Comment 2 for bug 1488148

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.