The Need for "Single Window Mode" 3237

I'm afraid it is true, in practice.

Yes, in theory, you could come up with a brilliant design that removes controls and content from your windows but does not move them to other windows; but real software developers are doing well if they just follow the written guidelines; brilliance is too much to expect.

What really happened to the Mac is that software wound up using more windows.

Zooming UIs seem to be like an obviously bad bit of UI, but then I can only think of magnification tools and the dock, and maybe you've got something better in mind.

Display spanning is clearly not an option on an original Mac with just a 9-inch display, which is what the Mac UI was designed for, back in the day.

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Yikes! I hope I never have to use your software!

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They move to more than one? This is sounding worse and worse. How do you know where any one window went?

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Most people do not recognize the existance of 'invisible' UI *at all*. That is why Explorer sports the seemingly useless 'copy' and 'move' links. You can *see* them; moreso even than the cut & paste commands.

Yes, it gets worse if you are doing many drag operations in series. If you build your UI around numerous windows and drag + drop between them, maximization isn't going to be such a great thing for your app.

But that would not be a normal Windows apps; neither would it be a normal Aqua app.

In the (sorta) new paradigm, you have fewer windows, and therefore drag and drop is mostly *within* one window, just like everything else is.

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Well, not to belabor the obvious, but "My Computer" is not an app. Neither is it a window; it's a folder which you can view in an explorer window, but *that very same window* can view other folders too.

It's like iTunes and playlists.

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Er, I think you are just mistaken about this: they do move windows 'while working', and muscle memory is not a 'per session' thing anyway.

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This is silly; you need to see *everything* before you can hit it, until you have learned where it is.

Being against the edge of the screen does not change that. Even if a button filled one entire edge of the screen, you'd have to look to see which edge!

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It probably did. The old UI was designed around more numerous, smaller windows, whose content was more stable. Measuing the 'ideal size' of such windows is not so hard.

With something like iTunes, the 'ideal size' changes depending on the current view, so it's much harder to decide what to do when the user hits that little green button.

Some apps (like iTunes) decide to do something completely custom since conventional zooming is so useless.

Basically, the Aqua UI still sports a 'Zoom' button, but that is no longer an appropriate action to take for most windows.

What Aqua needs is a maximize button, as I have said. :D

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Well, it seems to me that Apple's new toolkits *do* make it 'easier to do the right thing', which is almost what you are asking for.

I feel the problem is not in the tools but in the UI they implement, which still has elements of the old Mac OS 9 UI in it that aren't appropriate anymore.