Proposal and evaluation of a window system that enables constructing workspaces

• Published in: Transactions of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence Vol. 26; no. 1; pp. 237 - 247
• Main Authors: Shibata, Hirohito, Omura, Kengo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Japanese
• Published: The Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence 2011
• Subjects: multitasking; task switching; window systems; workspaces
• ISSN: 1346-0714; 1346-8030
• DOI: 10.1527/tjsai.26.237

When we perform tasks in computers, we usually need to refer multiple documents of multiple applications to perform each task. Additionally we usually work in computers with switching multiple tasks consisting of multiple documents in parallel. We propose an extended window system called Docking Window Framework to support such multitasking situations in computers. The proposed system enables to construct a workspace consisting of multiple windows for each task and to easily switch workspaces. The characteristics of our system are (1) to provide docking window interface to easily construct workspaces, (2) to support operating multiple windows simultaneously, (3) to provide a tile layout of windows to reduce the overhead of window operations, and (4) to support saving and reconstructing workspaces. In this paper, we focused on the above first characteristics and carried out a experiment to evaluate the docking window interface. In the task of window arrangement, our system was 20.9 to 23.4% faster than a traditional window system. This indicates that our system provides effective framework to construct workspaces of multiple windows in comparison with previous proposals to support multitasking as well as traditional window systems.