Re: Desktop/Window alignment (spatial?)

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Tue, 2004-03-02 at 00:44, Jerry Haltom wrote:
> Seems that for NOW the easiest thing to do, to make the problem
> bearable, is to position the windows by default down Y and left X of
> their parent window. And set the default position of the root windows to
> the top/right of the screen.

That's actually pretty much the recommendation that came out of our JDS
usability report too.  Unfortunately it probably wouldn't work quite so
well for JDS as it would for GNOME 2.6 (applications menu at the top of
the screen), because it means initially putting the menubar of
applications opened from our Launch menu (in the bottom left of the
screen) about as far away from the pointer as they could possibly be :/ 
Which is why I suggested using the centre of the screen by default
instead; it just opens things that bit closer than the top right of the
screen, for most users' default main menu positions.

(FWIW window cascading also just looks more untidy to me when you do it
from right-to-left, especially if your window titles are left-aligned in
the title bar... that's not the end of the world, though.)

Heck, maybe we just need to put an invisible panel over the desktop
icons so the window manager never places any darn windows over them, or
scrap desktop icons and move them to an auto-hiding side panel so you
can always get at them whatever your other windows are doing :P

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            Java Desktop System Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems