Menus for multi-window items

Gimmie does a great job of combining launchers and open items (be they applications, documents, people or something else) in much the same way as the Mac OS X dock (and many others). To open an item, the launcher/item is clicked. To raise an iconified item, the item is clicked. To handle the case of multiple windows for one item, a click on the item raises the group and subsequent clicks cycle through the windows. This behaviour is simple and works well except that there is:

1. no way to open a new window from the launcher once the item is open; and
2. no way to directly focus a window except by cycling through all of them.

Now, in Gimmie, waving the mouse over items shows a detailed tool-tip. Perhaps this could be extended into a menu for items with more than one window (a bit like GNOME’s window list or Windows XP’s task-bar) – so users could select a specific window:

The menu would appear on mouse-over, disappear on mouse-out after, say, a 0.5 second delay (with maybe a slow visual fade or an instant change when moving to another icon), unless the mouse is moved to the tool-tip menu.

The item highlighted in blue is the currently focused item and the item with the italicised title is minimised or shade. When the item is clicked and windows are cycled, the blue highlight would move to reflect the cycling of window focus.

Maybe the number of windows could be overlaid on the item’s icon. If the item has only one window associated with it, just the tool-tip information would be displayed.

If this behaviour is too unpredictable, perhaps a right-click menu would suffice, albeit a little more undiscoverable.