On 10 Mar 2006 at 13:20, Darcy James Argue wrote: > On 10 Mar 2006, at 1:04 PM, Phil Daley wrote: > > > I guess, if all programs had MDI, so you could click on a file and > > the already open program launched a new window, it would not be a > > problem. > > This is how the Mac OS has *always* worked. It's fundamental to the > OS. There is no such thing as a "SDI" in Mac OS. (... well, except > for library-style apps like iTunes and iPhoto, where there is never > any need to spawn more than one window).
It seems to me that the Mac uses a form of "single-document interface," just one that is different that Microsoft's. The SDI that Microsoft has implemented seems to me to be entirely modelled on the way web browsers before tabs behaved -- if you wanted to open a new web page, you had to re-use the current window or spawn a new window. Personally, I was always highly annoyed by this aspect of browsers, and it's one of the key reasons I quickly adopted Mozilla as my default browser as soon as it was fast enough to be usable on a daily basis. Opera implements a full MDI interface, but for some reason, it just feels wrong to me, and I never warmed to it. Perhaps it's because of other design decisions built into Opera (I have to turn off many of its default settings before I can use it comfortably), but I just never warmed to it. The tabbed interface seems to me to be the best interface for web browsing, and when you have the ability to spawn new windows with their own tabsets, as well as to launch a new instance of the browser in memory (so that if it crashes it won't take down other instances), then you've got the best of all possible worlds. Actually, that brings up a very good reason for allowing multiple instances of a single application -- to segment memory to protect against crashes. If one instance crashes, the other remains running. In a single-instance model, if the app crashes, all child windows are lost. -- 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
