Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!apple!uokmax!d.cs.okstate.edu!norman From: norman@d.cs.okstate.edu (Norman Graham) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc Subject: Re: Can't resize windows? (was Re: Windows 3.0 & the Mac) Message-ID: <1990Jul17.041915.9989@d.cs.okstate.edu> Date: 17 Jul 90 04:19:15 GMT References: <3114@gmdzi.UUCP> Organization: Oklahoma State University Lines: 105 From article <3114@gmdzi.UUCP>, by strobl@gmdzi.UUCP (Wolfgang Strobl): > A program which was designed before the advent of the Multifinder > had no reason to save screen space or to stuff the same information > (or as much as possible) into a window of reduced size. It had to > share the screen with a static desktop and an occasional DA, only. This may be so; but as I remember, all the pre-MultiFinder programs I used certainly _did_ provide resizable windows, if for no other reason than to allow the convenient display of multiple documents at the same time. The user decided the amount of screen space taken up by a program. At any rate, your point is moot: MultiFinder has been around long enough that the current versions of most applications are designed with MultiFinder in mind. > But even the Multifinder suffers from the original single-application- > design: a switch from one application to another one has to > replace the menu bar on top of the screen, because there is only > one of them. This is more disturbing than MS Windows use of > multiple menu bars and the use of highlighting to show the > active application with the keyboard focus. You should read Neff Walker and John Smelcer's article in the proceedings of the April 1990 SIGCHI conference. These guys have spent several years designing and experimenting with various kinds of menus (for example, their version of popup menus are about 8% faster than Apple's popups). In summary (if I remember correctly that is), from their paper you can conclude that Apple's "menu bar at the top of the screen" will be greater than 30% faster than a "menu bar in a window" such as in Windows. Go get the paper--it's an interesting read. > Therefore I think that the concurrent *use* of two or more > applications (i.e. have two copies of the notepad editor and > one kermit running and cut and paste between all three > while composing a message, for example) is to my knowledge > more common under Windows than on the Mac, which makes it less > attractive for applications to give up screen space, on the Mac. > (I do not doubt that it is possible to cut and paste between > different running application. But how much and how smooth > is it used?) Don't be ridiculous. Cutting and pasting between documents in different applications (whether the apps are running concurrently or not) has been a hallmark of the Mac since 1984. For example, I just copied 'ridiculous' (first sentence of this paragraph) from my dictionary and pasted it into my terminal emulator. I regularly run 4 to 8 applications concurrently, and I have full cut, copy, and paste between them all. In fact, I can't think of a single application that doesn't have this ability (not counting utilities such as analog clocks, etc). By the way, I can't imagine what copy and paste have to do with the amount of screen space an application uses. Also, the usual situation on the Mac is that applications don't take up _any_ screen space; their document windows do take up screen space, but virtually all applications have resizable document windows so the user can decide how much screen real estate to allocate to each document. I believe this is different from Windows, where each application usually has its own desktop that contains its document windows. Isn't it this 'application desktop' that is minimized, maximized, etc.? Finally, there is little need to run more than one copy of an application at the same time (eg. two notepads in your example) since most Mac applications allow you to have many document windows open at the same time. > Of course this is how a Windows user/programmer with nearly no > Macintosh experience (me) sees it, so please take the above > statements as a question: is this observation correct? If not, why? If you have no Mac experience, then why are you pontificating on the way the Mac and its applications operate? > This [MultiFinder 6.1b9's 'Set Aside' feature] indicates > that the resizing capability alone is not enough > to get applications to share a screen without either confusing > or keeping the user busy. MS Windows tries to tackle this problem > by giving the user the option to run an application in one of three > modes: minimized (i.e. as an icon), normal size (resizeable or not), > and maximized (resized to the maximum size the application allows), > and a fast method to switch between these three modes. As I see it, 'Set Aside' is just an extreme form of Window's 'Minimize' function: The only difference is on the Mac, the application is not reduced to an icon. And again, applications on the Mac don't take up screen real estate (as a rule). I assume you can get screen clutter on Windows also--why else would there be a 'Minimize' feature? > So, if I want to use two applications concurrently, I put them > side by side by resizing the windows. If an application's windows > clutter the screen, I shrink it to an icon. If I use an application > exclusively for some time, I maximize it. All this is only a click or > a keystroke away. And its not a *new* feature of Windows. Sounds like the Mac to me (except for the keystrokes that is). I see no real difference between the Mac and Windows on this point. > Wolfgang Strobl > #include Norm -- Norman Graham Oklahoma State University Internet: norman@a.cs.okstate.edu Computing and Information Sciences BangPath: 219 Mathematical Sciences Building {cbosgd,rutgers}!okstate!norman Stillwater, OK USA 74078-0599