Sometimes i have a window on my desktop that is either something annoying that i don't want to see (but necessarily has a window), or is something i could just close, but has annoyed me enough that closing is too good for it.
Instead, i propose "window inertia". Essentially, when this feature is enabled, windows express physical inertia rather than stopping wherever you drop them. With this feature, you can click on it to grab it, wind up with the mouse, and FLING it into the nether-reaches of off-visible-screen-area purgatory from whence it shall never return.
Maybe one day you'll even get a postcard from it's been on the road for a while and remembers to write.
In an alternate version of this, perhaps the computer's idea of spacetime is also curved, and eventually the window wraps around and at some point will come whizzing back across your screen from the other side. (necessarily littered with bumperstickers of where it's been, ala bugs bunny's baseball)-- cameron, Feb 28 2003 Biggest problem with this (for once, I speak from experience) is that the window will sit there continuing to use up memory and CPU cycles and things. Which, given how much it has been annoying you, is probably the problem you started with.
I find the "End Task" and "End Process" features in Task Manager perfectly satisfying.-- DrCurry, Feb 28 2003 I can certainly see the appeal. Maybe throwing it off the screen can equal "close program" to the CPU.-- snarfyguy, Feb 28 2003 Do they have collisions? You fling something out there into the low-priority nether regions, and bump something else which caroms into view... after an absence of, perhaps, weeks.-- lurch, Feb 28 2003 I'm all for throwing things ;) Maybe you could crumple it up before flinging (maybe holding down the shift key before clicking could wad up the annoying X10 camera ads and enable the inertia). Alternatively, you could aim it at something, similar to launching crumpled papers across the room into the trash can.-- mandy, Mar 01 2003 ...or shoot it, or paint some hate graffiti on it and email it to whoever sent it, drop napalm/bombs/toxic waste (any of several kinds) on it...-- galukalock, Mar 01 2003 Could I just fling it to the person sitting at the computer in the cubicle next to me? Then we could just pretend it was a kind of electronic beach ball and then bounce it all over the office! Maybe it could spontaneously explode or expire after the 10th person touches it on their PC.-- pathetic, Mar 01 2003 Maybe multiple monitors. You could fling it off this screen onto the other. You could set the left and right screen boundaries to be on or off, so the window could continue on to nothingness, or it could bounce off the adjacent screen and come back to you...-- Cedar Park, Mar 01 2003 not such a good idea, since it would waste memory and slow your comp, but I'm nuetral for now.-- Quadrax, Jun 24 2005 Remember people: The original idea was not to close the program that spawned the window, but to make the window itself unable to be seen while the program continues to execute.
You can already kind of do this by dragging the window to the bottom of the screen or something.
The problem I see with your idea is that throwing the window off-screen would have to remove the taskbar entry as well, and then how do you get back to it later?
You could always cascade the windows, but not everybody knows how to do that, and doing it messes up all your other windows.-- Psudomorph, Feb 27 2007 Maybe even have a sort of string attached to it. If you want a window back, you simply point in the direction it went, wait for a given signal that you have found the window, and then pull.-- daseva, Feb 27 2007 This would be sooooo fun to play with in a networked enviroment with plenty of computers. Throwing things onto the boss's computer only to have it burnt up by the firewall and dumped in the recycle bin!-- cpf, Feb 28 2007 Isn't inertia the quality of standing still? I think you mean windows ertia.-- phundug, Feb 28 2007 I may be wrong, but inertia should be an expression of how the mass of something makes it more difficult for it to change velocity (either from a standstill to some speed x, or from some speed y back to a standstill) f=ma and all that-- zen_tom, Feb 28 2007 with the Surface environment any many other experimental setups using touchscreens, this is now baked.-- loonquawl, Apr 03 2009 random, halfbakery