Comments about Linux/Ubuntu from a former MS-programmer

[Eric Dunbar]

There is _nearly_ one scenario in which the Windows style of a
maximized screen (without ability to resize windows without selecting
restore) works -- that is if you use Apple's Expose (and, I'm sure
there are copies now for GNOME/KDE).

What happens is that you can trigger Expose and all the windows of
visible applications are tiled across the screen. You can then click,
tab, cursor or enter to select the window you want. Then you'd have to
worry less about having maximized windows that high-jack the screen.
It's also less of an issue on small screen (<1280*1024) since, with
Windows/GNOME/KDE there's a lot of wasted screen realestate with all
the extra menubars and such so every little real-estate savings
counts.

PS There's a FireFox extension that copies Expose for tabs: Reveal
(it's neat, but I don't really use it that much because, well, tabs
are quite good at organising information in a compact way as is ;-)

Though, one scenario I could see for Reveal is... _disable_ the
display of the tabs tabs (does that make sense? ;-), and then use
Reveal to switch between tabs graphically (of course, there still
would be ctrl-page up/down to do a keyboard/mouse switch).

Eric.

On 13/04/06, Hein-Pieter van Braam <hp at syntomax.com> wrote:
> I've tried running with 'manually maximized windows' for a day or two
> now, just out of curiosity, see what could be made better.
>
> and it is utter shit :)
>
> I found out that my preferred method of finding the scrollbar is indeed
> 'throw the mouse to the left as far as possible' just as 'start app' has
> become 'throw mouse to the top left somewhere' breaking that is hugely
> painful.
>
> I also noticed a lot of accidental resize, when you accidentally miss an
> app in the 'app tray' at the bottom, and a myrad of other annoying
> things.
>
> to change the multi-mode thing for windows would require some really
> well-thought out model of operations :) perhaps some edge resistance
> like thingy for resize? so it doesn't happen accidentally?
>
> On Wed, 2006-04-12 at 15:54 -0400, Lee Revell wrote:
>
> > No one answered my previous comment about this - if you eliminate mode
> > change on maximize how do you prevent the user from accidentally
> > grabbing the right edge of the window when using the scrollbar?  The
> > only solution I can think of involves a different type of mode change
> > (allow resize by grabbing any edge, except the one with the scrollbar)