Re: SV: Testing & A Suggestion :)

[Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com>]

"Blad, John Erling" wrote:
> 
> My point is.. What is the difference between a "hidden" app in the taskbar
> and one not running? I've run into this problem many times when I try to
> learn newcomers how to use a PC.
> 
> Many handhelds don't use this distinction between application states.

Well, I guess one difference is that at any one time, you can have
several instances on your taskbar of any one application that you ran
from your Start menu, so there isn't always a 1:1 mapping between the
two.  In other words, the start menu and taskbar are application-centric
things, rather than document-centric.  (Well, almost; you could argue
that the task bar was document-centric provided you weren't running any
MDI applications like gnotepad...)

More often than not, though, you will only have one instance of a
particular document open at a time, and one working copy of that
document on your disk.  So, if your task bar was really a "document bar"
and your start menu was really a list of all your documents, there
really would be a more direct mapping, and you could perhaps (in theory)
get rid of the "document bar".

As with all the best ideas, though, doc-centric interfaces are
complicated a little by practicalities:  you don't always want to open a
document with the same application, and it's less obvious how you create
a new document of a particular type, without providing a whopping great
menu somewhere full of "create a new document of type x" items. 
Object-embedding technology goes some way to improving this situation,
by allowing you to create and edit all sorts of different document types
within the same application, but I suspect it'll be a long time before
it offers the complete solution.

(MS Windows does edge towards a doc-centric model, especially if you
have MS Office installed, but ends up providing a mixture of both, which
you could either regard as "flexible" or "a bit of a muddle"...)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems