Start and application navigation

摘要

Described herein are techniques to facilitate efficient application navigation by a user. In one embodiment, two or more scrollable surfaces contain application icons. One surface may have a first type of application icon and may be a user-customized surface akin to a desktop. Usually, only one of the surfaces is active and displayed at a given time. The user can swap one surface into view and the other surface out of view. The active surface is independently scrollable; when a given surface is swapped out and then swapped back in, despite any scrolling of the intervening surface, when the given surface is swapped back into view it returns at the same position it had before being swapped out. Another embodiment may provide optimizations to enhance performance and responsiveness by pre-rendering imagery of an off-screen surface. Caching logic may be used to assure that the imagery is correct.

主权项

1. A method performed by a computing device comprising storage, a display, and a processor, the method for a user to selectively alternate between displaying a first surface and displaying a second surface in a view area, either able to be scrolled only in opposite directions of a first linear dimension relative to the view area and only when the other is not displayed in the view area, the method comprising:
displaying the first surface in the view area of the display, the first surface comprising first graphic application representations respectively representing a first set of applications installed on the computing device, wherein the first surface is able to be interactively scrolled by the user, wherein the first surface is interactively scrolled to a scroll position relative to the view area; receiving a first input indicating that the second surface is to be activated, and in response displaying the first surface moving in a first direction of a second linear dimension out of the view area while displaying the second surface, at a last scrolled position thereof, moving in the first direction of the second linear dimension into the view area until the first surface is no longer displayed in the view area, wherein the second surface comprises second graphic application representations respectively representing a second set of applications installed on the computing device, wherein the second surface is able to be interactively scrolled by the user, wherein the second set of applications is a superset of the first set of applications; and receiving a second input indicating that the first surface is to be activated, and in response displaying the second surface moving in a second direction of the second linear dimension out of the view area while displaying the first surface moving, according to the scroll position thereof, in the second direction of the second linear dimension into the view area until the second surface is no longer displayed in the view area and the first surface is displayed according to the prior scroll position thereof.