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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