[Cuis] Fixing the Taskbar

[Ken Dickey]

On Wed, 30 Oct 2013 04:39:16 -0700
Casey Ransberger <casey.obrien.r at gmail.com> wrote:

> This is something I've meant to address for a couple of years. Unfortunately my life has not been conducive to much volunteer work. 
> 
> I have a project on my disk with a rather noble aim: to make the Taskbar not suck anymore without adding a single new class to the system. I think it's doable but I haven't had time to tack the work. 
> 
> I have some ideas about how to do this, but there are some interesting questions... 
> 
> If we want to throw out most of the idea of "application modality," and still keep a system that's both usable in essence and familiar to newcomers, what might that look like?

Stepping back a bit, a user interface in general is about visibility and control.  The fundamental questions are; Where am I? What can I do here?

Thinking about scalable user interfaces I think about what I would want to be with me in a 2.5d to 3d (Croquet, the (sur)real world with me and "an electronic device" with Cuis).

Basically, I want to be able to "carry things with me in my pocket" as I traverse scales, landscapes, worlds, whatever.  I want map and compass and a weather report, basic communications, my swiss army knife (Cuis). 

In a scalable UI, this pocket (dock/taskbar) could be a place where the visible objects I want to remember and have with me are in the same scale and access location.  So I think of morphs (which could be windows, movies, worlds) just scaled to fit into a taskbar.  Live icons if you will.  In the Taskbar, the "iconized window" is just the full window scaled to fit rather than just a thumbnail.

We have the World menu, which is great for things which organize linguistically (cognitive structure based on concept hierarchies).

I think the Taskbar should be like this for the visual cognitive realm.

How do I visually distinguish scaled down things which look similar?  The Mac dock comes to mind, just enlarge slightly the image under the cursor.  How do I group things?  Squeak's world thumbnails come to mind.  How do I find things?  ...


Just some ideas to play with..
-KenD