My comments below are written from the perspective of Unity, because
(a) that's what I'm running, and (b) that's where our design
conversations can have the most immediate impact.
On 16/05/10 15:30, Sense Hofstede wrote:
An application bucket where you can dump applications you
don't want to take space sounds like a neat idea. The applications
could stay in there, even when they're running and have got the focus
-- this could be indicated by placing the focus triangle at the bucket
icon (the bucket icon is distinct from application by a different
background colour or a border around its icon (what icon?)).
The Unity Launcher shows running applications.
If the app fits one of the Category Indicators, like the Messaging Menu
or Sound Menu, it may also show as "running" there, with the same
visualization (currently, a little triangle).
I think it's reasonable to have apps which *don't* show in the
Launcher, but are still running. I'd like to hear from MPT, cc'd, on
the subject.
I'm not sure if it's worth making that an explicit configuration option
(those cost a knuckle at least, remember ;-)). I've seen spec's from
MPT where that behavior is sometimes implicit (you close a music player
window, and it keeps running in the background
if a song was playing
but not otherwise), but I'm a bit uncomfortable with that myself,
because I'm not sure what the IM analogy would be.
But I would object to a
third catch-all place where windows
might "sometimes go", which is how I interpret your "application
bucket". The launcher is basically that bucket already, and Category
Indicators should suffice for things which are running but which we
consider more like "services" than applications; we don't need a third
place as well.
Mark