Re: An alternative to MDI

["Julian Regel" <julian white-tower demon co uk>]

> Please, no title bars across the top of a page, ever try to use this
> on a large screen? I hate macs because I have to move the mouse huge
> distances to get any menu functionality, especially when I am
> reading from one window while working in another.

I included the bit about title bars across the top so as to maintain 
some consistancy with normal windowed applications. I'm not a huge 
fan of the Mac single menu bar but this is different, more of a 
description of the screen / title (eg. GIMP Screen) with a button for 
cycling through screens and button that drops down a menu for more 
complicated actions (go to screen, move application to screen etc). I 
suppose that this functionality could be implemented on a context 
sensitive menu which would technically render the title bar 
irrelevant unless a) you want to maintain consistancy across 
applications and screens b) you want to give the user choice.

I guess that the screen metaphor could be taken one step further and 
(like the Amiga) support different resolutions and colour depths 
(does X support this on the fly?). Great for users of lower end 
equipment that can't do 24bit colour at a high res but wants to do 
graphics, or that high colour is too slow for general text 
editing/file management. The Amiga's draggable screens (seeing more 
than 1 resolution at the same time) would probably not work with most 
video cards, but we could still get some functionality from it.

Julian
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| Julian Regel: julian@white-tower.demon.co.uk |
|     http://www.white-tower.demon.co.uk/      |
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