Keep a single wallpaper in multitasking view

[danirabbit]

Currently in Multitasking view, we have a background that is a static blurred copy of your wallpaper and then each workspace is another copy of your wallpaper on top of it. I'm not sure it makes a ton of sense. It's kind of weird. So I was playing with a couple of ideas of having a single wallpaper and either the workspaces are like lenses that bring it into focus or blur it, but they aren't copies of the wallpaper themselves, just filtering the wallpaper from the background

Workspaces are bringing it into focus:

Workspaces are blurring it:

[wpkelso]

My gut says workspaces as a focusing lens rather than a blurring lens makes for a stronger metaphor. Workspaces being the focus point also means there wouldn't need to be an unblurring as the interface shifts out of multitasking, which I think would look a bit strange.

[danirabbit]

Yeah I'm unsure how to do a motion mockup but it's something I don't think I've seen done before and could be a really cool effect

[wpkelso]

Maybe something could be done in Penpot?

[ProgramCrafter]

I would prefer it if windows' contents continued to be visible from multitasking view (e.g. some are still so bugged that they do not render correctly in fullscreen but fine over the workspace), so I am against this blur idea.

[danirabbit]

Yes windows would still appear normally. This mockup doesn't include windows or all of the elements of the switcher or like a whole lot of things. It was only mocking up the appearance of the workspace cards themselves and not meant to be a 1:1 representation of everything on screen

[leolost2605]

I'm currently doing some prototyping with the focus version and I wondered what should happen when switching workspaces. Do we really stick with the focus i.e. we really only move the focus and the background stays static? This would break with the whole a workspace is its own desktop metaphor though (at least IMO). Or do we still keep a wallpaper per background? This would break the focus metaphor though

Here a video of the prototype with keeping a background per workspace (ignore the missing borders and the stutters are from the video):
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/39d4c6bb-d373-4924-9a7d-658f94f59805