Re: Multiple documents

[Jason Stitt <jjstitt wisc edu>]

On Mon, 2003-08-25 at 14:36, Michael L Torrie wrote:
> 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.

Photoshop for Windows uses WiW; Photoshop for the Mac does not.  I don't
know the minds of Adobe's developers, but I think that the Mac's single
menu at the top of the screen makes it easier to manage multiple
documents without WIW.

The most useful purpose of an enclosing window in Photoshop for Windows
is not grouping sub-windows together, at least IMHO, but providing a
single, always-visible menu.  The GIMP has no such resource.  It has a
menu stuck on the tool palette and another one hidden as a context menu,
with some overlap between them (both have File menus, but not the same
File menu, for instance.)

Microsoft Office has used top-level windows for each document since
Office 2000.  OpenOffice works the same way.  They can get away with it
because each document window is big enough to have its own menu and
toolbar.  The GIMP's windows will often not have enough room -- images
can be large or small.  This is why the toolbar is a separate window and
the menu is hidden.

A tabbed view, such as that in KDevelop, is an interesting alternative. 
It's very good for text documents or code.  But I don't think it works
as well for images, again because of their varying size.  Viewing a
large image would require a single viewing pane and a maximized editor
window.  Viewing a small image with this setup would waste lots of
screen space.  You might be able to split the window into multiple
viewing panes, but then what if you wanted to view the large image
again?

WiW is not perfect, but it gets around these problems and seems to
introduce fewer of its own.  Part of the problem, of course, is that
editing text documents is different from editing images.  I'd be
interested to hear about other ways that image editing could work
without WiW (and presumably without Mac-style menus, which Linux doesn't
seem to be adopting quickly.)

Regards,

Jason Stitt