emphasis on transparent windows, 3D cascading miss the point. the reason why plain old cascading is not good enough is simple: when you click a window, the titlebars of the windows placed slightly below it will no longer be visible.
notice that when the user clicked window A, it covered the titlebar of window B and all other windows in the cascaded group below it. now, instead of just changing focus, what if A and B also swaps positions when A is clicked, i.e. the current window smoothly moves to the bottom while all other windows re-arrange to maintain the cascade. this way, all titlebars will be visible at all times because the focused window is always at the bottom.
the user should also be able to cascade a selected group of windows from the taskbar, and have multiple cascade groups. this is what power users often need — a quick and simple way to keep more than the usual number of windows on screen and switch between them quickly, preferably with a single click.
kinda like the way the GTalk client handles multiple chat windows. iss nice ya.
true… when two or more GTalk chat windows are tiled together vertically, clicking one causes the other to collapse to just show the title bar.
what i’m suggesting is cascading with automatic re-shuffle so that all title bars continue to be visible
Maybe something along the lines of the BeOS window stack?