I like the idea of making tiling window management more accessible. I'd be very happy if we saw more of this move into the mainstream window managers and operating systems. For example, when I open two terminals in OS X they have a habit of opening one on top of the other, when I invariably would rather have them side-by-side.
More intelligent window placement will eliminate a lot of mundane window-management work for the user, leading to a more pleasant computer experience.
If you haven't tried a tiling window manager, I suggest you do, and this looks like a great way to start.
Compiz has a "smart" window placement mode where it tries to place the window in the least "dense" location on screen, preferably empty space. It fills the screen in a left-right then top-bottom search.
Xmonad is a revelation for anyone who spends most of their day on the computer. It takes about a week or two to adapt, but it's a great productivity enhancement. Its really a kind of desktop construction kit: I find myself making layouts that suit my work, mood, and hardware. Like emacs or hypercard, it has that "quality without a name" thing about it. It changed the way I think about user interfaces: there are opportunities for the ideas from xmonad and xmonad-contrib to be applied to window and view management on all sorts of devices and environments.
I'm glad to see someone's really thought about and implemented a way to introduce others to this great piece of software.
Your comment made it to their twitter account, which is shown on their blog. So, starting on the comments page, you can click the link to the story, click the link in the sidebar to get to your comment, and click "parent" to get back to the comments page. :)
Isn't ending up back where you started the whole point of using a Y combinator? Fortunately xmonad is written in a language with lazy evaluation, otherwise the recursion would never terminate and we'd overflow the stack.
Sorry, too much functional programming on the brain...
It is still not nearly as pretty nor as user friendly as the mouse based tiling window manager that is built into Blender. The difference between bluetile and Blender is a bit like the difference between win3.1 and osx. They are so many years ahead of the game.
> Blender does not allow the windows to overlap, as they may in other programs. This is why Blender's interface is known as a non-overlapping window interface.
Download Blender, and try the things on this page. You will be blown away by the slickness and animations. There are also keyboard shortcuts for all of this, but we are talking about mouse driven tilers.
I wonder how this would this work for windows that can't be maximized, such as dialogue boxes. Does anyone have any experience using tiling managers here?
If you watch the video, there's a window in it that was designed to be a certain size (even though it's part of bluetile!), and it doesn't handle being shoved into an alien format well. Overlapping text, weirdly changing button shapes, etc.
More intelligent window placement will eliminate a lot of mundane window-management work for the user, leading to a more pleasant computer experience.
If you haven't tried a tiling window manager, I suggest you do, and this looks like a great way to start.