virtual desktop for gimp. When the 
> user clicks the gimp button on the taskbar, the view will change to that 
> virtual desktop, which REMEMBERS the active window. Voila'.

This is interesting... however It sounds strange for me to allocate a
virtual desktop automatically... but on the other side it's true that
when I use gimp I switch to an (empty) virtual desktop and place all its
windows there... to keep the whole desktop clean, separating different
tasks in different virtual desktops...
... so mainly this could be a good idea... but it seems a way to emulate
the concept of the MDI application: a place separated from the others
where application-specific windows can live.

> 
> What about it?

Perhaps instead of grouping different instances of the same application
(actual behaviour) or creating only one entry for instance (your
proposal) why not grouping windows of the same application instance?
With an example:

Now (grouping off):

 mozilla - www.osnews.com
 mozilla - http://slashdot.org
 gimp - file.png
 gimp - layer, channels and paths
 gimp - Brushed, patterns, gradients

Now (grouping on)

 mozilla - www.osnews.com, http://slashdot.org
 gimp - file.png, layer, channels and paths, Brushed, patterns, radients

Your proposal:

 mozilla - www.osnews.com
 mozilla - http://slashdot.org
 gimp 

My proposal (grouping):

 mozilla - www.osnews.com
 mozilla - http://slashdot.org
 gimp  - file.png, layer, channels and paths, Brushed, ...

So you still have the possibility of choose which gimp window to
raise... while the two mozilla are managed separatelly, and in my
opinion this is correct since a mozilla may have nothing to do with the
other mozilla: different web-pages that are somehow "linked" to each
other can be opened in different tabs of the same mozilla (it's a sort
of not-windowed MDI) so if you open two mozilla it's to perform
different tasks (this is why I turned off grouping)

P.S.
Oops, I really use galeon but I think mozilla is "tabbed" too...



                                    
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