unity-design team mailing list archive

[Ed Lin <edlin280@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 8:51 AM, Thorsten Wilms <t_w_@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Let's see, up to 431 subscribers wading through a trainwreck of comment
> thread vs one Ed Lin taking the time to present his case in a clear
> fashion ...
Right, that wasn't very helpful of me.

A summary:

There's a difference between "minimize a window" and hide all
application windows, i.e. "hide an application". The bug doesn't
cleanly separate the two. The launcher is app centric and therefore
it's better suited to primarily hide applications, not individual
windows.

The most mature appcentric application/window management is the one in
OS X. We should takte a look at how it's done there: Apps can be
hidden from the dock, minimized windows are a completely separate
feature. Alt+tab (command+tab to be precise) supports keyboard
controlled application hiding, the dock has a context menu entry for
hiding apps, the menu bar as entries for hiding and minimizing, Exposé
separates active and minimized windows. The feature set in OS X is
very complete and has been refined over many years. Unity is clearly
lagging behind, not much harm in copying a few more features at this
point...

There are different ways of solving both window hiding/minimizing and
application hiding. One solution was presented in the bug tracker,
more where discussed on the list here. Canonical didn't go into any of
this, they saw solution #1, didn't like it and closed the bug.