This is an open proposal. Please contribute suggestions, additions and comments.
Intelligent Window Management
This proposal is motivated by some observations about how screen space is utilized by applications today. This is most easily demonstrated with a few examples:
Reading e-mail
This is an example of reading an e-mail in Evolution. I've just opened the e-mail in the active window at the center of screen.
- The first observation pertains to the active window at the center of the screen. The e-mail text in the window is about one third of the screen width. However, the window takes up more than half the screen width. The other half of the window is blank space. How come?
- The second observation pertains to the window in the background. In the lower right section of this window, we see a message preview (i.e. the e-mail body and a few headers) of the e-mail I've just opened. On the toolbar at the top of the screen we see a range of icons for actions pertaining to the e-mail. But if we look inside the opened e-mail window at the center, we'll find that identical copies of most of these elements are reproduced. Essentially, the screen is almost showing two copies of the same window. Why?
- Third observation pertains to the folder list at the left side of the background window. The list shows a number of entries which are unrelated to the e-mail but let's say I can live with that. However, the mail obscures parts of the folder titles. The shown fragments are distinct in this example, but e.g. several "gnome-" mailing list folders could easily have appeared, in which case I would have to close or at least move the open e-mail to pick the right one.
This experience could have been improved in a number of ways.
- First of all, the window should have resized itself to fit the content - not the size of the last (and entirely unrelated) e-mail window I had open.
- Secondly, I'm not sure why exactly e-mails can be opened in a new window since the new windows seems to offer no functionality that the preview pane doesn't, but if it did, the preview area could be used for better purposes than duplicating contents of the open e-mail window.
- Finally, the e-mail could have opened in a position that would make the most relevant information in the background window, such as the folder list, the least obscured.
Solution
The idea now is that many the of problems described above could have been addressed in a general manner by the window manager (or a side component to the window manager).
If it was possible to specify how the semantics of different widgets relate to each other, this 'intelligent window manager' could present each window such that at any one time, only the more important information is rendered on the screen at expense of the less important information.
This will work even better if developers get into the habit of putting semantically independent UI sections into separate windows rather than stitching them all together in one huge window as in the case of Evolution.
A few light accelerated visual effects can make the movement of the jumbling windows appear smoother. See also ModerateZoomingWindowManagement.