Prototypes: Viewing minimized/recent documents

This was a feature Apple prototyped but never shipped that was near and dear to my heart. The feature addressed two things.

First, people often remember the app they used to create a document or when they worked on it last. It’s harder to remember the name of the document or where they put it. I see people freeze up when the OS asks them where to file something and what to name it. I think this is still a great shortcoming in macOS.

In addition, there’s the question of why does it matter what the name or location of a file is? Why waste time naming and filing things away if you can find it because you remember you created it in MS Word yesterday?

Secondly, when it came to minimized windows, especially those minimized into the application icon—a feature that still exists today—I saw that people would perceive those windows as lost.

Minimized windows

In the mid-2000s, there was an effort to address these two issues, but the focus was on the less-interesting-to-me minimized windows issue. How…