Re: [Usability] Behavior of Minimizing Windows Violates Mental Model

[Justin Edwards <justin telelanguage com>]

I think one option would be to add an icon at the top bar of the minimized application. My vote is to bring back an 'option' for task bar, even if it's not a gnome panel. The option to have a taskbar vs activity menu would be good.  Both could be auto hidden.

Justin Edwards
TeleLanguage Inc.
Network Administrator

On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 6:50 PM, frederik nnaji gmail com <frederik nnaji gmail com> wrote:

On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 17:30, Allan Caeg <allancaeg ubuntu com> wrote:

That's the right term. It feels odd. Nice to know I'm not alone. 

hell you're not ;)

 

It's probably because we have a clear perception of how minimizing feels and this new way of minimizing doesn't follow the conventions.

It feels like a transitional solution towards getting rid of "minimize to window list" entirely.

 

It can be best to explore solutions to not break the firm mental model in minimizing while incorporating Shell's innovations.

The common denominator of all symbolic interfaces, if i'm not totally mistaken, is that a symbol ALWAYS refers to its corresponding object.

A thumbnail or an icon are symbols that points to files or actual applications.

A thumbnail or a symbolic icon can hence be regarded as the minimized representation of those otherwise not so small objects.

I see "minimize" essentially as the opposite to "open" or "enlarge", it is related to closing the detailed view of a content object, and it more specifically stands for making stuff minimal in its visual appearance.

The question of how to implement this shrinking/scaling/symbolizing in the modern desktop becomes problematic, once we cling stubbornly to associating this action with the concept of "window".

Associating "minimize", "maximize" and "close" with content itself, we no longer have problems understanding how these operations are best presented visually..

I like OS X's approach, where minimized windows are sucked into the dock with the "genie effect" then it will have it's own icon there (screenshot).

this addresses windows. The only case in which "window" should be relevant should be when the system doesn't have a native way of symbolizing the focused content.

In that case, the system should ask the application hosting the document/content to provide for a generic symbol that will refer visually to the respective object(document/content)..

I hope this is somewhere close to helpful..

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