Yes, agreed that its almost impossible to be very optimal with many
windows in a sensible time frame (i.e. within 10-300 ms). I'm new to
the packing problem and it appears over the last 40 years that lots of
people have been banging their heads against it. Google showed me
quite a few approaches and research papers about it.
My idea was to improve the Expose concept - but as Jens already
pointed out, Apple have patented the method of showing windows in a 2d
space without overlap, including the selection of one item within the
set of windows, the animation and about another 30 different things.
I suspect that if I progressed with any program that used the concept
of: 'laying out windows without overlap and then selecting one', that
Apple would be within rights to declare patent infringement, correct?
In which case, as a small indy developer for Mac, there's no way I'm
gonna fight that - a sad but true reality.
Comments?
Thanks
--
John Clayton
Skype: johncclayton
On May 8, 2008, at 8:58 AM, Thomas Davie wrote:
On 8 May 2008, at 06:04, Jens Alfke wrote:
On 7 May '08, at 8:50 PM, John Clayton wrote:
Does anyone know of literature or code / algorithms that I can
look at to learn about how this is done or which approaches are
possible?
The good news is that some of the details must be public, since
this is patented. You can look up the patent online.
The bad news is that you'd have to license the patent from Apple to
implement anything similar...
Some more good/bad news:
Bad: It's impossible to come up with an optimal algorithm to do this
in sensible time. If you do, you've solved the packing problem!
Good: There's plenty of easy to imagine simplistic aproaches that
will have varying degrees of success. Try maybe comparing the
centre positions of windows to find out whether they're slightly to
the left/right of each other, and moving them slowly in that
direction, while shrinking them slowly until they stop overlapping.
That one's really naïve, and won't give you as good results as
exposé, but it's a start, and can lead to some further playing.
Bob
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