unity-design team mailing list archive

[Evan Huus <eapache@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 1:04 PM, Mark Shuttleworth
<mark.shuttleworth@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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

This really surprised me: I've always found traditional alt-tab
annoying for exactly that reason. While the logical representation of
a stack makes a lot of sense in theory, I find I can never keep track
of what's where on it beyond the absolute top anyways. Whenever I use
traditional alt-tab for more than an immediate switch to the
most-recently-used, I have to stop, look at the icons, figure out how
many times to press tab, and then do it, which is slow. If I just
press tab until I see the icon I want highlighted, I tend to miss it,
and have to cycle round again to find it.

Admittedly, I've never used the spatial alternative proposed here, but
I imagine it would be much nicer if I could know 'four tabs is app X'
all the time, rather than, 'four tabs is the
fourth-most-recently-used, which was, uh, what again?'

On the other hand, I do use a single alt-tab a lot, which would break
if it was simply replaced by the spatial alternative.

Maybe I'm unusual in this, or maybe a stack is still faster than
spatial even though it feels slower. I dunno. I would be extremely
interested if somebody did a usability and speed study on various
window-switching methods though.

Evan