[Panel-devel] Zipper or Shading

[Dennis SCP]

Hi I'm Dennis,

Here and on Slashdot people have been impressed by a mouse gesture to 
fold away windows. While folding is my favorite gui subject I think the 
gesture itself is hard to discover and therefor nullifies the effect of 
aiding newbies. So let's improve it, but first:

As some have even said they now thought of something better they would 
like to patent I would first like to make the following prior art 
statement: Computer interface folding: using known (paper) folding 
techniques in a virtual environment (for example: the information 
display of a computer) to call for attention to details or to change or 
exchange the viewpoint (or order) of (visible and invisible) 
information.

Ok, I like the idea of teasing the user to look behind the current 
window, but only if there is another window (partially) underneath it.

Then the window can curl up its closest corner when the mouse moves 
over the middle 60% of the edge of the window. (we don't want to annoy 
the widget interaction of slide-bars and corners)

If the mouse is moved in a relatively straight line along the side 
towards the curling corner it will unzip the window further leaving 
behind a translucent shade in the original shape of the window.

To complete the unzipping and hiding of the window the pointer must 
cross the intersecting side of the window (shade) near the corner. 
(yes, like drawing a straight line from the middle of the window 
border, along that border, to and beyond one of its corners)

To unzip other windows which are stacked underneath the original 
window, a D-tour can be made away from the shade to repeat following 
the same path to hide additional windows in the same stack . This time 
the path may be shorter (than 20% of the side length of the window).

A counter counts down the remaining windows in the stack. If you want 
the bottom window you should stop making D shaped circles at 1.

A stack means all windows which overlap each other. A screen may 
contain multiple stacks, even though the stack programmer may handle 
them as a single large stack. The shades of one stack blend uniformly 
together thereby lots of stacked shades do not make a darker shade.

To unshade windows reverse the action: the mouse must approximately be 
crossed through a shaded corner and be moved 20% along the border to 
unshade the shaded window at the bottom of the stack. With a D tour 
more windows from the same stack can be unshaded with a shorter mouse 
gesture path. The counter again counts away windows remaining to be 
unshaded.

When close to the screen border the D-tour is allowed to be made inside 
the window.

Windows can also be removed from a stack, making this feature have an 
advantage over kompose: aiding in the organization of windows on the 
screen.

However allowing the (un)shading of windows out of order by using mouse 
gestures would make it too complex. It can however be done with the 
following tools:

'Shading'  option in the contextual menu; listing all windows in a 
stack which can be individually check-marked for shading. Other items 
in this list could be Shade All and Unshade All.

Zipping can also be done by pressing alt + tab and letting go of the 
tab key and pressing the S key, for shade, instead of tab, this shades 
the selected window and cycles to the next window in the list.

Other possible alt+tab default combinations are Q for quit and W for 
close as used by Lite Switch on Mac OS 7 or 8 and Apple on Mac OS X. 
All Quiting is done only after the alt key has been released. On slow 
machines all changes could be executed only after the alt key release. 
On fast machines Alt-tab over a shaded window could reveal a ghost 
image (alpha-channel).

Zipping or shading could replace rolling up the window by double 
clicking the bar of a window. In an even darker shade it would read 
'Use alt+tab-alt+s to unShade.' to inform old-time users.