Gnome Shell Automatic Workspaces Mockup (Tiled View Follow-Up)

This is getting more interesting every day!

A while back we've told you about an interesting Unity mockup for managing multiple workspaces that automatically creates the workspaces and always keeps an empty workspace so you don't have to create the workspaces yourself (and you always have the number of workspaces that you actually need).

Unfortunately, Mark Shuttleworth didn't like the idea (at least the way it was described back then) so it seems like we won't have this in Unity. But on the other hand, it looks like we'll have it in Gnome Shell (not exactly the same, but the same concept is being used). Read on!

If you remember the Tiled View Gnome Shell mockup we've talked about yesterday, Jakub Steiner said "[... ] we still rely on the user to do workspace "management. So the next step is to make the Shell do the heavy lifting. Stay tuned." Well, today he posted another mockup that behaves a lot like the Unity workspaces mockup I've told you about in the beginning of the post:

• There are no empty workspaces (apart from the initial state of not having any windows open whatsoever). If there are no longer any windows on a particular workspace, it gets merged with the adjacent one. This is a bit different then Unity because in Gnome Shell, you'll never have an empty workspace (as opposed to the Unity mockup where you always have one empty workspace), but the base idea is the same: always have the number of workspaces you'll need, without having to create them yourself.
• To launch an application in a new workspace, you drop the launcher on the [X] target thumbnail. Similarly you can launch it onto existing workspace or move windows to a new/existing workspaces.

Also related to Gnome Shell: I've yet again updated the post on how to compile Gnome Shell in Ubuntu 10.10 so check it out if you want to try it yourself (but you won't get the automatic workspaces feature since this is a mockup for now).

Your thoughts?

[via Jakub Steiner]