Re: GnomeMDI

[Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>]

Seth Aaron Nickell <snickell Stanford EDU> writes:

> Just a note... Window in Window MDI is considered an extremely ineffective 
> interface. The industry trend is to move away from it. If I'm correct, 
> Microsoft Visual Studio is the only actively developed Microsoft 
> application that still uses this interface, and I'm not even sure visual 
> studio does. Office recently ditched mdi altogether (at least by 
> default). Tabs are considered better UI when MDI is actually necessary 
> (its probably better to avoid MDI altogether, though there's some 
> disagreement about this). 
> 
> I would strongly discourage us from expending programmer effort on window 
> in window MDI. A better pursuit might be to try and improve task grouping 
> so its easier to use. This has similar benefits to window in window MDI, 
> but doesn't produce some of the confusion problems (not to mention the 
> necessity for every MDI application to have a window handling interface).

Well, I think this is an application development issue, ie. if there's an
application which wants to use MDI, then it's up to this application and
its developers to "write something".

-- 
Martin Baulig
martin gnome org (private)
baulig suse de (work)