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This idea is to allow minification and basic managment of windows when dragged onto the task manager. If a window is dragged onto it, it will ideally place the window entry in the appropriate position on the manager aswell.

On the flipside, dragging an entry off the task manager will restore it to the screen, preferably where you "drop" the task entry. Dragging a task entry onto the edge of the screen will restore the window and obey the screen edge settings, so dragging a task entry to the top of the screen would both restore and maximize it.


An extension of this is allowing windows to be managed through the pager by dragging window thumbnails above/below the pager itself.

A good default might be dragging a thumbnail past the bottom of the pager to minimize it. Users could configure dragging windows above/below the pager with custom actions, such as showing on all desktops or un-showing on all desktops.

I am curious to find out why you think this will be a useful interface. Can you give examples of why this would be useful?

anoneemouse wrote:I am curious to find out why you think this will be a useful interface. Can you give examples of why this would be useful?

Sure, I'll break down the individual actions and why they may be useful (at least in my little world )

Minimizing via dragging onto the task manager:

-Because we can drag chrome on windows, if your mouse is closer to the bottom of the screen, you could grab the window just about anywhere and drag it into the task manager. E.g. Grabbing the statusbar on most windows, only dragging a very short distance.

-On touch screen devices, it eliminates the relatively small minimize button hit-area, and allows for an almost "gesture-like" minification. It would be more tactile. Could be very useful for upcoming tablets.

-You would be self-organizing the task manager, as you would drag-and-drop the windows where you want them to be.



Restoring / Maximizing via dragging from the task manager

-Dragging from the task manager would let you place the window where you want it. I routinely move restored windows because they were in a bad position when I minimized them.

-By dragging a task to the top of the screen, it would both restore and maximize a window, combining two actions.

-Again, with touch-based screens, it's more gesture-like and tactile.

-If you show all the tasks running on all the desktops, this would be a very easy way to bring up a window from another desktop.



Window actions via the Pager
This would be user-configurable, and a few actions might include:

-minimizing/maximizing by dragging window thumbs up/down (admittedly less useful when compared to the taskbar)

-setting the window to show on all desktops / one desktop (pager-related, since it's managing a window across all desktops, could be an easy way to quickly do this, even if the window is on a different virtual desktop)

-Setting the window to be above/below other windows.



The pager actions are a little less obvious, but could improve workflow by letting users flick windows up and down in the pager to perform these basic actions.

This looks like two separate ideas to me (two completely separate components - task manager and pager)

Of course you can already minimize/restore windows by clicking their entry in the task bar (though it doesn't move the window to the current desktop, it moves the current desktop to where the window is located). With that in mind, you don't really gain much in the drag-to-minimize, other than that it adds the ability to pick where in the task bar that the icon will be placed, and honestly I doubt that very many people care about the placement of icons in the taskbar other than that there is some logic to the ordering.

I can see a little bit more benefit in the drag-from-taskbar to restore/bring-to-current-desktop, though mostly on the bring-to-current-desktop department. It doesn't really save you much to click-drag-drop over click, click-drag-drop since the extra click is marginal compared to the total time spent performing the operation (especially in a tablet environment, though in that environment you are typically going to be dealing with maximized windows only, unless you have a large tablet).

The window actions via pager idea has a bit more merit, I think. I've seen pagers (for other environments) which let you move windows around and between desktops (and support alt/ctrl/shift+right/left/middle mouse clicking to perform various actions like minimize, maximize, close, stick, unstick, etc.), and it can be pretty useful (so long as you have a sufficiently large pager and have a simple mechanism for identifying what each window is so that you can pick and place them properly). Of course your selection of gestures is limited by the size of the pager.