unity-design team mailing list archive

[Ed Lin <edlin280@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, May 15, 2011 at 6:04 AM, Brandon Watkins <bwat47@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Unity badly needs better ways to deal with applications that have multiple windows open. Currently if you have a program with multiple windows open, and you click its icon on the dock it just brings every window to the front. This is terrible behaviour and would be downright overwelming for new users.

I agree with the problem. Some corrections though...
A single click focuses the last used window (singular).

> 1. Reversing the currently default behavior. Currently single click brings all windows to the front. Double click brings up scale. Unity is supposed to be easy to use, new users would not know to double click, instead they will click and be assaulted with windows. IMO single click to bring up scale and double click to bring forward all windows would make more sense.

It's not really a double click: it's two single clicks. The first
focuses the last window as above, a subsequent click will open the
spread view. Here's where this difference becomes apparent: If you are
trying to switch from one window to another within the same app you
only need a single click for the spread view.

It's not immediately discoverable but I think it's simple enough that
people figure it out after a view minutes of playing with the Unity
launcher. I'm against reversing it because among other issues you will
always at a minimum need one mouse click more to do the same thing.


> 2. Windows 7-like thumbnails. Hovering over and/or clicking the icon could bring up thumnnails that you could click on to bring forward the desired window.

Suggested multiple times, maybe the most sought after feature on the
mailing list lately (hint, hint). Though I have to say I really don't
like the hover in the Win 7 taskbar, mouse clicking or clicking and
dragging is faster. The sole reason for this feature after all is
speedy access to all windows. Unlike Win 7 there is an "expose" view
so if those window thumbnails are slow no one is going to use them
over the current scale views.

> 3. Slide-Down thumbnails. When you have multiple windows open there could be OSX-Like thumbnails in the launcher, but hidden until you click the app icon. For example you would click the application icon and if it has multiple windows open thumbnails for these would slide down from under the icon in the launcher. For this to be intuitive there would need to be an indicator on the dock icons that shows it has multiple windows open.

This is an interesting design because it still preserves one goal of
the launcher: predictable icon placement (something were OS X dock
fails miserably). If the animation is fast this would solve the speed
problem of above very elegantly. One issue: especially all text based
windows will look pretty much the same in the thumbnail view, window
titles are needed to distinguish those but titles don't really fit
into the narrow launcher (the reason why I prefer horizontal panels on
larger screens...;) )

There already is an indicator: little arrows on the right side of an
app icon show how many windows are open.

> When you bring up scale there should be an X button on the top right of every window so you can close windows within scale (See: Gnome Shell)

Yes, and a minimize button (or at least hidden via middle click or
something) because unlike in G3 you can still hide windows with a
button.
Let me repeat that we need to rethink the term "minimizing" and the
layout of the button which was designed with a taskbar in mind.
Secondly, minimized (or "hidden") windows should be represented
differently in the Scale view. Reason being: people minimize to get
stuff out of their way, preserve for later and so on. A user
deliberately chooses not to see those windows so why should those
become mixed with the "active" windows in the spread view?