Bernstein, et al.
Summary:
Taskpose is a combination of a window manager and a task manager. It determines which windows are stuck in a common task and group those windows together when Taskpose is called up (the presentation draws heavily from Mac OS X's Expose). It also tries to determine which windows are the most important and enlarges the important windows' size.
The window importance and window relations are based on window switching. The more a window is switched to, the more important it becomes. And the relationships between windows are developed by monitoring how many times Window A switches to Window B and vice versa. The windows then move around the screen to congregate with similar windows. The more important a window is, the larger the thumbnail becomes. The larger, more important windows have a static tendancy and the smaller, related windows are attracted to them.
After a week long user study, Taskpose was found to be useful but still had some weaknesses. Users tended to like Taskpose. It was very useful when the open windows were too numerous for the Windows Taskbar to appropriately handle. There were two prominent shortcomings of Taskpose. First, it did not recognize "parent-child" relationships, such as a buddy list and the chat windows. Second, when multiple projects were being worked on simultaneously, the two projects would merge in Taskpose.
Discussion:
Taskpose's presentation takes from Expose, which I really like. However, its usefulness falls short due to the two problems discovered during the user study, especially the second shortcoming. If these issues could be fixed, it could be useful and would make window switching quicker and require less mental work. Another problem, which is mentioned in the paper, is that importance and relationships are solely based on window switching. Importance should also include the time a window is active.
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