Comments on: Squib of the day: Live previews in alt-tab

By: Guyou

Guyou — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 19:06:54 +0000

Preview in alt-tab is just great: Thanks.

Is there any plan to add preview in desktop switching? This could be usefull too.

By: jeff

jeff — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 02:56:01 +0000

I agree with John (previous comment), I find that thumbnails tend to distract me with composite metacity. I kinda liked the simplicity of just having icons.

What I am suggesting is this: keep the thumbnails, but make the icons much bigger on top of them. Maybe have half of the overlaying space be used by the icon.

Also, more importantly, please scale the text according to the screen width to make it big and easy to read.

By: Squib of the day: speed up alt-tab under compositing - …for the adult in you

Squib of the day: speed up alt-tab under compositing - …for the adult in you — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 12:01:16 +0000

[...] there’s a common bug that it hits. Fixing this would also mean that we got to have animated previews [...]

By: John

John — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 10:49:26 +0000

As much as I like the gee-whiz factor with Alt-Tab thumbnailing, I’ve found it distracting. I don’t know if this is a personal bias, a case of being set in my ways, or a true reflection of usability factors.

I’ve used composited Metacity for around six months now, after using the “old” Metacity (and various versions of Windows and OS X) for years before. While the thumbnails have occasionally helped to distinguish between multiple windows of the same app, more often they’ve made it difficult for me to switch between apps.

I agree with Frej-as-anonymous’s comments about the usage of that small space: an icon has been optimized for that small space, whereas a thumbnail is representing a small percentage of the useful content that makes it possible to distinguish. When shown thumbnails of a sparse white Web page and a text document open in gEdit, I still have to rely on the icons to decide which app to select – but now, the icon is secondary and harder to find visually than in a purely icon-only list.

I think that thumbnailing (live or not) is better relegated to an Exposé-style switcher, and that Alt-Tab should revert to icons. Or perhaps a GConf option for Alt-Tab thumbnailing – yes, I understand the can of worms that suggestion opens. :-)

By: Carl Holmberg

Carl Holmberg — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 10:27:07 +0000

I think Jon Nettletons idea is a really nice solution. I mainly use OS X and really like seeing only the icons in Cmd-Tab, but having a preview appear after a delay would help in Metacitys case because of Gnomes and OS X’s different application vs. document paradigms.

By: Jon Nettleton

Jon Nettleton — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 02:21:10 +0000

Wow, I am always amazed when this bug continues to pop back up. Anyone thought of having alt+tab just display icons, but staying on a selection for a fraction of a second generates a screenshot or live preview of the window selected? This should make quick alt+tabbing possible. We don’t waste time and cpu creating pixmaps for windows we don’t care about. We get a visual identifier when we have multiple windows and we aren’t sure which ones we want. Any takers?

By: Andreas Nilsson

Andreas Nilsson — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 00:26:59 +0000

@Thomas Thurman: oh, sorry, misunderstood that (and maybe I should fix my alt+tab keys) :)
Yeah, that other thing sounds rather useless. Why would anyone want to have that?

By: Frej

Frej — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 21:16:44 +0000

Oops, posted as anon before. Thought openid would handle name/email :(.

Yeah, I know how it looks :) (using metacity+compositor, thanks!!!).

I still think that doing preview in expose is a better solution. It might be possible to come up with preview+icon solution that works great, I haven’t tried ;).

The problem, is that preview only helps in cases where the same icon is shown twice (2xInkscape), but it in all other cases it’s significantly worse. It solves one issue but it’s much worse for the general case.

But it is pure speculation – I have no data to back it up.

PS:
One small issue with the current solution. Icons are aligned horizontally, so it’s harder to ’scan’ with the eyes.

By: Thomas Thurman

Thomas Thurman — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 19:28:49 +0000

@anonymous: But we do in fact show icons with the thumbnails. Does your objection to thumbnailing still stand in that case?

By: anonymous

anonymous — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 19:20:37 +0000

@Simone Malacarne
Actually OS X doesn’t do thumbnail-alt-tab. But a big icon (128×128). Probably because it’s much faster for human minds to recognize the email icon(it’s in the dock/panel too!) rather than a thumbnail of, say evolution.

For the rest, as you guessed, I actually think that thumbnailing a window is very a bad idea.

Think of an icon as a graphical identifactor. Thumbnailing actually breaks this pretty bad.

Second, there is no benefit. Thumbnailing (128×128) a window (conservative say 1024×768) shows 2% of the pixels (or 2% of the original information). Think about doing this on a normal laptop (1400×900) it’s less than 1 percent!

For the live preview/’thumbnail’ we have exposè, here it makes sense since it we window size is as big as possible, instead of 128×128.

Pretty please with sugar on top, Kill this thumnbnail ‘feature’, it’s eyecandy that doesn’t help – use expose for live previews/thumbnails. And plain icons for ALT+TAB. I know it sucks when having two inkscapes open, but then use expose or show the titles of all windows below the icon. (Inkscape could should the title,path or name of drawing for distinguishing serveral icons).