Patent ID: 8555193

Claim:
A method of transforming an appearance of a display of a computer that includes at least one or a plurality of windows displayed in a scrollable viewport, the method of transforming based upon a user commanding the computer to add a new window or to remove an existing window and comprising the steps of: providing a layout manager that is executed by a processor of the computer and contains a plurality of instructions to cause the computer to automatically arrange placement of the one or a plurality of windows within a representation of an extensible display area of the scrollable viewport stored in a memory wherein a subset of the representation corresponds to a viewable area corresponding to a visually perceptible viewable area of the display associated with the computer, and an extension area corresponds to a non-viewable area of the representation, wherein the layout manager: creates a log of the one or the plurality of windows and a scrolled offset of the viewable area, and monitors which one of the one or the plurality of windows is an active window, such that any portion of the one active window that is within the visually perceptible viewable area is displayed and other ones of the plurality of windows that are not the one active window are displayed as background windows that are spatially oriented around or behind the one active window, wherein some of the background windows have portions within the visually perceptible viewable area that are behind the active window and are occluded and also portions within the visually perceptible viewable area that are around the active window and are not occluded; in response to the user commanding the computer to add the new window, the layout manager automatically designating the new window as the active window, positioning the new window within the representation of the scrollable viewport, wherein one or more locations within the representation are reserved as non-occluding locations where no new windows are placed, wherein the positioned new window does not occlude the reserved locations, and wherein the positioned new window occludes at least portions of one or more windows in locations within the representation that are not reserved as non-occluding, and automatically scrolling the representation so that a portion of the new window is within the visually perceptible viewable area; and in response to the user commanding the computer to remove the existing window, the layout manager automatically determining an immediately previous active window and designating the immediately previous active window as the active window, and automatically scrolling the representation so that a portion of the immediately previous active window is within the visually perceptible viewable area.