Raphael Quinet wrote: > > Yesterday, I wrote: > > > Hmmm... Maybe I should re-post this as an article on Advogato? > > > > That's what I did. You can find the article here: > http://advogato.org/article/287.html > Some of the replies are interesting, even if they would be a bit > off-topic for this list. > > -Raphael The article's comments are interesting and show that people are using MDI for at least 4 different concepts. - There is the Microsoft MDI API. I have not tried to use it in a program so cannot comment. - There is the window within window concept. StarOffice and Microsoft Works both open a window containing multiple windows. I do not like those instances of windows within windows because they group unrelated applications and documents together. I would rather have Word files in a group with RTF documents but not mixed with spread sheets or database files. - There is the multiple document in one window approach. Opera opens multiple web pages in one window so, while I prefer Opera to Netscape, I tend to open unrelated web sites in Netscape so each site appears as a separate selection in the main toolbar. The opposite is true for email, where having all email documents open in the one window lets me very quickly scroll through the junk mail. - There is the docked and undocked toolbar approach. I do not call a tool a document, but some people do, and some tools open complex windows that would qualify as documents in their own right. I like a document appearing with all the tools applicable to the document. Netscape does a nice job by letting read email within the email application window with all email application tools in the toolbar, or I can click on an email and have it open in a separate window with just those tools that relate to individual email. I like that approach and in PaintShop Pro (the release I use), simple tools stay docked, complex tools pop open an undocked settings window. While the PaintShop Pro approach of popping up windows is nice, there are multiple images in the window and the one setting always applies to all images. There are occasions when I want to apply the same action to all the open documents so having them all in one window with one setting the for tool is great. There are also occasions when I have open several groups of images, with each group containing several images (or dozens of images) and I would like a tool setting to apply to just one group. In that case I can open several instances of PaintShop Pro, have a group of images in each instance and set the settings individually. Unfortunately that release of PaintShop Pro uses one internal setting and a change to the settings in one instance will be used in all instances, even through the tool settings display continues to show the individual setting. As another instance of good and stupid programming, an abnormal termination of one instance of Netscape, will terminate all instances of Netscape while blasting away one instance of PaintShop Pro will leave all the other instances working happily. In Apache, a big change in release two, is to support both NT's tasking and multithreading so an administrator can run separate Apache tasks for reliability while using multiple threads for performance. It would be nice to have all applications that sophisticated so separate instances of Netscape can survive the failings of other instances and PaintShop Pro will not change settings in other instances of PaintShop Pro. Something I liked, back in the days when I was learning to tie shoelaces and program in Assembler (which is the easier of the two), OS/360 had what is effectively read only memory for applications. I know 98% of programmers, including most of IBM's, did not understand the concept, but it meant you could load an entire application in to memory, or just the frequently used bits, without executing the program, or using any variables, then reference the code from other tasks, The other tasks would then be extremely small and totally independent, as each would open it's own read/write memory for variables but have almost no code. Writing a well formed program was actually easier than writing the code typically sold by the big software companies. A 100,000 people could use well formed code at the same time and not have a single collision. I do not understand why companies like Netscape work so hard to make one instance crash other or why Jasc have one instance update other. Irrespective of the technology, I would like to open an image with it's own toolbar and settings while having a separate image open with separate settings, and, when I click on one image, have all it's tools and settings appear together. A second item, in the Windows toolbar, Netscape displays the document's title first then places the advert for Netscape second while Opera places the advert for Opera first and the document name second. Opera's approach is unbelievably frustrating with a crowded tool bar. Gimp places the document name first, which is great, but only on the document window. I tried opening two instances of the Gimp to test what happens when I crash one, but realized I could not usefully select (or crash) one instance out of many as they all have the same name for the main window. Hmmm...., then I discovered that crashing a document takes out the related instance of Gimp. I have yet to test the independence of document settings. If that occurs and the correct instance of tool windows pops up when I click on an image, then I could have two or more groups of images open, each in a separate instance of Gimp, and set the tool settings independently for each group. It would be great for working through a list of images in two parallel streams, one to convert the main image to a displayable image, JPEG, and the second to create the thumbnail version, perhaps as a PNG 8 bit or less. What is supposed to happen with settings when you open multiple instances of Gimp?
