Re: Microsoft was right with explorer windows

[Marko Macek <Marko Macek snet fri uni-lj si>]

Wesley Felter wrote:
 
> The problem here seems to be the difference between single-launch applications and multiple-launch applications. There are two common cases here: For a single-launch app, there can be only one instance of that application per user and all windows are owned by the same process. Single-launch is the only method supported on MacOS. For a multiple-launch app, each window is owned by a separate process. Multiple-launch is the default on Unix. An in-between style where there are several processes which each own several windows is possible but even more confusing.
> 
> The problem as I see it is that the user can't tell the difference between these two styles. When a user chooses File->Exit for a single-launch app, all of its windows go away. For a multiple-launch app, there is a question: Should exiting quit all the instances of the app or just one? Explorer gets around this by not having an Exit item, so it is obvious to the user that when they choose Close, that action only affects that window.
> 
> Close only affects the window it is invoked upon, and Exit affects the whole application. But the effect of Exit can be ambiguous when the scope of "the whole application" isn't obvious to the user.

This is why IMO having multiple document applications (MDI) is a bad
design idea. Unless you
can make the document-app relationship unambigous (by using horrible
Windows-like windows in
windows or not very flexible notebook style MDI) it can be confusing.

This is also the reasong why I think that having a gnome (foot)
application menu is a mistake.
It implies that an application is completely separate from document
which should not be the case. 

IMHO.

If there will be a foot menu I sincerely hope I will be able to turn it
off.

Mark
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Marko.Macek@snet.fri.uni-lj.si        http://ana.fri.uni-lj.si/~markom/