At 23:52 Uhr -0500 24.04.2005, Jesse Ross wrote:
Flashy fun is available here:
http://jesseross.com/clients/etoile/ui/project_based/01/
Neat. One detail I especially like is the
automatic coloring of different workspaces. I'm
not sure we should force the project-based
workflow, though. If you think of it, all files
and other items in a project eventually have a
window associated with them (at the least, the
containing folder window in GWorkspace). So, just
doing this as a workspace manager that manages
windows should suffice.
Any new windows opened while a particular
workspace is current would automatically be added
to that workspace (you'd be able to drag windows
from one workspace icon to another in the small
preview to move it, like KDE lets you do). Closed
documents would retain their association with
their workspace and remember the position(s) of
their window(s), scroll locations etc. This would
work across restarts, obviously.
You could set up shortcuts for some of your
workspaces, and there'd be one "shared" workspace
which shows up no matter what regular workspace
is frontmost (for things like the desktop,
taskbar, and any other things you want). An
Exposé-like feature would also make sense here,
on a per-workspace basis, along with a simple
"Window list"-style window that contains both
open and closed windows associated with this
workspace, allows to manage them and maybe even
is extensible (so Project Center could just use a
workspace to manage its files).
Every workspace is effectively a file somewhere.
Users could duplicate workspaces (which will
automatically duplicate all documents open in
that workspace) to send them to other people,
make aliases of them etc. It'd also be handy to
have a document be a member of several
workspaces, with different open windows, window
positions and scrolls, etc.
Note that utility applications (like a CD player
that simply plays the CD currently in the drive
and allows you to pause and skip) would be
treated just like another document. So, you could
have your TV-Tuner app set to CNN on the "Work"
workspace and to "Fox Kids" on the locked
workspace where your daughter can play Solitaire,
Myst and write her homework in TextEdit... or
whatever.
One problem would be to find a good name. Since
the file manager is already called GWorkspace, we
might just want to find another name. "Project"
is also used by a similar-but-different concept
in IDEs. So either we'd get ProjectCenter changed
so it uses our Project metaphor, or we pick
another name. "ProjectCenter" would definitely be
a misleading name.
Another would be that if we mixed the concept of
workspace and project file, it would cause extra
work to view two projects side-by-side.
This is just my "brainstorm" caused by Jesse's
Flash mockup. Let me know what you think.
--
Cheers,
M. Uli Kusterer
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"The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere..."
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