Re: Menu guidelines updated



At 12:29 PM +0100 8/24/01, Calum Benson wrote:
Adam Elman wrote:

 As I said, there are other ways to handle this feature.  A "clone
 this window" menu item or button would not be inappropriate, for
 example.  But I believe that the same command should never have two
 different behaviors depending on any "preference" setting.

Another issue is that people (myself included!) often struggle with apps
that allow you to open two windows on the same document, because the
outcome isn't always obvious.  It's often not immediately clear whether
the two windows are just different views on the same document, or
whether one is just a snapshot of the other at that moment in time,
which will be saved under a different filename when you hit Ctrl+S.
Both features are useful in different circumstances, so we may want to
think about standard ways of presenting each.

I think that if you have two windows open on the same file which are labeled identically, i.e. with the exact same filename and file information, they should be directly linked somehow and not snapshots. Ideally this should even happen across different apps, although I have no idea how that could be implemented.

The cases where it is useful to have two _separate_ instances of the same document generally seem to me to fall into the category that Colin mentioned, where what you really want is to have a new _copy_ of the document that you'll end up saving into a new file. In that case I think it's better to have an explicit way to do that, and that when that happens the windows would be labled differently -- one would be the original file, and the other would be "Copy of ..." or (not as good) "Untitled N" or something like that.

Adam
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