Re: [Usability] spatial desktop

["brian muhumuza" <brian muhumuza gmail com>]

According to what i understand about spatialness, is about a single
object being in one place the way it was when we left it there. 

I think this is hard to do currently because the difference between files/documents and apps is fuzzy. 

Almost all the time, we open an app and a new document is there, we
open gedit/abiword/gnumeric/etc and a new document is already there.
This makes it hard to point out what the object is, is it the app or
the file?? Is a window an application or the document???

However, we can start some where. In nautilus to be exact. 
In spatial nautilus, when we open a folder, it gets shaded/greyed and
we cannot open it again. This should be the case for files. We open a
file, it gets shaded/greyed and we cannot open it twice. 

But then again a shaded/greyed icon still represents the file object
and we would still have two objects for the same file; an open window
and a shaded/greyed icon. And because of this, we hit a wall when we
are allowed to move the shaded/grayed icon to somewhere else. What i'm
saying is we shouldn't be able to move the shaded/greyed when in this
state.

After doing this for nautilus, we go ahead to do it everywhere like in
the control center, etc. However, we hit a wall when we try to do this
for application launchers which would typically allow us to open many
windows i.e. firefox. So launchers break the spatial philosophy.

Thinking about breaking the spatial philosophy, even the task bar
breaks spatial philosopy. What do task bar entries represent, the app
open or the document open. If it's the document, that's 3 objects
(shaded icon, window, and taskbar entry), if it's the app that's 2/3
objects (launcher, window and taskbar entry).

Happy day

------------
Brian