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List:       kde-look
Subject:    Re: kghostview queries
From:       Torsten Rahn <rahn () astrophysik ! uni-kiel ! de>
Date:       1999-10-15 17:29:19
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Martin Konold wrote:

It seems that I didn't get all of the thread ... :-(

> On Fri, 15 Oct 1999, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> 
> > Note that there is quite some misunderstanding about the term
> > "application". For a user, each entry in the taskbar is a running
> > application. For a programmer, each UNIX process is a running

Exactly! (((perhaps it would be better to talk about 
'application-windows' instead of 'applications' to avoid 
misunderstandings between user and programmer? As you cannot quit 
an application-window it would be better to say 'close' here 
instead of the word 'quit' IMO. 
But that's not very important as it is just a matter of words 
not of different concepts. :-)))
 
> > application. UI's are designed from a user point of view. So the term
> > SDI or MDI should be determined based on how the user looks at the
> > "application". The user is basically not interested in UNIX processes
> > (unless your application crashes very often...) so the number of UNIX
> > processes you (as a programmer) require to give the user N applications,
> > is for the UI not very interesting.

Yes. The following example shows the disadvantages
of Exit-buttons allowing multiple processes:

You start two processes of netscape and create 
additional Windows for each process by clicking 
File-> New-> Navigator Window.
The user doesn't know anything about processes and 
window-id's, he mixes up all these Windows and has no chance 
to find out *which* windows will vanish as soon as he 
clicks on one of the Exit-buttons.

Our solution avoids these irritations and is quite easy to understand.  

> > As a result the UI should express itself in terms of the application and
> > not in terms of the UNIX process. This means that it is very bad form a
> > UI point of view to have a "Quit" which terminates all applications
> > (closes all windows) of a given UNIX process.

Yes! (see example of such a bad behaviour above)

> > Instead you should only have an option which terminates a single
> > application (close a single window) Whether that terminates the UNIX
> > process as well depends on whether this same UNIX process hosts other
> > applications at that moment.

So our behaviour will even result in reduced memory-consumption and 
better performance as you have to deal with one process per app *only*!
 
> Very well said Waldo! This was exactly what we aggreed upon at KDE-Two.

Yes, I can confirm: that's what we agreed upon at KDE Two.

Bye, 
Torsten

BTW: I already have an idea for an optional extension of the 
taskbar which deals with the problem of dozens of windows of the 
same application shown at the same time . It will probably 
please also most of the people who still like MDI -- and we 
can even achieve this without touching the style specs above! :-)

> Yours,
> -- martin
> 
> // Martin Konold, Herrenbergerstr. 14, 72070 Tuebingen, Germany // KDE:  A
> stable GUI for a reliable OS.

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