On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 1:04 PM, Mark Shuttleworth <mark.shuttlewo...@canonical.com> wrote: > > It's a lovely idea, and three consecutive designers have dashed themselves > on the rocks trying to get it right. I'd be thrilled if someone could do > better! > > Here's what we found each time we tried it: > > The launcher is spatial, the alt-tab is logical. The alt-tab works best when > it is a stack, with the most recently used stuff first. Toggling between > apps is always a single alt-tab, and moving between a small group of apps > scales up accordingly, alt-tab-tab-tab gets you to the third most recently > used app/window. > > If you want to jump more than one step back in the stack, you want to be > able to see where you are going. And this is the problem with the launcher, > in order to give a sense of trajectory, you would need to reorder the items > on the launcher. Which breaks people's sense of "where things are" and makes > the launcher seem arbitrary. On the other hand, you could jump from item to > item, but then you are not providing any clue as to where the next tab will > send you. Which feels sucky (we tried it :-)). > > So, it's an interesting exercise and a very attractive idea, and if someone > can make it work I would embrace the patch, but I think it's one of those > attractive-but-wrong sinkholes. Prove me wrong :-) > > Mark
This really surprised me: I've always found traditional alt-tab annoying for exactly that reason. While the logical representation of a stack makes a lot of sense in theory, I find I can never keep track of what's where on it beyond the absolute top anyways. Whenever I use traditional alt-tab for more than an immediate switch to the most-recently-used, I have to stop, look at the icons, figure out how many times to press tab, and then do it, which is slow. If I just press tab until I see the icon I want highlighted, I tend to miss it, and have to cycle round again to find it. Admittedly, I've never used the spatial alternative proposed here, but I imagine it would be much nicer if I could know 'four tabs is app X' all the time, rather than, 'four tabs is the fourth-most-recently-used, which was, uh, what again?' On the other hand, I do use a single alt-tab a lot, which would break if it was simply replaced by the spatial alternative. Maybe I'm unusual in this, or maybe a stack is still faster than spatial even though it feels slower. I dunno. I would be extremely interested if somebody did a usability and speed study on various window-switching methods though. Evan _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ayatana Post to : ayatana@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ayatana More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
