The Need for "Single Window Mode
Aqua represented a big change for Apple's UI; more than just lickable buttons.
Aqua reduced the number of windows you have drastically. In the original Mac UI, you 'opened' things and got new windows. Now you navigate within a single window.
Apple has tried a number of different ideas for how to navigate in different apps, but they seem to be settling down now. Their apps now sport 'source-lists' which show you where you are, and where you can go.
This is, of course, the fileman.exe technique. They even use the same left-pane-right-pane layout. But that's okay; it's a great technique, and MS certainly uses it everywhere too.
What this does is to greatly reduce window clutter. That is a lot more important that it seems.
Users like a tidy desktop; many will re-arrange windows so that they look 'neat', even if there's no practical need to do so.
I bet many of you who are reading this have done this yourselves. I know I have.
But Apple's efforts here are incomplete: you have fewer windows to fuss over, but you must (well, you *will*) fuss over them.
What is missing is... single-window mode!
That was a feature of the first betas of Mac OS X, and was abandoned before OS X shipped.
You click a widget, and all windows but the foremost minimize; and when you switch windows, the previous one minimizes, so there's only one at a time.
Dan Johnson It's important for a non-spatial interface with a relatively small amount of screen real estate. Very good for people still using 1024x768 on a 17" CRT...
Dan Johnson Because the interface was designed to work in that manner. Indeed, anything *but* a full-screen window...
This puts all the windows you can switch to in the dock, so you can click on them to switch windows quickly.
"Single window mode" wasn't a good solution- it did remove most of the clutter, but left much of the screen unused. And it was an all-or-nothing mode that affected all running apps.
It is as well it was dropped. But there's nothing to replace it.
No, I don't agree; you need some way to switch windows, you you want big but not quite fullscreen windows. The thing is...
Of course, Windows has a solution to this little problem; maximization. Maximizing a window 'tidies up' your screen completely; one window fills it, all others are obscured. You can then use the tidy-looking taskbar to switch windows. It's a lot like single-window mode, if you think about it.
The effect of all this is unfortunate for Apple. Coming from Windows, Mac OS X seems messy. Untidy. Windows just strewn all over, willy-nilly.
That's a bit jarring given how much effort has gone into the appearance and presentation of the product.
And this, I think, is why some Windows users complain that the window zoom command in OS X 'doesn't work'. It usually does make the window bigger, but it doesn't make it tidy-looking.
Of course, Apple *tried* to deal with this, and failed.
Actually, the overlapping windows are best for small screens. On the old 9-inchers, you needed to keep each window simple, or its content area would be too small to...
But why do they not try again?
At the least they might copy Windows. They've not been afraid to do that before, and they could probably make their own 'full screen mode' swankier looking than Windows'.