On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 22:13, Zack Rusin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Thursday 30 October 2008 16:19:32 Orcan Ogetbil wrote: >> Doing a quick google search: group tasks annoying >> brought me to a discussions page about Windows XP > > Well, all your googling proves is that Microsoft along with Apple and KDE all > groups tasks by default, which is pretty much the opposite what you're arguing > for. > Fortunately for us we have usability experts and instead of complaining about > things you don't like you can go and ask them. > Celeste what's your opinion on task grouping? >
Hi Zack, while I agree that it is interesting to hear Celeste, or others with a leaning towards usability, because it offers an important, and often neglected, view on software design, I think the issue at hand is actually more fundamental than usability. Conceptually a taskbar competes with UI elements like virtual desktops or the new idea of activities, they all offer means to navigate between different working contexts. The problem with taskbars is, that they were conceived in a time, when a user's working context could easily be represented in a single window. Computers were so limited, that only a handful of tasks could be performed with them and for each of these tasks there was an application (in one window). Thus, in the user interface, a window and a task were the same thing. As computers became more powerful and capable of many more tasks, it was uneconomical to still represent every combination of sub tasks in a separate window. Thus came modularization, which is a good thing. But it breaks the equivalence in the user interface of a window and a task. One remedy are virtual desktops, where a user's working context is just displayed as a complete desktop with any number of windows and the ability to switch contexts by switching from one desktop to another. Another is to allow grouping of windows, which does not really work. All windows from one application do rarely correspond to one working context, which leaves us with manual grouping. This would allow a user to group all windows into one working context, but it also seems kind of awkward in the 21st century. I think, the solution would be to agree on some fundamental concepts of how a user's desktop (and his mobile phone, his entertainment system, car, ...) work and then tackle the problems in front of us, because caring for the usability of taskbar grouping today is like trying to make it convenient to choose a caliber: to shoot yourself in the foot. Just my two cents. michael >> I admit that I didn't talked to sufficiently many people about this to >> achieve a reliable statistical data but I can say that every single person >> I asked disables this feature as soon as he installs his new DE. > > This is how my panel looks without grouping: > http://ktown.kde.org/~zrusin/panel.png > and this is only showing tasks from the current desktop. I have to click on > each and every item in the taskbar to find anything. While I'm certainly a > very > special kind of user, your argument for pointlessness of grouping tasks is > obviously bogus. > > z > _______________________________________________ > Plasma-devel mailing list > Plasma-devel@kde.org > https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel > _______________________________________________ Plasma-devel mailing list Plasma-devel@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
