unity-design team mailing list archive

[ello <tenniswithshovels@xxxxxxxxx>]

First of all, I'm no programmer.  Second of all, I'm probably missing
something.  Third of all, how about making "Toggles" the Backlight Mode
default?  That way, it will be clear on first sight what alt-tab
selections there are, especially if it only cycles through open
programs.  The white highlight used when keyboard focus is on the bar
could be used (as well as showing the program window).

An alternative would be to use the Scale plugin, in effect adding extra
keyboard controls.  Alt-Tab would scale all windows and cycle through
them; to show which window is highlighted, use Zoom Window and Window
Title from the Scale Addons plugin.  This has the advantage of avoiding
extra UI items or re-arranging the launcher bar while being somewhat
intuitive.  The problems would be how this would work on low-spec
computers, and the work that would need to be done with Compiz (e.g.
changing the behaviour of bindings, adding new functions, making Scale
arrange windows in order of recent use &c.).



On Thu, 2011-07-28 at 18:04 +0100, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> 
> It's a lovely idea, and three consecutive designers have dashed
> themselves on the rocks trying to get it right. I'd be thrilled if
> someone could do better!
> 
> Here's what we found each time we tried it:
> 
> The launcher is spatial, the alt-tab is logical. The alt-tab works
> best when it is a stack, with the most recently used stuff first.
> Toggling between apps is always a single alt-tab, and moving between a
> small group of apps scales up accordingly, alt-tab-tab-tab gets you to
> the third most recently used app/window.
> 
> If you want to jump more than one step back in the stack, you want to
> be able to see where you are going. And this is the problem with the
> launcher, in order to give a sense of trajectory, you would need to
> reorder the items on the launcher. Which breaks people's sense of
> "where things are" and makes the launcher seem arbitrary. On the other
> hand, you could jump from item to item, but then you are not providing
> any clue as to where the next tab will send you. Which feels sucky (we
> tried it :-)).
> 
> So, it's an interesting exercise and a very attractive idea, and if
> someone can make it work I would embrace the patch, but I think it's
> one of those attractive-but-wrong sinkholes. Prove me wrong :-)
> 
> Mark
> 
> On 28/07/11 15:52, Owas Lone wrote: 
> > Great Idea.
> > 
> > On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 7:42 PM, Alex Launi <alex.launi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > I love this. It really just makes alt-tab a keybinding for features we
> > > already have. Very clean, very simple, and enhances the idioms we've already
> > > started developing.
> > > 
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