An off-the-wall suggestion.
I'm using Groupy to bring order to the chaos of windows on the desktop, so that I put nearly all windows into one group, then I can simply and quickly tab between the apps by mousing along the top of the screen.
However, please take a look at Microsoft Onenote. There they took the revolutionary step of distributing tabs along the left and top edges of the screen. Thus they acknowledged that the notes exist in a 2-dimensional space (actually 3-dimensional but I'm simplifying). By putting the first dimension tabs along the left edge, and the 2nd dimension tabs along the top edge, they made it so much easier to see what is going on.
You can see where I'm going with this. I'd like the option to put the Groupy tabs along the left edge, well actually, any edge. Like many things in IT, I don't know how nice this will be till I try it, but I think its got a good chance of really helping.
Of course that raises new questions for the choice of having tabs along the left edge, like:
- should the text be horizontal or vertical? I prefer vertical (to save space) but configurable is best
- If horizontal, how wide should the tab be? should it truncate? or should it wrap over multiple lines?
OK, now that you've assimilated that idea, I will push it one step further.
What if Groupy offers you tab bars on the Left, Bottom and Right edges at the same time? Then you could leave the top edge for where your brain automatically finds the in-app tabs, like those your browsers like Chrome and Firefox will give you. You can then use the other 3 edges for grouping your apps.
- Say, the Left edge is for selecting from your personal data and admin apps, so Calendar, Contacts, Whatsapp and Thunderbird would live there.
- The bottom edge could be for your main office work, like Adobe Acrobat Reader, MS Word, Excel, etc.
- Maybe the right edge, if present, could hold some system monitoring and admin tools, plus your password manager.
Obviously if you are going to use all 3 edges, you really need to maximise the Groupy window to fill the whole screen. Then Groupy has effectively become the Windows Screen manager, because even after 20 years MS are too dumb to do the job properly, LOL,
And it raises another question: e.g. for your PDF reader, do you want each pdf to appear in Adobe Reader as a tab (and Adobe Reader only occurs once in the Groupy tab bar), or do you want to see multiple occurrences of the Adobe app in your Groupy bar? Once again, I've no idea, so a configurable option is best.
From what I know of Microsoft, they will screw up their Sets idea on first release. However, if you do this right, you could use the opportunity to gain a bigger uptake of Groupy, once people start talking about the tabs-for-apps idea that Sets will raise with all Windows 10 users.
