July 20, 2005
Ooh whizzy!
I'm as fascinated by new developments in user interface design as the next person, and stumbling upon a new method for dealing with overlapping windows makes my little geek heart leap with excitement. It's a seemingly elegant paradigm, though I suspect that it might be slightly too easy to trigger accidentally - I'd also be slightly concerned that pointer acceleration would render the gestures involved slightly less straightforward than the video might suggest - it's something I've noticed in general with the trackpad on my laptop. Still it looks like it might have some real world applications besides making for neat eye candy.
Ultimately I'm not so much interested in this sort of thing for simple window rearrangement - it seems like a bit of a waste to me, but rather for dealing with layered documents. I class Apple's Expose in much the same boat - it's a neat idea, and makes for a whizzy demonstration, but it's still waiting for a killer application (and no, OS X new Dashboard doesn't make the cut for me). Imagine Photoshop's layers, or all the pages in word processor document whizzing apart Expose style at the touch of a function key for example, or being able to flip though pages Fold And Drop style.
Who's responsible for applying these innovations. And how do I apply for a job with them?
Thought iMark at July 20, 2005 02:39 PM | TrackBackFold-and-drop looks quite neat, and I can see it being useful, but I'm not convinced that Exposé isn't a better solution to the same problem. I have it set so it activates when I flick the pointer into the top-right corner of the screen (FItt's Law being rather blatantly handy here), and it's a fundamental feature of my working style. I use it routinely for drag-and-drop operations, to the extent that I think other computers are broken when they're not set up like that. Fold-and-drop strikes me as being admirably more cutesy, but likely to be slower in practice, thanks to the smaller target areas one has to hit.
The thing both systems fail to consider is what one does with windows that are already hidden at the start of the operation. I routinely command+H applications that I'm not using right this minute, with the result that their windows aren't on my Exposé radar. Flaw!
Posted by: Jonathan at July 22, 2005 01:27 PMOh fold and drop has it's flaws certainly, but I stil find it a fascinating bit of research. Much like Sun's looking glass project I'm just curious as to when we'll ever see it's like escape from the lab onto the desktop.
My biggest frustration with Expose is that as far as I'm aware only Apple have used it so far for a couple of minor, albeit terribly useful, operations. I want to see this sort of thing integrated into applications directly. For example, I've current got about 7 or 8 tabs open in Firefox. Why can't I hit a function key to Expose them? Admittedly, I've no idea what sort of API, if any, Apple have introduced so I don't know if this is currently feasible, but I'd hope someone somewhere is looking at it
There's an 'all windows of this application' Exposé mode, sure -- but curiously, I don't find it all that useful. Perhaps because all browsers treat tabbed windows as single windows, so they don't peel apart.
For an interesting take on tabs, OmniWeb is worth a look. Tabs can be dragged between windows, and spun out as their own windows. Pretty much essential, I reckon, yet sorely lacking elsewhere.
Posted by: Jonathan at July 25, 2005 10:05 PMOne of my few grievances with Firefox is it's basic handling of tabs. Even with the extensions I have installed it's still not yet possible to drag them off the tab bar to make a new window. Still, I believe some of the extensions will be incorporated into v1.4 or 1.5 or whatever the next version on their increasingly convoluted roadmap is - perhaps we'll see that facility then...
Posted by: iMark at July 25, 2005 11:21 PM