TabOrder

A NeXT-inspired task manager.

There are no good NeXTian desktops for Windows. The only attempt at such a thing is WinStep, which has the up-front flaw of being payware—and bloated, and ugly, &c. My primary fascination with NeXTSTEP¹ is all about the Dock, which is remarkable in its flexibility and utility²—perhaps even moreso than its OS X counterpart!

Being able to relocate tiles just about anywhere on the screen is nice; having multiple docks is nice; having dockapps (as Window Maker people call them) is nice. Other nice things: storing documents, minimized windows and running applications variously in the dock. NeXTSTEP didn't really have the storing documents part, but we can improvise a bit since it's a fairly logical extension.

So this is what TabOrder currently looks like:

The · button is a gripper; right-clicking will open a context menu, double-clicking will toggle the visibility of the Windows taskbar. There are two principle tile types that sit on TabOrder, saved objects and windows.

Saved Objects

Files, folders, and even OLE objects (just about any data you can drag and drop or put on the clipboard) can be added to the dock by dragging it to the gripper. Dragging it off will allow you to copy or move it into another window. By default, these shortcuts are assumed to be transient, and aren't remembered. To change this behaviour, right click on the object and chose Remember. It is also possible to use the traditional dock icon behaviour by setting specific values in the Details panel (accessible from a saved object's right click menu.)

Windows

Windows are normally shown with a 32x32 icon with two lines of descriptive text beneath them (differing quite radically from the NeXT format), a consequence of some fairly peculiar Windows limitations (48x48 icons aren't retrievable for running tasks; only 16x16 and 32x32.) If the window title fits within one line, the program's filename will be used to generate the second row. It is possible to override this display with special 48x48 icons; simply place them in .\icons\?.exe.ico and restart TabOrder. This allows the concealment of particularly hideous application icons, captions, and small icons all at once.

Normally, TabOrder only displays minimized windows. Right clicking on the gripper will allow the user to remove even these, or show all windows. If the current behaviour is to display windows (either all or just minimized) then holding shift and waving the mouse over the window will invert whether non-minimized windows are listed.

More to come!

Footnotes

¹ Herein capitalised thus.

² I mean, other than that, it's mostly just the menu system, you know? And, frankly, I prefer the Apple/Amiga approach of a horizontal topbar, though desktop right-click menus are unquestionably 'in,' too.