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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.