Re: Some thoughts about window management

[Alex Graveley <alex beatniksoftware com>]

The Gaim "panel applet" (really a notification tray icon) obviously goes 
away in this case.

OSX's dock items have custom menus.  Some apps use it, some do not.  It 
can be quite useful when they do... allowing access to common actions 
when the app's window is minimized or obscured.  The key is that there 
is no action accessible only from the dock menu, and not also from the 
app's main UI.

-Alex

Matthew Thomas wrote:
> Yaron Tausky wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 2005-06-20 at 17:00 +0300, Yaron Tausky wrote:
> >
> > > 1. The context menu for tasks in the taskbar is not very helpful. Most
> > > of the functions it offers are rarely used (rollup, anyone?), even
> > > though it's the best place to put the most used ones, since it's always
> > > accessible (as the panel is always visible). I suggest that some sort of
> > > API would be implemented to allow the application developers to add
> > > app-specific functions to that menu, and put all the window management
> > > stuff under a "Window management" submenu.
> >
> > ...
> > http://www.geocities.com/decaycell/mockup.png
>
>
> The main problem with this is that most programs would not add extra
> items to their menu, either because they didn't need to, or because
> their developers didn't get around to it because it was a near-invisible
> feature. So in most cases, you'd have a menu where *most* of its items
> (the window management items) were in a submenu, which would be very
> strange.
>
> And with the Gaim example you show, there's the problem that it's
> duplicating items that are already in the panel applet menu. If your
> mouse pointer is in the middle of the screen, which do you go for -- the
> panel applet menu, or the window list menu? Dither, dither ...
>
> Also, how would this work with the "Window Grouping" preferences?
>
> I agree on getting rid of the "Roll Up" item, though. The use case for
> rolling up is to temporarily get a window out of the way so you can see
> what's behind it. If you're near the window list, minimizing and
> restoring does the same thing, much more quickly, so there's no point in
> having Roll Up in the menu.