Windows 7 Taskforce

Pseudo2008 wrote on January 19, 2009, 4:39pm

Great Idea I hate having to move everything back where I had it before... Another pain in the butt problem to solve...

Patp1946 wrote on January 31, 2009, 8:30am

this would be a definite plus!

brock wrote on February 15, 2009, 3:08am

This should be done dynamically and not by a save/load system; I am going to denote this for its suggestion, which could definitely be improved upon.

.Chris wrote on March 3, 2009, 9:46pm

Whats worng with sugestions? you dont know what this site is about then you dont need to be here

techyfox wrote on February 4, 2010, 1:17pm

Windows really does need this feature but I agree with brock in that it should not be a user selectable option. It should just happen without any effort on the users part.

I thought of an example where a similar functionality is already present in Windows. When you choose to stretch wallpaper to your current desktop. Let's say your desktop is at 1280x800. The wallpaper will fill that entire space. Now if you change the resolution to 1680x1050, the wallpaper will again stretch, only now it will fill the entire 1680x1050 space. This makes sense and it works.

Now lets apply the way icon positioning works to wallpaper. If I select to stretch my wallaper to my desktops 1280x800 resolution, it will fill the entire screen. Now if i change resolution to something like 1680x1050, my wallpaper will no longer fill the entire screen, it will still be stretched to the previous 1280x800 size. This is obviously bad and would feel broken if that's how it really worked in Windows.

So icons should follow the same principle as wallpaper only it gets a little more complex for icon positioning but I think a simple solution could work something like this.

For each resolution I choose, the icons should remember where they are.

Example. My desktop is 1680x1050, I have a column of icons that fill the left hand side of the screen and the right hand side with space in the middle. These two columns fit my 1050 pixel height perfectly, I've spent ages getting them all lined up and spiffy.

Now if i change the resolution to 1280x800 what I believe should happen is the icons should forget where they were and all line up in columns from left to right.

Now if I once again move them around and get a nice arrangement in groups I like that all fit nicely within my 1280x800 space, Windows in the background should be remembering this.

Now I switch back to 1680x1050, the icons should jump back to the two column layout I made for them. If i switch to 1280x800 they should again snap to the positions I set for them at this resolution. If i choose a new resolution I haven't arranged icons for before, they should all just line up left to right.

With a feature like this, it should just work and need no user selectable options at all. So while I wouldn't label that as dynamically arranging them, I think seperate states for each resolution used would be a better description.

Just a suggestion :)

Patp1946 wrote on February 4, 2010, 7:34pm

I found the Fences application works well and does everything I need.

http://www.stardock.com/products/fences/index.asp?expirenag