Jesse wrote:
> Yeah, right. Admit it, you read the Etoile archives, compiled all the
> ideas in there into one document, and now you're claiming it as your own
> work. Do you work for Microsoft? ;)

I go by the name "Narcoleptic Electron", and wear this mask and
spandex, so that my mild-mannered secret identity can go unknown and
unattributed.  Innovation for innovation's sake, my friends!  The
promise of fame can only corrupt.

Also: If I worked for Microsoft, you would have seen all of these
features "appear" amidst the Longhorn vapours by now.  And then Apple
would have implemented it.  And then Microsoft would have removed it
from the Longhorn feature list, after realizing that it was beyond
their skill to implement.

> If we think of "iconified" as "miniaturized", this is exactly what I propose.

Iconified is like "closed": the contents of the window are not visible
-- only some sort of icon representing the window.  In order to "open"
it again, security credentials would need to be provided.  It could
not be a thumbnail, as that would reveal potentially secure
information within the window.

> Explain "scrolled" more. What is scrollable? Where did the previously
> squished windows go?

Each workspace is a scroll view, containing windows.  "Squishing" the
contents of the workspace causes the contents of the scroll view to be
compressed such that they are all visible in the workspace window
without scrolling.  The workspace window stays the same size.  At this
point, clicking a compressed window within the workspace causes the
workspace contents to become "unsquished" again, and it automatically
scrolls to the window that you clicked.

> Similar to what I'm calling Project View (Overview) and Document View, I 
> would assume?

I think so, but I find the "project" and "document" terms confusing
because they already have very specific meanings for me.

I prefer to use the "zoom" terminology, as it better indicates the
closure of the concept.  For example, a user can select a workspace
window and zoom into it, making it full-screen.  Then the user can
select one of the windows within it, and zoom into that, then zoom out
again, etc.

> As long as it's not possible to inadvertently zoom out one depth too far
> (from your home workspace to the users workspace) and then have to
> re-login.

A window would not "close" (iconify) unless the user explicitly did
so.  Zooming out to the top-level workspace would show the window you
came from in its "open" (manually-resizable) version.

> Yep -- unless you create a copy of a workspace, then it creates copies of
> all the files contained within.

Yep.  Ideally some sort of "copy on write" deal.

> I'd like to hear more: I think right click and double click have their
> purposes, as long as they're dedicated to doing only one thing (perhaps
> right click brings up context/pie menu and double click is used only for
> zooming, for example).  I'm also interested in using mouse gestures in the
> interface (mouse gestures are really just marking menus: pie menus which
> don't show the pie).

Thanks.  I'll try to write up a proper article about my ideas and put
it somewhere.

> Further evidence of an ideosphere we're all tapped into... or maybe we're
> just all reading the same 3 usability books. :)

I think that is more likely.  I probably came up with the core of this
idea about 2 years ago.

> Talk to Quentin or Nicolas (do you have admin rights?) about getting wiki
> access and start posting your ideas in the appropriate spots.

Right on.  No admin rights yet (this is my first post to Étoilé, I think).

N. Electron

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