[sugar] alt-tabbing to the Journal

[Erik Garrison]

On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 11:43:57AM -0400, Robert Myers wrote:
> Tomeu,
> 
> >On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 10:26 PM, Erik Garrison <erik at laptop.org> wrote:
> >> A thought which has come up a few times in my exploration of activity
> >> switching performance, and a few times in conversations on the sugar
> >> list, is that the Journal shouldn't be included in the set of activities
> >> which can be alt+tab'ed to.
> >>
> >> The most compelling rationale is that there is already a dedicated
> >> button on the keyboard for it (F1).
> >
> >This comes up regularly and I think we have a ticket where people are
> >voting. I believe you can find the ticket if you search in this month
> >archives.
> 
> Is this #6251? That's the only trac that I see that makes sense here.
> 
> My 2c. Leave the Journal in the alt-tab ring. It's an activity. It
> just happens to be an activity that's always running. Think of the
> Finder on MacOS as a parallel example. 

The journal cannot be closed or saved.  It cannot be opened.  It's not
an activity, but part of the shell, both in aspect and in
implementation.

> Making it a special case that you have to use a special key to get to
> is more confusing than leaving it on the ring.

An access path is also in the frame.

Every time you alt+tab unintentionally to the Journal you waste time and
keyboard interaction.  This is why there is a dedicated key, to expedite
the process of finding the Journal without necessitating that users see
it when they don't want to.

> Continuing down that path, I think that the launcher pane should be
> treated more as just another activity, and also be on the alt-tab
> ring. Maybe it should also have an icon on the frame.

Further still, every single view/window in the window manager---
neighborhood view, launcher, and group view included--- could be on the
alt+tab stack.  This would be conceptually very simple.  But because
such windows can't be closed, users who aren't using them would have no
choice but to navigate through them on their way to what they want.

Erik