Re: Testing & A Suggestion :)

["Blad, John Erling" <john erling blad aftenposten no>]

>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...)

You can set up Emacs so it creates new buffers from the start menu.. weird..
Try to explain to a new born PC user how that happens..

>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".

I gess it is really three areas involved: Documentbar, programbar and
taskbar. One way or another you find them all in M$ Windows.. And in
lots of the apps too.. Esp. the docbar as items in the "File" menu.
The start menu in M$ Windows is a mix of various applications, settings
and documents. Is this what we want in the future?

>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. 

He, he.. Been there.. Ouch, had so many discussions about an object-oriented
app where we couldn't find the right place for creation of new objects.

This is a real problem in many file managers. No one really cares how
they create new documents, they just add one more "Create foo-file"
element in some menu. I belive this should have a better solution.

>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.

This is not a big problem (?) because you could be allowed to start
"empty documents" and then define them inside the application.

>(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"...)

Seems to me all (?) goes for a document-centric model too..

>Cheeri,
>Calum.

John