Re: Some questions raised by 131010

[Raphael Bosshard <whistler bluewin ch>]

> On the Mac the menus are at the top of the screen, so the advantages of
> maximising/fullscreen compared to on windows/gnome/kde are not as
> significant.

May be, but Safari, for example,  also has a button bar which is a great
deal larger than the menubar at the top. I don't think that the top menu
bar is the only reason.

How comes that Mac users in general don't use the maximise function? I
watched one of my fellow students today and he didn't ever maximise his
windows. He couldn't tell me why, though.


> Maybe I'm rejecting CSDI because the current crop of CSDI applictions are
> not particularly user friendly and in my opinion are overcomplicating
> things and I favour a simpler approach.

I agree that CSDI tend to be more complicated. But they also seem to be
better suited for works involving multiple documents. So there is a use.

> > Every time I post stuff like this, people pick and choose what they
> > reply to.  That's fair, since I pick and choose what I reply to as
> > well.  But it strikes me as odd that nobody ever replies to my main
> > objections to the everything-maximized design.  How do you work with
> > multiple documents (images, folders, whatever) at the same time?
> 
> Edit, Copy   (preferably by using Ctrl+C)
> Switch       (preferably by using Alt+Tab)
> Edit, Paste  (preferably by using Ctrl+V)

It seems to me that maximized windows somehow defeat the uses of a
multitasking operating system. And it also nullifies the profit of drag
and drop.

> 
> > There are problems with CSDI interfaces on today's X desktops.  These
> > designs that work really well on the Mac aren't working as well for us.
> > But rather than applying SDI with a bulldozer (the Windows approach), we
> > should find out why CSDI isn't working as well on our desktops.
> 
> As I have said already I dont think the CSDI applications we are referring
> to can be very directly compared to the Mac and although it is likely that
> more could be done to make these applications work better it seems that
> Gnome and the Human Interface Guidelines has largely rejected the idea of
> CSDI.

Yes, Alan, you are right: the CSDI applications we have on Gnome

I reckon that there are two things that make CSDI applications less
usefull in Gnome. First there is the lack of the top menu bar (a la
MacOS). It would solve stuff like the awkward approach to menues that
the Gimp and Sodipodi use: Their main windows (the tool bars) are to
small for extensive menues, so they put everything into the context menu
(and defeating the very idea of a contextual menu). The Gimp even
introduced a second application menu for the document window, making it
all worse.
However; I don't see a way Gnome could ever adapt such a menubar. Gnome
has evolved to far for such a fundamental paradigm change.


The second thing is  the "application based" window management mode.
(Every application has it's windows glued to a transparent layer, if you
click one window, you raise the whole layer..). Metacity has such an
option (called "application_based") but it's marked as "not
implemented".