I'm on the ML now, so I'll fill in some ideas: The basic concept I had in mind is a frame-based system in which the screen is always completely covered in frames. A frame can be split horizontally or verticly to create new frames. Frames could be empty, in which case you could draw some background.
Operations can be done on the frames in various ways. One possibility is to have borders that are thick enough you can click, drag and such on them to resize, split, and join. This requires a mouse, however, and would only be usefull on a desktop. There's no intuitive way to resize that I can think of without having some sort of handles. So, a menu option could enable tempoary handles. This of course would all be optional, so the desktop people wouldn't have to use it. Also, a hotkey, or a button on a handheld, or some combination of charecters written could bring up the menu or enable the handles. On a handheld it's not wise to waste space on any titlebars and such, so for the apps that don't have some menu to display, it shouldn't be displayed. I've found that I can usually figure out what program I'm in by what it looks like, not the titlebar :) A small corner could be used for a button to tap that slides out the title bar, or a hotkey or other button. The app should be able to specify a prefrence to having the titlebar or not, but the user should be able to choose "always" or "never". Each frame has a list of associated windows. In the menu the active window can be selected from a menu, and a submenu called "global" or something like that allows windows in other frames to be moved to the curent frame. I'm using ion now, and I've found it's much more efficient because it uses 100% of your screenspace and it's easy to navigate with a keyboard. However, some apps, like the gimp, are completely incompatible with this system. One thing that would make it better is if there were a way to specify a set of toolbars, then these toolbars can be displayed as the user sees fit. They could be hidden completely, or a tap on a button could pop them out, or a keyboard shortcut, or they could always be displayed in the window. The important thing is that the app only specifies "i have a toolbar like this" and the user has total control over how it's displayed. Using a system like this I can't think of any applications that would have trouble in frames, and I think it would be a much more efficient way to work. </braindump> I'm currently working on another project, so I probally won't be able to help with much more than ideas and "moral support" atm, but I'd like to help in the future. It seems there's really no one who can implement these ideas soon, so if someone is availible, please speak up :) _______________________________________________ Pgui-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/pgui-devel
