Patent ID: 7669140

Claim:
A method in a computing system for providing a user interaction scheme comprising: defining a sidebar of a user interface; requesting an application appear in a sidebar when minimized, said application having a taskbar application button associated therewith; and minimizing the application upon receiving a minimize command to a rich minimized application (RMA), said minimizing including hiding the taskbar application button associated with the application, said RMA comprising a restore option allowing the user to restore the application, said minimizing comprising: revealing a tile in the sidebar to represent the RMA, wherein the sidebar configured to display a plurality of tiles corresponding to a plurality of RMAs, wherein revealing the tile includes displaying a sub-set of live-data provided by the application when not minimized to the RMA and a sub-set of interactive application features provided by the application when not minimized to the RMA in the tile, wherein the sub-set of interactive applications features do not include features related to sizing or re-sizing of the tile, and wherein the sub-set of interactive application features are selected by the application and the sub-set of interactive application features are determined to be useful by the application when minimized; and persisting the revealed tile in the sidebar when the user logs off the computing system wherein the revealed tile remains in the sidebar upon the next login of the user.