unity-design team mailing list archive

[Tony Pursell <ajp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2011-07-28 at 17:20 -0400, Evan Huus wrote:
> 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.

I have to agree with Mark.  In my last job (I am retired now) I had to
make extensive use of the Alt-Tab feature.  Often it was to find (search
for) a browser window (organisation was stuck on IE 6), but where it
really came into its own was when switching between two applications.
My productivity would have been severely limited without that simple use
of the Alt-Tab feature. 

> 
> 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
> 

Tony