Re: The Need for "Single Window Mode"

"ZnU" <znu@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:znu-D2FBE0.14002319082006@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In article <12eegu711iip048@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Dan Johnson" <danieljohnson@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Apple's approach in Aqua is to mostly cut down application interfaces
to a single window.

Quite.

This effectively turns apps into little
self-contained "widgets" which the user can arrange as desired.

They can. And they will. And it's a bit of a waste;
surely here is a task the computer can do for them.

Think of
it like having a few different sheets of paper on your desk. You're
drawing on one of them, reading from another, and writing on a third. Is
this clutter? I wouldn't say so. It's organizing different tasks or
different aspects of the same task in space, rather than using some kind
of explicit conceptual task switching, and IMO it's much more natural.

I don't think you can be writing in one app and drawing in
another at the same time. Not in OS X anyway.

It's also going to become even *more* of a good fit in the future, as
screens get bigger and users have more room to spread things out. My
desktop spans a 24" screen and a 17" screen, and there are very few
single applications which can really effectively use even just the
entire 24" screen.

Well, I am not sure I buy *that* one. Not
every app can use so much space, but
many can do it comfortably.

For instance, I find Visual Studio 2005- which
is very much an "everything in the window" UI-
to be kind of crowded on a 20 inch LCD.

Heck, even iTunes seems crowded to me on a
17 inch LCD, when the music store is up.

When you put everything into one window, that
window really needs to be pretty big.

There are studies that show that giving regular
desktop users monstrous screens (40-50", IIRC) actually has rather
significant productivity benefits, and I suspect that the ability to do
what we could call "spacial task management" plays a significant role in
that.

An interesting result, though I won't jump to the cause
quite so quickly. :D

I do wonder what sort of UI these tested users were using.

Apple is actually adding specialized full-screen modes to some apps that
can benefit, like iPhoto, and I think Core Animation is at least partly
targeted at letting other developers do this better. It's a neat idea,
but note that these full screen modes are *in addition* to the
self-contained window interfaces. It would be a mistake to think such
full-screen interfaces would be useful for all apps or could become the
standard way of interacting with apps.

It seems to me that single-window UI is indeed the standard
now on OS X, and that this necessarily means the windows
have to fill a large part of a typical screen.

(I said typical, not your 24 inch+17 inch monstrosity. :D)

Anyway, if clutter bugs you, learn to use the OS X "hide" commands and
their associated keyboard shortcuts. They're by far the most effective
way I've found of managing window clutter on any operating system.

I've used them, and they do work, but they aren't
nearly as nice as maximization.

The Hide command, like Single Window Mode,
leaves your foreground app to be adjusted.

But since it does not place other windows in
the dock- indeed it removes those which are there-
it makes it harder to switch between windows.

I think that task switching is a much more common
mode than the simultaneous use of several
apps you seem to anticipate.

They're much more flexible than maximizing in Windows, because they let
e.g. switch from only seeing one app to seeing two with a single click.
In Windows, if you start off with both apps maximized, accomplishing
this requires un-maximizing them and then manually resizing their
windows.

Obviously, if you *want* clutter, maximization is not
your friend. :D


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