So I’ve been using Unsanity’s WindowShade utility, taking advantage of both traditional windowshading and minimizing windows in place. I have started clumping mini-windows together, and I just realized that what is now available to the Mac community is a 2-tiered version of Raskin’s scale-free desktop, aka the Zooming User Interface (ZUI). Not bad for a start.

A nice little two-tiered Zooming User Interface.

The key aspect of WindowShade that permits the analogy is maintanance of spatial relationships. That is, I minimize a window in place, position it where I would like, forget about it for a while, return to it but restoring the window to full size, work a bit, then reminimize. Now doesn’t that window shink back down to the exact same place that I had put it before? Fantastic.