Xref: utzoo comp.sys.mac:23739 comp.sys.mac.programmer:3449 Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!dartvax!eleazar.dartmouth.edu!earleh From: earleh@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Earle R. Horton) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.mac.programmer Subject: Re: Disabled Menu Items -- Cons and Pros Summary: Single-window applications defended. Message-ID: <11407@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> Date: 8 Dec 88 00:50:21 GMT References: <7743@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU> <6000@hoptoad.uucp> <6001@hoptoad.uucp> <6004@hoptoad.uucp> Sender: news@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU Reply-To: earleh@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Earle R. Horton) Organization: Thayer School of Engineering Lines: 45 In article <6004@hoptoad.uucp> tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes: ... >By the way, the case you cited, where "Open" is disabled, is a >sloppiness of another, far worse kind in my view. Writing a single >window application for the Mac should lead to at least defenstration, >with evisceration the preferred penalty. It was immensely dumb that >all three of Apple's lead-off applications for the Mac were >single-window (MacPaint, MacWrite, MacTerminal). Any single window >program is isomorphic to one where the globals have been moved into >per-window data structures! We're supposed to be *improving* on ttys. This statement has a lot of merit, but I don't think the presence or absence of multiple windows is really the correct way to judge how flexible an application writer has been, or how much of an advance he has made over glass ttys. For instance, HyperCard has ONE window, but it clearly demonstrates progress in some direction or other from the first Macintosh programs. Imagine HyperCard as a multi-window application, with a separate window for each card, and you should quickly see that multiple overlapping windows are not always appropriate. Also, multiple windows are slower than a single window. You have to handle activate, deactivate, and update events properly, and if many windows exist then the user can run into problems managing them all. An example of where a single window is appropriate for an operation is the split-window option in Word. Cutting and pasting between two sections of the same document is much much faster using a split window than it would be using two windows. Any time I do extensive cut-and-paste between two separate documents I wish there were some way to get both docs into a split window like this! A careful application writer will weigh the inconveniences of multiple windows against the conveniences, and then judge on an application by application basis how many windows and types of window are needed to get the job done. If we're talking about a word processor or a paint program and its documents, Tim is exactly right here. An application which exists to create and modify documents should support operations on multiple documents, and multiple windows is a good way to accomplish this. It is not, however, the only way. Earle R. Horton. 23 Fletcher Circle, Hanover, NH 03755 (603) 643-4109 Graduate student.