[Ayatana] Fwd: Re: List windows on hover

[Matt Richardson <m.richardson.1990@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 Perhaps it could show the scale preview of the windows (as currently shown on double click) when hovering for half a second.

Personally I find the window previews on Windows 7 to be too small.
They obviously felt this too as they introduced the feature where if you hover over a window preview, that window is brought to the front, but not selected.
Again, it's only my opinion, but I find this feature (showing the window but not selecting it) to be very annoying, as I often hover over the window preview, and then try to click something on the window, only to have it drop back behind the currently active window.

I really like the way the window previews work on double click, large enough to distinguish from each other and easily clickable.
I would suggest the following behaviour:

1) On clicking the launcher icon, if the application does not have focus, the last active window is selected, else, the scale preview is shown
2) When hovering over the launcher icon the scale preview is shown (as with double click now)

I am aware that displaying these previews probably requires some quantity of graphics processing so I think that a half second delay on showing the scale preview would be a good idea.
This would be long enough to distinguish between scanning the launcher and hovering, but not long enough to make the system feel slow.

Matt

On 20/11/11 20:38, Luiz Felipe Talvik wrote:

Recently I've done task in which I needed to refer to several spreadsheets and other documents. In Unity, changing between the open documents was quite difficult, I had to think to much to find a window and my focus was constantly shifting from the main task.

The Launcher is quite agnostic to multiple window applications, so Unity relies to much on the window manager for this. I found it quite inferior to the more traditional task bar for this type of workflow. I've ended up running another task bar(tint2) to get my work done.

When I hover an icon in the Launcher it just shows a tooltip with the application name. I think it would be better if on hover it also listed the window's titles, clicking on an item would bring up only the referred window. This wouldn't affect most of the current behavior.

http://ubuntuone.com/1BAZfzHSzpHYCtfW5neY4U

http://ubuntuone.com/02CEbphUkex7mRqSdL5Yx7

I know Unity is aiming for simplicity, and is being inspired by newer OSes like android and iOS. But the work that people need to accomplish on the desktop is far more complex than what one does on a mobile.

regards,

Talvik

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