Subject: Re: definitions -- *DI window management
From: Larry Kollar (kollar@alltel.net)
Date: Mon Aug 20 2001 - 20:41:04 CDT
Paul Rohr wrote:
> ... I represent a different population of users, who like to
> close all their documents in the same way. The last thing I want is
> for any vestige of that application to insist on hanging around
> after I close the last document. To quote a prior post -- "die,
> die, die already!" :-)
MHO, this school of thought is a vestige of the days when "nobody would
ever need more than 640K of RAM." When 256MB SDRAM is $30 *including*
shipping, why worry about it? You'll either come back to the app later
or it'll die when you logout or shut down.
As far as closing documents in the same way goes, I don't know of a
single Mac app these days that doesn't close the current document
with Cmd-W and quit the app (and all its documents) with Cmd-Q.
> The MSDI look and feel is deliberately document-centric, and it thus has no
> "natural" GUI state for representing just-an-application-with-no-documents.
>
> I don't doubt that:
>
> - you (and others) personally find that state useful,
> - the 3 second relaunch penalty we impose feels onerous to you, and
> - all of the proposed workarounds feel ugly to you.
Yes, it's useful. And you haven't said anything to convince me that
it's a problem for anyone else. :-)
> ... It was a deliberate design decision to make the user experience
> more document-centric without handcuffing ourselves inside a totally
> pristine SDI box.
This is (again MHO) one of those things that can't be abstracted into
XP for all platforms. It might help to think of a Mac app with no open
documents as having a window the exact size and location of the menu
bar. That's not how Windows works, nor how X11 WMs work -- KDE gives
you the option to put the menus at the top of the screen, but it's
really a bit of a kludge on a Un*x system.
Given that the paradigms are so different, and the way that Abi works
currently, I wouldn't expect non-Mac versions of Abi to "hang around"
after closing the last document. But on MacOS, it's a different story.
Expect a cacophony of retching noises if the MacOS version of Abi
doesn't work the way MacOS users expect it to. (But you probably knew
that already...)
Larry
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