Re: Launching vs. Raising an application

["Andrew S. Townley" <atownley informix com>]

I have to agree with Tim Moore about the problems you are describing  
users having with MS Windows.  Like most things, however, the  
problem isn't with MDI per se (I don't particularly care for it  
either, but...), rather it is due to the application programmers  
forcing the application to full-screen mode when it is launched for  
the first time.  With today's higher resolutions, this isn't  
necessary anymore (if it ever was) for the user to have a "workable"  
screen area for the application.

I would personally have a big problem with what Ami suggested about  
blurring the line between running + minimized and exited.  Given the  
way I generally work, I have lots of applications running and switch  
between them frequently.  How this is manifested is different on each  
platform:  on NT, the only option is to have all of them minimized.   
This isn't too bad since most of the apps are MDI and therefore only  
put one icon on the task bar.  On NEXTSTEP/MacOS X, I work with a  
lot of them hidden.  This ends up being very similar because you end  
up with the application icon somewhere, so you can restore it, but  
you don't have individual minimized icons for each window.  This is  
the mechanism I personally prefer.  Under most of the X systems I  
have used, you end up with no way to "hide" or minimize an entire  
application, so you end up with a whole bunch of minimized  
windows--which can get confusing if they have long titles as any WWW  
browser is apt to do.  While I realize that many people use virtual  
desktops to deal with such problems as Guillermo suggested, it is not  
a method I particularly prefer.

Another problem with the suggestion of "New Window" is that to me,  
and I would surmise several people, a new window does not mean a new  
instance of the application.  One approach to solving this usability  
problem which started this discussion may be seen in NEXTSTEP and the  
new MacOS X.  If the user hides an application or the application is  
not on top and the user wants to get it back, they perform the exact  
same steps they did to launch it:  double click on the application  
icon.  The presentation of the applications where this works, differs  
slightly between NEXTSTEP and MacOS X.  In NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP, if a  
user has started the application from the application dock, if they  
double click on the dock icon again, the application will either come  
to the front or be restored from a hidden state.  With MacOS X, the  
application icons appear on the desktop, but they work the same way.   
Also under MacOS X, the default behavior if you double-click on the  
application icon from the file viewer is to show the running copy if  
it exists.  I don't remember if NS/OS worked this way or not, but I  
don't think it did.  With both systems, you can still have multiple  
windows minimized on the desktop and have the application not hidden,  
so if you clicked on the icon, you wouldn't see anything immediately  
obvious except that the minimized windows would appear on top of any  
other applications.  So in this case, Ami's original issue isn't as  
clearly resolved.

I guess the whole point of this rambling is that depending on where  
the user has come from or spent most of their time (computing time, I  
should clarify) shapes their expectations on how an environment  
should behave.  This isn't to say that alternative ideas like Ami's  
should be ignored because alternative points of view is what should  
make us think about the way things are done.  But, in implementation,  
whatever method is chosen shouldn't be so rigid that it prevents new  
users or casual users from feeling comfortable in the Gnome  
environment.  There should always be a default behavior, but I  
strongly feel that the user should be able to customize the behavior  
based on what they find efficient.

Regards,

ast