Re: Desktop 'Tape' - New UI Idea

[Trent Lloyd <lathiat bur st>]

Sounds like a cute idea, *adds it to his mile long list of things to
hack on *

On Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 04:15:57PM +1000, Benjamin Rich wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-04-01 at 16:06, Trent Lloyd wrote:
> > This is an interesting idea, however I get the feeling navigating it
> > would be tedious as the places of variosu things would be constantly
> > changing,
> 
> Things would always be changing their positions along the tape, but this
> is also true of normal DE's - you either arrange windows yourself along
> virtua desktops, or you arrange them within one window by constantly
> minimising etc. The idea would be that you either navigate by sliding
> along the tape, or by using the alt+tab style cycle list, which would
> remain pretty static.
> 
> > tho I suppose it would all be relatively right, it would
> > require a fair bit of magic in the window manager for figuring out where
> > to place things like error boxes, preferences etc,
> 
> Any dialogue would come up in front of the application that spawned it,
> just as happens now. I suppose you could set an option to have error
> windows or dialogues appear in front of you no matter where you were on
> the tape (just as it also happens now with some window managers), but I
> think this would be annoying. An idea I had would be to take the Windows
> 'hot taskbar item' thing and put it into practise on the tape pager: if
> an application spawned an error window or somesuch 3 screens down the
> tape, the representation of that window and it's accompanying dialogue
> would flash orange in the pager. Another cool addition might to be have
> a translucent overlay appear meta over whatever you're doing, featuring
> a view of the spawned dialogue somewhere offscreen, and then fade away
> after x seconds, to let you know in an unobtrusive manner of a short
> error, or that something's happened.
> 
> > and how would you
> > handle multiuhead in this case, just make the multihead a larger part of
> > the "tape"?
> 
> Just make the second monitor or whatever the next bit of the tape - I
> mean, this is what happens now in most window managers, the second
> monitor either allows you to double your current screen res and view the
> screen in two physical parts, or it becomes a second desktop
> (-workspace).
> 
> -Ben
> 
> > On Tue, Mar 30, 2004 at 09:43:12PM +1000, Benjamin Rich wrote:
> > > I had an idea for a new UI which I think could be implemented in GNOME
> > > (or any DE for that matter). It seems to me to solve the big problem
> > > associated with graphical 2D DE, namely the onus of arranging and
> > > organising windows being left up to the user via
> > > minimise/maximise/taskbar/etc. and the problems of the very cluttered
> > > nature of 2D environments.
> > > 
> > > I've written it up in a blog, have a look at it at:
> > > http://www.cracksmokingducks.com/?display_article=108053528993243123
> > > 
> > > Tell me what you think =)
> > > 
> > > -Ben
> > > -- 
> > > 
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > desktop-devel-list mailing list
> > > desktop-devel-list gnome org
> > > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
> -- 
> 
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