Author: Gerd Isenberg
Date: 12:57:23 10/07/05
Go up one level in this thread
On October 07, 2005 at 14:47:37, Tord Romstad wrote: >On October 07, 2005 at 12:31:47, Dann Corbit wrote: > >>MDI is better. > >I had never heard about MDI before this discussion, and unless >I have misunderstood the concept I have only seen one application >(the old Maple for Linux, mentioned elsewhere in the thread) which >uses this type of interface. I really don't want to use it, for the >following reasons: > >1. The idea seems really bad to me, because the parent window >eats valuable pixels on the screen and restricts the movement >of the child windows. The single MDI program I have used was >extremely frustrating to use for this reason. > >2. MDI seems to be extremely unusual for Mac OS applications >(otherwise I would have seen them more often). I don't want to >create a GUI which seems alien to the average user. > >3. After a quick Google search I discovered that Apple actually >recommends avoiding MDI when porting Windows programs to >OS X: > > The MDI tendency directly contradicts Mac OS X, in which > windows are document-centric rather than application-centric. > No parent application "main window" exists--the menubar and > other interface elements, like palettes, are used to constantly > indicate which application is active. Document windows are only > constrained by the user's desktop size (which might span single > screen or multiple monitors). > > In Mac OS X, users can freely manipulate and interleave their > document windows (see Figure 3); simultaneously viewing > multiple document windows (which may belong to several > applications) is easy. This behavior allows easy exchange of > data, especially by way of drag and drop, between documents. > > In your Mac OS X application, use the menubar, palettes, and > toolbars as a holistic replacement for the "main window" in > Microsoft Windows-based MDI applications. Document windows > should open as individual entities, unconstrained by a parent > window. > >The whole document can be found here: > >http://developer.apple.com/ue/switch/windows.html > Aha, interesting. So MacOS implicitly use the desktop with it's menubar as a single frame window. I agree with the pixel wasting of an additional application frame. Otoh i don't like to have hundreds of open document windows on my desktop without futher hierarchical structures, like projects with java, c++/h and ressource files. I admit to be windows centered and ms infiltrated ;-) But i like enhanced mdi-applications like msvc-ide or eclipse. During the last nights, i watched wcc-games with BabasChess via FICS, it was nice to watch two tiled boards of the two most interesting games - and to have a second BabasChess open to play a blitz game now and then. Gerd >>I want to be able to size every window and also to close or minimize windows >>that I am not interested in. > >Of course. > >>The worst thing is fixed size windows that I can't close and can't even resize. > >I agree 100%. This is one of the main reasons why I strongly dislike >Sigma Chess. > >Tord
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