Re: Desktop 'Tape' - New UI Idea

Sounds like a cute idea, *adds it to his mile long list of things to
hack on *

On Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 04:15:57PM +1000, Benjamin Rich wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-04-01 at 16:06, Trent Lloyd wrote:
> > This is an interesting idea, however I get the feeling navigating it
> > would be tedious as the places of variosu things would be constantly
> > changing,
> 
> Things would always be changing their positions along the tape, but this
> is also true of normal DE's - you either arrange windows yourself along
> virtua desktops, or you arrange them within one window by constantly
> minimising etc. The idea would be that you either navigate by sliding
> along the tape, or by using the alt+tab style cycle list, which would
> remain pretty static.
> 
> > tho I suppose it would all be relatively right, it would
> > require a fair bit of magic in the window manager for figuring out where
> > to place things like error boxes, preferences etc,
> 
> Any dialogue would come up in front of the application that spawned it,
> just as happens now. I suppose you could set an option to have error
> windows or dialogues appear in front of you no matter where you were on
> the tape (just as it also happens now with some window managers), but I
> think this would be annoying. An idea I had would be to take the Windows
> 'hot taskbar item' thing and put it into practise on the tape pager: if
> an application spawned an error window or somesuch 3 screens down the
> tape, the representation of that window and it's accompanying dialogue
> would flash orange in the pager. Another cool addition might to be have
> a translucent overlay appear meta over whatever you're doing, featuring