That will get confusing, for example, sometimes desktop screen 9 will be swipe bottom right and other times swipe up, and will keep changing depending on what screen you are viewing. This will happen with all screens. And would require remembering a pattern if you want to avoid swiping to the wrong screen.

I think rather than remembering patterns, your original concept is better and far less confusing.

So just assign a specific direction to a specific desktop screen, e.g. swipe top left will always take you to 1st desktop, swipe up will always take you to 2nd desktop, swipe top right to always go to 3rd desktop screen and swipe left to always go 4th desktop screen and swipe right to always go to 5th screen etc, regardless of which screen you are currently on.

It will look something like this:

123
4 5
678

That way is much more simple and the desktop screens will not change direction ever. This will work perfectly for 8 desktop screens as there are 8 directions to swipe in and is an easy feature to use and easy to learn/remember.

For the 9th screen just have a double tap feature. So double tapping on any desktop screen always takes you to the 9th desktop screen.

Simple enough

This is a good idea as well, rather than 8 different swipes, just swipe up to bring a desktop selector which lets you choose what screen you wanna go to immediately.

Fast and efficient. Desktop selector would need to display all screens in a decent view though, so you can clearly see which one you want to go to, rather than have a thumbnail thats too small to see.

Gee, a year and a half on and I'm still finding new features. Cheers for the Conversation tip.

How about using MAG's Mediabar to open a list of icons giving the desktop numbers instead of the app icons as it does now. That way, we can access any desktop just by by holding the proximity sensor.

Not a bad idea at all, although I don't like the proximity sensor bit, since I end up accidently touching the proximity sensor alot :P
So for me this would cause more problems than it would solve.

But I think some people will miss the media bar function as its quite a popular feature. Plus having a 'dashboard' type view of all your desktop screens would be a pretty slick feature to compliment the CSSU

I think that the whole swiping idea for swiping onto desktops would be hard to achieve (I don't have any idea, but it's what it seems to me).
Maybe the easiest way to develop it could be an application in the background that can be opened with shortcutd or with an icon that we can put in every desktop (I don't like the latter too). Maybe it could be a status menu app, but I think it isn't the best option either.
What I really liked was the screenshot thing, said before by other user here (don't have the name of the author now). The desktop selector app running in the background would take screenshots of every desktop when called. It isn't as wonderful and good looking as the task selector, which is alive, but don't think we could never get that. Who knows.
It would be great to have this feature in the future

Thanks to all the community and specially for the CSSU team.

I'm fine with just using multiple swipes.

There are only a few rectangular options possible for a given number of screens (which I'd love to be able to select from ):
1x9
3x3
9x1 (current)

1x8
2x4
4x2
8x1 (current)

1x7
7x1 (current)

1x6
2x3
3x2
6x1 (current)

1x5
5x1 (current)

1x4
2x2
4x1 (current)

1x3
3x1 (current)

1x2
2x1 (current)

1x1 (current)

...and I see no problem whatsoever with the diagonal screens wrapping around as the horizontal ones currently do. If they're that big a problem, then forcing users to go vertically then horizontally is a compromise, but one I really don't feel is required. I think a selector would be interesting, but once you have your screen locations memorised it'd be quicker to just swipe a couple of times, it's not like you'll be able to read any information on the reduced previews. Even more so if you had a large wallpaper that was spread over the multiple desktops (which I'd also like to do as I want 3x3).

Why not making it similar to XMB on PS3?

456
123
789

123 is the main screens. Scroll "2" and you can either go up to "5" or "8". When slide back or forth you will be back to "1" or "3" whether you are at "5" or "8".

456
123
789

this is much simpler.

I don't see how that's "simpler". That's one of those things that's only "intuitive" once you're used to it. I for one would find that disorienting.

I personally originally thought (before looking at N900 videos, back when I was first finding out about it), that it worked like so:

1 2 3 | 1 2
4 5 6 | 3 4
7 8 9 |

For 9 desktops and 4 desktops respectively. I also thought that there was up and down scrolling, not just left-right scrolling. Diagonal is not necessary, because as the prior diagonal scrolling suggestion shows that that introduces a desktop-tiling complexity that's unwarranted.

The thing is, with just the option of "linear" (as it currently is) and "rectangle" (as this discussion keeps chatting about), you can easily have normal scrolling without any of this fancy crap.

Just up/down takes you down/up a row (looping around at the ends, so from 1 up you go to 7), and right-left moves right to left as normal. You could also make a settings option where side scrolling from 3 to the right would take you to 4 instead of looping you to one, and vice versa, while keeping the up-down stuff going on a shift-rows basis.

The problem is, I think people are forgetting that this isn't exactly easy to just insert into existing code just because it's easy to logic-out.

Also, what is the point of having "screenshots" of each desktop if you're going the desktop-switcher route? The N900 handles multiple windows updating just fine, as can be seen in the task manager when you're switching between windows. No point in freezing a screenshot (and constantly writing a new image to disk) when the N900 can easily handle the viewing of multiple windows - not to mention the fact that that way you can see if some widget updates on your other desktops from the desktop switcher (just as you can from the task switcher for running programs currently), instead of just having to see a screenshot of your desktop as it looked when you last visited it.

before discussing all kinds of swipe methods, maybe the devs should say if they think something like this is possible and if they want to do it.