I was thinking about this today in my computer lab, where i was working with a multi-windowed program, and at the same time flicking between tutorials and help files. What a pain in the butt.
Luckily the program in question, LabVIEW, allowed the tiling of windows that were related to the program. However i still had to alt-tab for the documentation and help. For once i would like to see an OS include some really smart tiling, something allowing you to actually specify which windows you want to tile, instead of tiling all or none. And options like being able to choose whether to scale the windows to fill all available space, or scale them as a factor of their current dimensions, so they fit together as a sort of jigsaw, but you don't get overly thin or short windows, obscuring most of the content and defeating the purpose of tiling them in the first place.
Of course the only reason this is even possible is because my university is rich enough to fill our engineering labs with 23" and 24" screens. Tiling isn't very applicable to small screen sizes or small resolutions, probably why it's never been considered a big feature of most desktop environments. But my point is it would be nice to have something to do some slightly smarter and more customizable tiling instead of just expanding every open window to the size of the screen.
Keep thinking.
No comments:
Post a Comment