[HIG] Re: [Usability]Question on Multiple Document Interfaces

[Daniel Borgmann <daniel liebesgedichte net>]

On Thu, 2002-08-22 at 18:41, Calum Benson wrote:
> I do agree with the rest of the HIG team though that ideally, MDI is
> something that the window manager rather than the application should
> deal with-- acting on the user's preferences of course-- for the reasons
> Dave and others have pointed out.  This could still mean presenting the
> same sort of tabbed interface as you see now.  Or if you preferred, it
> could just group the windows more loosely so that they all
> minimized/restored together.  Or it could just group them on the
> tasklist and let you treat them as individual windows.
> 
> Extending the concept a bit further, you could conceivably drag a
> document tab from one application's window to another, allowing you to
> group projects together in one window, rather than applications.  (MS
> Office used to have a "binders" feature that attempted this, but they
> never quite pulled it off... I don't know if it's still hanging on in
> Office XP or not).
> 
> We recognise that window managers that can do all this aren't going to
> appear overnight, however, otherwise we wouldn't have given any MDI
> guidelines in the HIG at all :)


Isn't the tab grouping of fluxbox pretty close to that? I didn't use
fluxbox a lot (yet) so I don't know how well it's done but people seem
to like it. I think it could be awesome to have a feature like this. :)
As it is clearly innovative and could improve the way people work with
multiple documents quite a bit (like you said above). Or am I missing
the point?
http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net/features/tabs.php


- Daniel