windowed mode right edge spread selection needs animation

[kevin gunn]

when in windowed mode, invoke right edge spread (through swipe or mouse pressure)
currently selecting an application in the spread is a hard feeling switch to the focus on the application

---------Desired design-----------------
When selection happens from the switcher:
1) hide the switcher immediately
2) focus on the selected application and animate its scale value from 0.98 to 1 during SnapDuration and StandardEasing

[Michael Zanetti (mzanetti)]

So far this is intentional and wanted by design. Also matches with unity7. Anyhow, added ubuntu-ux to give input.

[Vesa Rautiainen (vesar)]

The current design is intentional for few reasons.

First of all the switcher view is visually quite heavy already. Maybe not so much when accessed via edge push or gesture but in simple alt-tab use case. Adding an animation, for example selected app moving to its place, would be too much every single time you use alt-tab to switch between windows. Also in that case we should consider the opposite animation when entering the spread (surfaces moving from their places to the spread) which would be superheavy and hard to implement nicely since the z-stacking order is reversible in spread than in normal windowed mode.

Secondly in the current design the spread surfaces are square to have balanced look and feel and also enable nice looking stacking at the ends. That means cropping of the actual window content to fit in the square without stretching. Not sure how nice it would look to animate that cropping between the states.

Thirdly, if the item that is selected is already the topmost item on the desktop and animates its place when selected it means that the same surface is shown twice during the animation. Unless we hide the actual surface on the desktop right when the animation starts to avoid duplication. This might be ok but we haven't tried it out.

If you have any ideas how to ease the transition a bit feel free to propose.

[Vesa Rautiainen (vesar)]

I reconsidered this use case and undrstood that the switch from the switcher to the desktop is a bit abrupt. We want to keep the transition snappy so that it wound't start to annoy the user in the long run. I created a prototype of it and with a little bit animation it feels much better and smoother. In addition now the switch is in line with what happens on the phone switcher at the moment.

[Vesa Rautiainen (vesar)]

This rough gif gives an idea how the selection animation should look

[Vesa Rautiainen (vesar)]

Ignore the previous animation attached as gif in this bug report. The desired UX is now updated in the bug description section and that is much simpler and works in all edge cases as well.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package unity8 - 8.11+16.04.20160310.4-0ubuntu1

---------------
unity8 (8.11+16.04.20160310.4-0ubuntu1) xenial; urgency=medium

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