The future of virtual desktops

[Marco Martin]

On Friday 25 February 2011, Nuno Pinheiro wrote:
> 
> You would like my solution to this problem....... I call its space :)
> the desktp is a view on a linear expanding space (it just expandes side
> ways)... that revolves into itself, (you can make the space grow or shrink
> ). and you can scrool the space in your desktop view.... This is not much
> difrent from the desktop we have now, just that you can stop a view in
> betwin virtual desktops.
> 
> Ortogonal to this space you would have activities that are simple
> colections of spaces, in an activity everything can be diferent. just like
> in our cuurrent activities.... wen you browse them you woud see stacks of
> spaces piled one ot top of the other....

let's call this "analog" virtual desktops, where your viewport can be 
positioned in any place of the extended huge desktop

> Problems.... aparently the way virtual desktops are build do not alow this
> to be real, secondly I would have to make realy huge wallpaper that would

not sure about our virtual desktops right now.. seems that the workspaces of 
compiz are slightly nearer to the concept

> be continous strips. Third, a realy elegant presentation of this concep
> needs a opengl canvas.

what about a wallpaper that is just *slightly* bigger and have an huge 
parallax effect? ;) (even the space for widgets shouldn't be much bigger, i 
think)

> But this would solve the problem as it realy makes activities and desktops
> ortogonal visualy speaking. plus it woul be somthing that relates much more
> to real life space tends to be circular around us...we can put documents
> out of our view but easy to reach it by simply movig our view to it...

btw, to see a bit how this could behave, unfortunately somebody already tought 
about this already (and even more unfortunately, it's a windows application)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-R2SU4dKa8
http://www.360desktop.com/

Cheers,
Marco Martin