Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2007 21:44:56 +0000 From: David Marrs <David.Marrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> All Mac software ported to Windows uses the parent window model because - I suspect - it's the simplest solution to the "where goes the omni-present menu bar?" problem. You put it at the top of an omni-present window that has to be maximised and you've got a makeshift Mac desktop. It's not elegant and it usually doesn't work very well (see Photoshop pre CS2 for details). Most (if not all) Unix WMs already share MS Windows's behaviour of every window containing its own menu bar, so why try and solve a problem that's already fixed? Windows users hate the Gimp's current layout because it forces them to work using scaled windows. Windows users like to maximise *everything*, in case you hadn't noticed. I wouldn't be surprised if a large fraction of Windows/Gimp users maximise their canvases and then use alt-tab to access their tool dialogues. It also doesn't help that the default layout is very hungry of space. The first thing I do after installing Gimp is to reduce the size of the toolbox to something that leaves some room on my screen. I think your own mock-up is a far superior solution to an MDI layout, especially if slave windows could be rolled up or otherwise made invisible. It allows one to work full screen, removes the confusing CDI structure and also reduces the problem of task bar clutter. I also think that extending the tool dialogue's tabbing feature to the canvas windows would be very natural and help the clutter problem as well. You could have several canvas windows each containing many images in tabs. You could even go as far as allowing tabs to be moved between the tool dialogues and canvas windows so that an overview could be nested directly beneath the layers tab, for example. As long as we're talking about all this, I'd rather see things go the other way -- each image has its own toolbox, set of dialogs (perhaps in a sidebar, or as slide-outs or slide-ins), etc. Let's take layers as an example (because this is one of the more annoying ones to me). Having only one layers dialog has two undesirable consequences: 1) I can only see the layer stack of one image at a time. 2) If I move the mouse from one image to another (even if the mouse is in transit), GIMP switches which image's layers are displayed. One way of looking at this is that this is a problem with focus follows mouse (actually focus strictly follows mouse in my case, but I don't think that that matters here). The other way of looking at it is that this is a problem with dialogs that are related to a document being shared between multiple documents, so there's only one "active" document at a time. My preferred way of working is to have lots of open windows at a time. Sometimes a window that I'm working in at the moment (emphasis on "at the moment" -- I don't really have a notion of "this is what I'm working on now", I jump around between things) may be partially obscured by another window, but that's how I like it. I do use multiple virtual desktops, but not in a very organized way. I rely on screen real estate (currently 1600x1200 on my laptop, and 1920x1200 on my desktop except when I bring the LCD upstairs and stick it on my laptop to get 1920x1200). I'll be a good candidate for QXGA or even HXGA when it becomes affordable -- it will just give me that much more space to expand my clutter onto. I personally do not like the Macintosh interface one bit -- it gets all the key interfaces wrong for the way I work. At least to me, it emphasizes that there's one thing that it expects you to be working on at a time (click to focus and raise rather does that, especially combined with the single menu bar that's tied to whichever application is "active" at the time), and that one thing is front and center no matter what. Be all that as it may, I suspect that having separate layers, channels, etc. dialogs for each image might be very attractive in a lot of cases, but it's not going to be to everyone's taste. -- Robert Krawitz <rlk@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Tall Clubs International -- http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2 Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@xxxxxxxxxxxx Project lead for Gutenprint -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net "Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works." --Eric Crampton _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
