unity-design team mailing list archive

[Conscious User <conscioususer@xxxxxxx>]

Le samedi 26 mars 2011 à 19:11 +0000, Luke Benstead a écrit :
> On 23 March 2011 14:13, Bilal Akhtar <bilalakhtar@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > The current way of switching between windows of the same app is
> > time-consuming. The launcher icon has to be clicked twice for the
> > 'spread' compiz view to get activated, and then we switch between windows.
> >
> > Alongside this, it would be good to have a numbered list of running
> > windows of an app, in its launcher icon's quicklist. This list would be
> > separated from the rest of the quicklist items by a separator line. An
> > example of such an implementation is in Gnome-Shell.
> 
> I agree, I think switching windows in Unity is cumbersome and
> frustrating. Windows 7 actually gets this right IMO, if you hover the
> application icon you are shown a list of that application's windows.
> You can select the window you want in a single click, it's extremely
> fast and easy to use.
> 
> DockbarX also implements this for GNOME and also gives the option of
> window previews instead of a list. I urge anyone who hasn't tried
> DockbarX to give it a spin under GNOME 2.x I think it would be a huge
> improvement to Unity if this kind of window switching was implemented.

Hello,

First of all, let me say that I fully support the idea of listing the
open windows in the quicklist. This is very expected behavior and it
is always frustrating to right-click the icon and not see it there.

About the Scale, as a fan of the plugin even before Unity was first
announced, I'm going to play Devil's Advocate a little bit.

For starters, just to make Bilal's statement a little bit more
accurate, I should mention that activating scale does not "require
two clicks". It does only if no window of the application is
currently in focus. If a window of the application is, activating
Scale only requires one click. What happens is that the first click
gives focus to the last focused window of the application. That makes
sense for the very common case where you switching between two apps,
but between specific windows of such apps: requiring scale every
time you switch from one to the other would be annoying.

Second, let's not confuse Unity's current implementation with the
concept itself. The current implementation is questionable in a lot
of ways and it is important to recognize which issues raised here
are *inherent* to the concept and which ones are wrong implementations
that could be solved with simple refinements.

For example, the lack of labeling bug raised by Bazon and the lack
of a distinguished appearance for minimized windows make Scale much
less useful than it could be. As it can be seen in this screenshot
from Bug 734253, OSX does this right:

http://mac101.net/files/2009/06/20090629_screenshot_on_2009_06_29_at_73451_pm.png

Now, I agree with Luke when he says that Aero Peek works very well
with Windows 7, but supposing some tweaks here and there, there are no
big differences between Peek and Scale. And Scale has the advantage
of having larger thumbnails. Peek solves this with the transparency
effect, but let's not forget that this only works because Windows
only has a single workspace.

I think the Scale *can* work, and a complete redesign is not necessary.