> On 11 May 2005, at 14:21, Nicolas Roard wrote: > >> That's an interesting idea ... >> I would say, we should have both -- keep a tabbed shelf on the bottom, >> but have a key to put the shelf on the front and "fullscreen". > > I think the thing I really like about the idea of a Dashboard-style > shelf is that it is transparent - you can see things that are not in > the shelf through it (although it is clear that they are not on the > shelf, because they are dimmed). A full-screen shelf without this > would be of much less use. > > I agree though, that both would probably be a good idea. >
I'm not sure how this would integrate into what we've previously discussed regarding the rest of the interface, but what about this... We have a non-tabbed shelf at the bottom (or left or right or top) of the screen. It's not tabbed because it's intended to be a temporary storage medium -- making it tabbed would make people have to take time (or make them think they have to take time) to organize the shelf. The more things in the shelf, the smaller the contained items get, like the OS X dock. You can drag items from anywhere and have them drop into the dock. Pressing and holding a key on your keyboard (F12 for example), opens the shelf full screen, which means that all of the contained documents flow out of the shelf and fill the entire screen, like Expose. You can still see what's underneath, perhaps darkened a bit to give more indication that you're in a different mode. Releasing the keyboard key removes you from the full-screen shelf mode and collapses the shelf. Also, the shelf needs to be clearly distinguished from the rest of the desktop, perhaps with a dragger along the top that allows the user to grab and drag the shelf to make it taller and thus able to show contained items at a larger preview size. J.
