On 10 Mar 2006 at 13:04, Phil Daley wrote: > In Windows, a program that is not MDI, often launches a new invocation > of the program to deal with the new file request.
There are plenty of newer programs that do this, too. For instance, MS Access, which can only have one MDB/MDE/ADP open at a time, will launch a new instance. Otherwise there would be no way to work on two different ones at the same time. Of course, Microsoft is proliferating the SDI interface (which I believe is a huge mistake), which causes exactly the same problem in the Taskbar representation as multiple instances of the same program. For the end user, there's little difference between multiple running instances of a program and multiple windows all controlled by the same running instance of the underlying application. One might think that allowing multiple instances of an app would be a memory problem, but it's not, because files that are used in common are loaded only once (such as DLLs and other library files) and used by all instances. The only situation where I think allowing multiple instances is a problem is where the user tries to launch the same file twice. I wish Windows were smart enough to say "Oh! There's already an instance of MS Word with this document open in it -- I should simply switch focus to that, instead of opening the document a second time in a new instance of Word!" But that's not the way it's designed. It's also a problem with MS Access applications, at least for the inattentive user who pays no attention to the icons in the Taskbar. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
