apps: launching/switching/adding to activities

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday, June 16, 2011 23:27:10 Marco Martin wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> there is a pretty big area of the ui that has been just flat out ignored
> right now:
> * switching running applications
> * browsing/launching applications
> and, as connected thing, browsing application launchers is the way to
> connect lauchers to the current activity.
> 
> at tokamak we already had a design session about all of this, the idea was
> basically to put the window switcher and the launcher in the panel, that can
> be pulled down to reveal the hidden parts.
> 
> I gave a try with a slightly different approach:
> instead of pulling the panel (with its icons that would move, and would seem
> strange)

why is that strange? if you pull something down, the things in it follow. 
millions of years of evolution have ingrained this expectation into us.

if you go to the app switcher or launcher, chances are you aren't doing that 
to interact with the system tray. so it's position is not critical at that 
point.

the nice thing about having it all in one place is that it can give everything 
a very "solid" feel to the user. the app switcher is just "off the screen" and 
"above" the system tray .. opening it and dismissing it is a similarly 
symmetrical action.

in terms of "naturalness", assuming that's still part of our goal here in 
plasmaland:

* things that spontaneously appear are "magic" and therefore not good
* things that fade in are nomically better due to transition
* things that slide in from a known, anchored location are even better as they 
allow one to use pre-existing mental model such as drawers and other 
hide/reveal items
* things that connected to a smaller shown bit and pulled out as a part of 
those items are probably even better as it uses the even simpler "this is a 
single item, i just can't see all of it right now" model

i also don't like how in the example shown it doesn't use the whole screen. 
that seems like a waste of space, and on these screens that isn't something we 
have a lot of.

> you pull a window *from* the panel:
> http://i.imgur.com/37ESf.png

ok, so aside from the mechanics of show/hide ...

i do like putting launching with switching together. i agree with you that 
these are related items and it covers the use case of checking to see if 
something is running and if not launching it: "i'll switch to the web browser 
.. oh, it isn't open, i must have closed it .. so i'll just launch one."

i'm not sure about the thing (tag cloud?) on the left .. it makes the whole 
thing look messy and rather horrible.

putting the running windows above the launchers may make more sense from a 
number of angles:

* lets me see if something is already running before launching
* since the contents of the launchers may change due to search, it will keep 
all the content snug and more consistently laid out if the non-changing 
(window list) is above the changing (launchers)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks
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