Re: Some questions raised by 131010

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Wed, 24 Nov 2004, Raphael Bosshard wrote:

> Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2004 00:59:26 +0100
> From: Raphael Bosshard <whistler bluewin ch>
> To: Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>
> Cc: desktop-devel-list gnome org
> Subject: Re: Some questions raised by 131010
>
>
> > 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.

In the case of a browser in particular it is not very pleasant to use
maximised on larger screens because (depeding on the site layout) you get
text from one side of the screen to the other when in most cases you
probably only want between 600-800 pixels for the main column of text.

For graphics applications like Dia or the gimp I tend to want to see as
much as possible of the document and maxising is a lot more useful
(in the case of Dia I'll maximise and pin the toolbox always on top, in
the case of the gimp through I tend to manually size the window as large
as possible leaving a strip of space for the toolbox but with gimp 2.2 I
might customize things a bit more and try and find another way of
working).

> 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 is quote I cannot quite remember (possibly by Steve Jobs) about
users not really wanting multi-tasking per se so much as wanting to be
able to one thing at a time but easily be able to switch to something else
which at least describes how I tend to use things.

> 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".

I agree a lot could be done to improve CSDI applications, if they could
blaming the window managers and bang out exactly how things are supposed
to work.  In gimp 2.0 you can set a Preference for Window Management and
set the window hints for the Toolbox or Dock to be utility windows (this
was not enabled by default due to some loud objections during gimp 1.3
development).  Now that I've remembered to enable it I feel a bit more
comfortable and have a lot less window management to think about.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

Dia is for Diagrams  http://gnome.org/projects/dia/
Inkscape, Draw Freely  http://inkscape.org
Abiword is Awesome http://abisource.com