windowgroups / pager / ZUI

[Sebastian Kügler]

So today during lunch, Chani, Marco, Rich and I were talking about the ZUI and 
the confusion between the ZUI and  virtual desktops. We came up with a design 
that would make it less confusing. The idea is to make virtual desktop less 
zui-like. Virtual desktops are basically groups of windows that can live "on 
top" of an activity (or rather, a context), they can also be tied to this 
context.

The idea is to remove the zoom-out grid metaphore from virtual desktops, and 
make it clearer that those are window groups. Instead of adding a window to a 
virtual desktop, they're tagged with a group. (This can also allow for session 
saving, saving and starting groups of windows. An activity would have a plasma 
context and possibly a set of applications. Switching to an activity would 
switch to this plasma activity and start the set of windows related to this.

The desktop grid effect (which zooms out and therefore looks a lot like the 
ZUI) would be replaced by a column-based layout, much like present windows. 
You can drag windows from one column to another (effectively moving them from 
one group to another). The concept of virtual desktops is completely replaced 
by window groups. Switching between virtual desktops is done like shown in the 
mockup. A modified present windows effect that groups the windows in columns 
is used to visualize this.


= Example: Work Activity =

The email client is started, an office application is started, the desktop 
contains a folderview with my current project's work document, and some RSS 
feeds that are relevant to my work.


= How does the ZUI look like =

The ZUI could have the background of a faded to black current activity, or 
black. Adding and removing an activity rearranges the activities for optimal 
space usage (if you search for "gnome shell" on youtube, the first hit gives a 
nice example how this could look like. (We agreed that the visualization is 
quite nice, but the concepts are a bit weak since it's not much more than a 
polished virtual desktop grid).

"vdesktop" (in fact windowgroup switcher):
	http://imagebin.ca/view/YXgSWis.html

gnome-shell screencast:
	http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcpndKUx4pc

So much for the braindump from today's lunch session :-) This is quite a 
departure from the concepts as we're using it now, and I think quite a bit of 
work to implement. It didn't stop us from talking about this idea of course 
:-) We can also offer a "traditional/simple mode", much like it's now, but 
without ZUI at all. That would just mean keeping what we have now and removing 
the zoom-out.
-- 
sebas

 http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org |  GPG Key ID: 9119 0EF9 
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