windowgroups / pager / ZUI

[Sebastian Kügler]

Forgot to cross-post. Of course this needs to go to kwin at kde.org as well...

On Saturday 11 July 2009 01:20:35 Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> 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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