Murphy's dashboard

I don't know how easy it is to utilize core animation, but I think apps that resize windows such as SizeUp and Cinch would really benefit from it. I am thankful that SizeUp resizes the window so quickly when I press a shortcut, but I think it would help the mind process what is actually happening to the window if you could see it quickly resize from its original form to the newer one. It could make the transitions feel smoother and more responsive.

A great example of core animation is dragging a tab from and back onto the tab bar in Safari 4. The transition is smooth and it helps you understand what action you are performing in the program.

I know some of the ideas I'm posting might be farfetched or low on your priority list, but I just thought I would share them so you have more ideas if you eventually make a plugin set.

First, since hot corners are the easiest targets to hit on the screen, it would really be nice if you could set hot corners to automatically resize your windows into some sort of configuration. While SizeUp currently resizes one window at a time, the hot corners would be a good way to quickly tile your windows across the screen (I mentioned the tiling idea here). Just as there are the options in exposé to show all windows or to show application windows, there could be an option to tile all windows or to tile the current application windows. Just fling the mouse quickly to a hot corner, and your windows suddenly move and resize to take fill all of the screen real estate.

The next exposé idea I had pertains to the "Show all windows" and "Show application windows" functions. If you currently want to arrange some windows using SizeUp, you need to select one, put it in the appropriate place, select another, put it in the appropriate place, and so on. I think a better way might be to drag the windows into configuration using the existing show windows exposé functions. Basically, when you show all windows using exposé, there would be hotspots in the corners and sides of the screen that you could drag windows to, and when you leave exposé, they would be arranged properly. Here is a quick mockup I made showing off how it could look:



Just drag each window to the light areas corresponding to the different divisions of the screen, and then click any of the dark area inside of exposé to finish and the windows will rearrange. I think it would be an intuitive way to manage windows (since exposé is already so useful for finding and selecting windows).

The last suggestion I had, and it is also shown in the mockup, is having close buttons next to each window in exposé. I often need to go through and close a bunch of windows I have open, and I currently need to activate each window/application one at a time to close it. I think it would be a very useful window management feature if you could quickly close some of your open windows in exposé. You could click on the close button (which I took from Dashboard) to close a window, and if you held the button for a second or two, it could quit the application.

This is an idea for a plugin I had if you end up making a plugin-based window management system.

The only window management app I have seen other than SizeUp is called Zooom: http://coderage-software.com/zooom/in...
I like SizeUp more because the keyboard shortcuts for resizing windows are great, but Zooom does make it a lot easier to move and resize windows using the mouse. Rather than having to hit the relatively small target of a program's title bar to move it, or the even smaller target of the bottom-right hand corner to resize it, Zooom enables you to move or resize the window by holding a hotkey and clicking anywhere inside of the window.

For example, if you set shift as the hotkey for move, you would just hold shift, click anywhere inside of a window, and move the mouse to drag the window around the screen. If you set ctrl for resize, you would hold ctrl, move the mouse in a certain direction, and the window either expands or contracts depending on the direction you move the mouse in. This makes windows large, easy targets to click on.

One thing that I think is a little strange about operating systems is that they let you put parts of programs off of the screen borders, even though it doesn't do you much good having part of your program in an imaginary space where you can't see it. I think it would be better if the window started to resize as it was being moved off of the screen.

For example, if you started moving your browser against the right side of the screen, it would start shrinking horizontally from the right so that the window always fits entirely within the screen. Then, if the user were to move the program back to the left where it originally was, the program would grow horizontally as it was moved until it returned to the original size (the size it was at before it was squeezed against the side of the screen).

I think this functionality would make it really to manage windows because It would help you get a window fitting perfectly within the borders of the screen, and give you the ability to resize a window while moving it, killing two birds with one stone.