Designing Aero Snap

In the early days of windowing systems, there was competition between the "overlapping" approach (i.e. what everyone uses today) and "tiling", where visible windows carve up the screen.

Inevitably, the overlapping approach won but it's a shame that all the benefits of tiling have been largely ignored for so long since a hybrid model is so easy to imagine.

I question the wisdom of Aero Snap expanding on Windows' notorious modal maximize behavior. The only benefit it offers is remembering the position of your window before you maximized. That same functionality could be captured by simply keeping a history of all resize operations and having "restore" step back through the history. This would be far more intuitive and more powerful.

For more info about tiling and utilities that let you do it in Windows: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager