The Need for "Single Window Mode" 3242

Having multiple windows on-screen is not untidy. Having lots of unrelated overlapping windows most of which are covered to the extent you can't see what's in them is, but it's easily avoidable.

Yeah, there are lots of large complex apps. Aperture, Final Cut Pro, InDesign, etc. can all use as much screen space as you can toss at them. But probably 80% of the apps that even high-end users use, and an even larger fraction of the apps that more typical users use, don't require that much space. RSS feed readers, word processors, e-mail clients, etc. in general don't really benefit much past about that same 1280x1024 mark. Even, more complex apps like iMovie or GarageBand don't benefit that much.

snip

They are in conjunction with single-window apps. Obviously not all apps on OS X fit that description yet.

Sure, a lot of the single-window interface apps can benefit from more than one window, but even then you've got a very small number of windows. Anyway, one of the major reasons one would open multiple windows in those apps is specifically because one wants to see or work with two different enbreasties (directories, mailboxes, web pages, etc.) at the same time, so a feature to only show one window at a time wouldn't be very useful. If you just want to flip back and forth between mailboxes in Mail or directories in the Finder, sidebars already facilitate this without multiple windows, and Safari has tabs for the same purpose.

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