Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 11:47:37 10/07/05
Go up one level in this thread
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
>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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