[Usability] Re: Usability digest, Vol 1 #911 - 12 msgs

["David Adam Bordoley" <bordoley msu edu>]

> Message: 2
> Date: Mon, 1 Sep 2003 15:25:24 -0400
> From: Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>
> To: Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>
> Cc: "usability gnome org" <usability gnome org>
> Subject: Re: [Usability] HIG and MDI/SDI/Tabs 
>
> On Mon, Sep 01, 2003 at 12:20:04PM +0100, Calum Benson wrote:
> > Although it's not currently very clear, the HIG is really only advising
> > against the hard-coding of such window management policies into the
> > applications... the hope is that one day, window managers will let the
> > user choose between multi-document models  (MDI, tabs, multiple top
> > level windows, anything else that's invented in the meantime) for any
> > particular application.  
>
> I feel pretty sure that this can't or shouldn't be done in the window
> manager; it's really something that belongs in a standard GTK widget. 
>
> We'd like to see such a widget for GTK 2.6. It may also want to cover
> "IDE MDI" also which is somewhat more complex as it's not just
> documents, it also has random dockable utility windows etc. 
>
> What I'd like to see from the UI team is a recommendation for how apps
> should work in some detail: 
>
>  - web browser (read-only documents, tabs popular now)
>  - IDE (editable documents, with lots of auxiliary dockable thingies)
>  - office apps (editable documents, but no auxiliary thingies)
>  - GIMP (editable documents, but many people claim it's different
>          from the office apps somehow) 
>
> What is the ideal kind of "big picture" organization of these apps,
> how does the window manager, window list, Alt+Tab, etc. fit in, 
> what is the workflow. 
>
> Then we know what to implement in the WM and the GTK widget. 
>
> Havoc 

Well one reason I think it really fits well into the wm is that it allows 
users to actually create tab groups based on their tasks rather than the 
application that just happens to be used as the viewer for a doc. For 
instance it be handy to be able to tab together the web research I'm doing 
for a paper alongside the document that i'm working on. Implementing tabs 
per app is potentially confusing. Why can some windows be tabbed together 
while others can't? 

dave