this little work in progress utility appears to be popping up in various blogs so it's about time DC mentioned it...
microsoft scalable frabric
http://research.micr.../research/downloads/ (about half way down the page).
it isn't perfect but for those of you into playing around with customising your GUI then it's worth looking at - i may even leave it running as it tends to fit exactly how i work.
disable the naff audio feature and play about with it - i think it has potential if they work on it further - maybe someone could pinch the idea and beat them to it.
anyway, it works like this...
windows aren't minimised anymore, instead they shrink to thumbnails at the side of the screen. you define your 'work' area and then have a border around it where the thumbnails will rest. you can then drag or click on active windows/thumbnails around the screen to bring them back into focus or shrink out of the way. this is all animated but in a rather jerky fashion.
i can well imagine that this idea has been around for quite a few years but not on a windows operating system. it's also not going to be much fun on a small monitor.
i just like the idea of having the small thumbnail previews of all the apps i'm running - it's unlikely to be part of windows vista maybe windows 2020 will use it - we'll all have 40 inch (at least) widescreen monitors by then so it'll make more sense to use this kind of GUI.
here's a screengrab - original resolution is 1920 x 1200, so i've shrunk it down by 50%.
(it doesn't work well with child windows like photoshop uses.)
