Jack Wallen over on TechRepublic posted an interesting piece about a discussion that’s been buzzing on the Ayatana mailing-list over the last few days.
It centers around an idea that, like other proposals we’ve featured the last few weeks, seeks to make use of the space left by the moving of window control buttons to the left.
‘Esfera’ is the name of the concept and it’s too awesome not to explain here.
Esfera
Esfera introduces a new gesture based control to window borders that can do some pretty spiffy stuff. In the mock-up below it is the giant blue dot “3 times wider than normal” buttons
Esfera represents the window; think of the blue dot as the window.
For example: –
- Clicking Esfera and moving it to the top maximizes the window, moving it to the bottom minimizes.
- Moving Esfera to the left or the right places it on the left/right workspace
Now remember we said Esfera is a gesture based control? The idea is that: –
- A user clicks on Esfera and then proceeds to make an ‘X’ with it. The window closes.
- Esfera moved in a semi-circle motion; the window turns and the back is shown to the user
Being able to see/use the ‘back’ of a window presents many, many possibilities – notes, application related activities/launchers/files, etc.
As Jack Wallen says – “The ideas are limitless.”
Other ideas have been put forward include more ‘simple’ gestures to speed up workflow such as: –
- Dragging Esfera from Totem to PiTiVi results in video being opened in PiTiVi
- Esfera of OpenOffice document dragged onto Esfera of Nautilus’ document saved in that place.
- Clicking on Esfera to see an application menu. (Similar to Izo’s replacement buttons we posted about earlier)
Thoughts
Out of all the current ‘right-hand side replacement actions’ mooted or proposed this one is certainly the most exciting. Sadly I’m not sure if all of it is actually feasible. That said i’ll be following the discussion closely from now on and keep you posted!
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Read the full Esfera idea .pdf @ https://lists.launchpad.net/ayatana/pdf8VmdTSCOL8.pdf
All pictures copyright/belong to Pablo Quirós
Story via | TACH0, TechRepublic