Indeed it looks a bit like the Windows task bar, and that's exactly where the idea comes from. The bar along the bottom shows a button for each currently open window, whether the window is in view or buried under another window. Imagine you are working on a synth plugin, a reverb plugin, the mixer, the channel rack and the playlist, all of which are open, and everything else is currently not open i.e. closed. Rather than waste time scrolling up and down the channel rack or the mixer looking for a certain plugin (remember Tab doesn't work for detached windows ATM), which takes a lot of scrolling and window-switching, it'd be much more efficient if all the handful of plugins we are currently working with could be one click away, without any scrolling or any window switching.
- The buttons along the bottom show all windows that are currently open, and not necessarily visible. This is similar to running programs in Windows.
- Left-click a button to show the corresponding window regardless. This guarantees that the window can be seen with a single click, not like ATM where you some times need to click once and some times twice depending on whether the window was open or not.
- To close a window, press the [X] button in the top-right corner of the window.
- The button corresponding to the active window has a green border ("Sytrus - Bass" in my mock-up), again, similar to the the way the Windows task bar works, where the button for the active window looks different from the other buttons.
- The buttons can be dragged left and right to freely reorder them in a way that makes sense to the user, just like buttons in the Windows task bar.
- Middle-click on a task bar button closes the corresponding window (I think that is more useful than "rename" which can be done by middle-clicking the window title bar instead).
- The Captionise button on plugin windows, the mixer, etc, could be used to minimise the window to the FL task bar, similar to the way windows in Windows can be minimized. This is a proven workflow all Windows users should instantly feel at home with.