Howard,
Thanks for the reply. What I think would be very useful would be copmparable to the multiple pages often found in graphics programs. Usually those programs allow you to establish a working area that is larger than the screen area, and that is usually established as some array of pages, like 1x2 or 2x1 or 2x2, etc. When you are working in the program you cannot see the full image unless you zoom out, but you can move to any portion of the image with the scroll bars.
I can conceive of the desktop behaving in the same fashion. The desktop bitmap could be larger than the visible screen area so that only part of the desktop is available at any one time, but you could easily move any part of the bitmap into the visible area of the screen, either by scrolling, or simply by paging to a predefined screen size area such as upper left, upper right, etc. A 2x2 page array would be like having a 4 monitor system physically configured into two upper monitors and two lower monitors, except that instead of moving your eyes from monitor to monitor you move the part of the bitmap you want to see into the single monitor in front of you.
I can imagine other ways of doing somthing comparable to this. For example, if windows let you control the arangement of active task icons in the taskbar, and to group the tasks, then clicking on a task icon would move it to the front (as it does now) and show only the visible windows in that group rather than all visibe windows.
Hope that makes it clear.
Dan |
