unity-design team mailing list archive

[Diego Moya <turingt@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 3 May 2010 12:06, Dylan McCall wrote:
> On the other hand, it may be interesting to explore shading as a
> complete replacement to minimizing, though there's probably something
> else to be done. If my history is right, earlier GUIs did shading
> instead of having a window list to minimize to, but they all moved
> away from it.
> I guess this Gnome Shell mockup I made is fairly relevant to that end,
> though ugly looking:
> http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/DesignerPlayground/WindowTrays

GUIs moved away from shading because it's a crappy design:
- shaded windows are scattered all around the screen
- they have really small height, making them a difficult target
(Fitt's Law and all that)

Recent taskbar redesigns (Mac OS X' dock, Windows 7 taskbar) are using
the NEXTStep design, where all frequent applications have a persisten
square control that centralizes its state information whatever the
windows current status is (minimized, not running).

Task bars and docks are simply better than shading, because they're
bigger and they're always placed at the edge of the screen.