| OMG YES YES YES! That is exactly perfectly described. When you are switching tabs the 3rd application messes things up. And what is worse is that what if the third application was an accident, now you have to re-alt-tab everything to the proper order. Its kind-of the same problem as when you send out emails. Why can't your email client remember that while there are 5 harrys in your address book, only Harry C is the one you send emails to and thus should be on the top of the auto completion list (FF3 betas missed this feature, FF3 has this now). The problem is: 1) If we do long-term computer learning, the person might judge that this feature is useless. A second person sitting at the computer screws the whole deal. 2) If we do a manual way with "rearrange" were still screwed. Too much work for temporary windows. 3) If the computer guesses wrong, were also screwed because now were stuck with an incorrect ordering. Consider this one: What if instead of trying to get alt-tab to work right, we try to get a consistent (press alt-tab x number of times to get from application foo to application bar) which will remain consistent no matter how many windows are open. So if you go from Eclipse -> Firefox, Eclipse -> Firefox -> Twitter, Firefox -> Eclipse, Firefox -> Eclipse -> Twitter, the user can now form a great habbit: If you are in FF, alt-tab = Eclipse, if you are in FF 2xalt-tab = twitter. Etc. I think a simple formula of Frequency of Use will help. If a habbit is frequent (person switches from application foo -> bar, even using non-alt-tab ways) we can use frequency of use to determine the ordering. Otherwise fall back to LRU (we can always ignore some random tabbing cases). Since a person will keep the recent "places" they been to in their head, it will feel intuitive for them. |