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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