KamuSan's Journal: Desktop stacks

Based on a discussion here

Say you work with a GUI in which you could make a link to every document (email, text document, web page) you work with by just dragging and dropping it's icon somewhere. Then you could simulate this idea by making a folder on your desktop for each group/task/situation that you can think of. Say, I get an email from a friend about an article I should read. This article refers to another article I think he should read. I create a new folder on my desktop, name it 'Turning gold into lead', and drag and drop his email, the articles and my email into this folder. Now I've got a nice stack of things that are related to eachother.

It would be even nicer if I opened an item in this folder and the window I had open for that item jumps open. Or if I could open all the items in the folder at once. Or that I could close all the items in the folder that I have open by just clicking on the folder.

I tried to play with this in OS X, but this concept needs 3 things:

• You should be able to drag the icon in the window you're using to your desktop stack/folder to instanty create a symbolic link. In OS X this doesn't work for all apps, just for Finder and Safari, but not Mail.
• Clicking on a symbolic link should bring up an open window if the document is already open.
• You should be able to open, hide or close all documents/windows with a simple context menu of the desktop stack.

Wish I had time to build a hack for KDE. But my first point is most important and depends on 3rd part apps to be able to create a link form a window icon.

See also heironymouscoward's Journal