The Need for "Single Window Mode" 3232

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Apple's approach in Aqua is to mostly cut down application interfaces to a single window. This effectively turns apps into little self-contained "widgets" which the user can arrange as desired. Think of it like having a few different sheets of paper on your desk. You're drawing on one of them, reading from another, and writing on a third. Is this clutter? I wouldn't say so. It's organizing different tasks or different aspects of the same task in space, rather than using some kind of explicit conceptual task switching, and IMO it's much more natural.

It's also going to become even *more* of a good fit in the future, as screens get bigger and users have more room to spread things out. My desktop spans a 24" screen and a 17" screen, and there are very few single applications which can really effectively use even just the entire 24" screen. There are studies that show that giving regular desktop users monstrous screens (40-50", IIRC) actually has rather significant productivity benefits, and I suspect that the ability to do what we could call "spacial task management" plays a significant role in that.

Apple is actually adding specialized full-screen modes to some apps that can benefit, like iPhoto, and I think Core Animation is at least partly targeted at letting other developers do this better. It's a neat idea, but note that these full screen modes are *in addition* to the self-contained window interfaces. It would be a mistake to think such full-screen interfaces would be useful for all apps or could become the standard way of interacting with apps.

Anyway, if clutter bugs you, learn to use the OS X "hide" commands and their buttociated keyboard shortcuts. They're by far the most effective way I've found of managing window clutter on any operating system. They're much more flexible than maximizing in Windows, because they let e.g. switch from only seeing one app to seeing two with a single click. In Windows, if you start off with both apps maximized, accomplishing this requires un-maximizing them and then manually resizing their windows.

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-- "Those who enter the country illegally violate the law." -- George W. Bush in Tucson, Ariz., Nov. 28, 2005