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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: A word to MDI and MS
From:       Aaron Granick <parallax () ucsd ! edu>
Date:       1997-07-15 0:29:25
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Warwick Allison wrote:

> This is a fundamental tension in writing applications:  do you write
> a fascist application that insists on being the boss?  That will
> certainly make THAT application easier to use... but at the expense
> of other applications.  This dog-eat-dog (or app-eat-app?) approach
> is to be expected of bickering commercial applications, each openning
> a huge banner over your workspace as it loads (surely you have nothing
> else to do but wait?), adding items to global status and menu bars
> (surely this is one of your favourite applications, and you need
> instant access?), and even busy waiting, polling, or just generally
> wasting CPU on animations, etc. when it has nothing else to do.
> Remind you of The Popular applications?

I will not continue to debate this issue much further, since I haven't
heard any good arguments against MDI except that some people simply
'dont like it'. That's fine.  Every other IRC client out there creates a
separate window for each channel, message.  However, in response to this
email...if our goal is to create apps that are NOT fascist in their use
of screen space...MDI seems the perfect choice if you anticipate more
than 2-3 windows at a time.  Otherwise, your app has hogged both screen
space and taskbar space, and the user (who cannot tile or cascade free
floating windows, and nobody but me seems to think this would be a good
feature in a window manager) is stuck always trying to find windows that
have been obscured (OH if I may add a little comment in here...I really
don't like the way kwm raises a window with a single left click anywhere
within a window...this means that you cannot be working in a large area
(like emacs) and have a smaller window floating on top of it giving you
notices or whatever; emacs simply obscures the whole screen.  I think
that clicking on the titlebar or side frame should be intuitive enough
to RAISE the window, but that a click elsewhere simply brings focus to
the window without raising it up above its neighbors)

I would invite you to take a look at:
http://sdcc13.ucsd.edu/~agranick/kirc.gif (its updated!)

Yes, I really talk in that many channels...and it is nice to know a
single click will minimize them all...if each of those windows had free
reign on my desktop...THAT would be a fascist app, imho.

Thats' all I plan on saying on MDI; if anyone has constructive
arguments, or feature requests for kirc, email me privately.

Thank you,

Aaron Granick

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