Re: [Usability]Keeping the Quit menu item



On Wed, 2003-03-19 at 22:10, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > These can both work in an app-like way, with the exception that you
> > never want Nautilus to quit and hence you don't want a Quit menu item
> > there.  (Actually, Nautilus already works like that.)
> 
> Q: Why don't you want Nautilus to quit?
> 
> A: The desktop background happens to be in the same process 
>    as the file manager windows.

No, the answer is "because Nautilus is the application that handles my
desktop and my files and it needs to be running at all times".  In the
Mac this is very clear, you always have a Finder icon on the dock, and
you can switch to the Finder app by clicking on it.  I don't know how
many processes it's made of, but it's definitely one app.

Nautilus does kind of the same thing, except that, as we already
determined, there is no clear concept of what a "running app" is in
GNOME.

> In GNOME 2.2, I can't even find anywhere in the UI that implies that
> the desktop background and the file manager windows are related.  

Except that the desktop does pretty much the same things that a Nautilus
window does, it has the same operations and dialogs etc.  It does feel
like one app to me.

> KDE
> has kdesktop in a separate process from konqueror, so we're talking
> about a random implementation detail here, that demonstrably could be
> different.

Arguably you could say that it feels like one app in KDE too.

Process != Application.  You can have one application made up of
different processes, but it's not relevant to the GUI.

Even Evolution is made up of different processes, but still -- it's one
app.

> Doesn't "File->New->Evolution Window" seem to imply a type of window
> called "Evolution window"?
> 
> I can morph an Evolution window into various things - calendar, tasks,
> mailbox - but they are all still Evolution windows.
> 
> If I run "evolution" a few times, I get a new window each time, which
> is document-style behavior, not application-style behavior.

It is not document-style behavior because Evolution doesn't follow the
document paradigm.  There is no strict 1:1 correlation between an
Evolution window and an Evolution folder.  An Evolution window can
display anything, it can even switch to display something that another
Evolution window is displaying.

Of course, the fact that clicking on the Evolution app menu item creates
a new window is kind of broken, but we have no other way to handle that
currently, as you pointed out somewhere else in the discussion.

> My question though is: if I'm using Evolution in a
> multiple-document-window kind of mode (I have a calendar window, a
> mail window, etc.) - are 'calendar' and 'mail' more related than 'word
> processor document A' and 'spreadsheet document B'?  Why do I have a
> way to quit all (calendar, mail, todo list) windows as a group, but
> not all (word processor, spreadsheet) windows as a group?
> 
> Now you have me wondering if I choose Quit in OpenOffice, is it going
> to quit all my OpenOffice windows, or all my Writer windows? ;-)

The problem there is that it is not clear which one is the app:
OpenOffice or Writer?

It all depends on how you expose that to the user.  If you are going to
have a separate application item for spreadsheet, word processor and
presentation program, then "Quit" should only close one kind of window. 
If instead you only have an "Open Office" app, then "Quit" should close
all the windows.

-- Ettore

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