![]() The document-based application becomes a special case of a larger, more complex system that has to be accomodated unambiguously in the menu selections and keyboard shortcuts, and presented in a way that is logical and intuitive, and which scales down to the more natural document=window paradigm so that the added complexity of MDI only clutters up the rest of the interface when it has to. TEXT EDITOR FOR MAC OS 9 WINDOWSI despise MDI on principle, but I will grudgingly accept it on OS X if and only if:ġ) the creation and management of subwindows becomes the responsibility of the Window Manager (which, in turn, would allow for system-standard ways to interact with them).Ģ) These windows do not recycle the tab widget, which is meant to organize static forms, but introduce a new "subwindow" widget like the one in the screenshot above, or (better) like Safari's.ģ) Apple sits down and thinks all the way through the implication of turning a window into a folder of sorts. Even people who like the tabbed interface in Safari acknowledge that there are sharp corners and things that haven't been thought through yet, and there are all kinds of ambiguities, like the expected behavior of Command-N, Command-O and Command-W, introduced because all of a sudden a window is not a document and a document is not a window, and 17 years of elegant consistency is moot. ![]() TEXT EDITOR FOR MAC OS 9 FREEThis is exactly the kind of inconsistency- and bug- introducing makework that OS X was supposed to free us from having to do in the first place. Right now, the main problem with any tabbed interface on OS X - including Safari's - is that they're completely DIY, and they require that the application do window management. Now that's what I'd call ergonomic design ! :-) I hope that will give ideas to cocoa-knowledgable brains around here. This is a screen make-up I photoshopped where I arbitrarily took the best of UltraEdit (Windows), Hydra, Safari and even a (forthcoming) IRC client and sticked them together. So here's my little contribution to the establishment of a Better World?. You quickly end up chatting in the edition window: welcome to Hell! Generalization of brushed aluminium in their apps and, above all, tabbed browsing in Safari are steps in this (right) direction.Īnother thing that bugs me with Hydra is its chat system: il relies on iChat, which is of course the right thing to do, but Hydra and iChat aren't well integrated: having a window for editing changes (Hydra) and another one (iChat) for commenting them is quickly becoming a pain in the ass. Not adding such a killer feature (tabs) because of nearly-religious beliefs in Apple's OS X guidelines is not the best thing to do IMHO.Įven Apple themselves seem to have moved from their 'classic OS X' guidelines to a new, mixed and less radical interface. N their FAQ, they state that 'Tabbed editing seems to be an interesting idea, but at the moment it doesn't really fit into Cocoa's mulit-document architecture, which we don't want to harm by doing something like this.' (typo theirs). It's such a shame that Hydra won't support tabbed editing.
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