Re: Multiple documents

[Michael L Torrie <torriem chem byu edu>]

On Mon, 2003-08-25 at 13:23, Gus Koppel wrote:
> What you (Chris) may miss, however, are WiW (Windows in windows) as in the
> MDI implementations of MS-Windows and QT (KDE). Unfortunately there's no
> support for them in GTK+, mostly for ideological reasons AFAIK.
>
> <PLEA> Despite a number of Gnome developers apparently condemning it, I
> miss them as well and would appreciate it very much if the GTK developers
> would get over themselves and seriously consider a WiW-implementation for
> one of the next versions of GTK+.</PLEA>

No.  I disagree.  Windows in Windows are inherently unusable.  No
average user that I know uses them.  Even Microsoft is going away from
them, especially in their latest Office XP offering (which opens a new
top-level window for each document.  WiW is just not useful.  Apple has
done millions of dollars of usability testing over the years and have
determined that WiW isn't the way to go and I don't think we should go
there either.

As further evidence of the general shift away from WiW is MS Visual
Studio.net has ditched the WiW method in favor of adjustable panels and
tabbed areas.  Much more usable.  KDevelop 3.0 is also moving in that
direction too.  Their new IDEAI mode is really good
(http://www.kdevelop.org/graphics/pic_corner/gideon-3.0.png ), and is in
many ways a clone of vs.net.

I really like the new Gimp's UI where you can dock windows together (in
a tabbed interface) or have separate toplevel windows.  When things are
docked nicely, I see no advantage whatsoever to a WiW MDI interface.

Michael


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-- 
Michael L Torrie <torriem chem byu edu>