10/GUI
I like it. Simple and elegant. This actually reconciles a quandary I’ve been having about the state-of-the-art in window management until now…
In the beginning (when there was only the console), programs with a textual user interface DID take up the entire screen.
Then came along the GUI, and some folks at Xerox decided it was a good idea to splatter overlapping 2D windows all over the screen. This design served desktop systems for a long time without noteworthy modification.
And then the web happened. If we think of each web page we visit as a full application (which is not far from the truth these days), then the only “window management” that’s being done for web apps is simply to organize them into Firefox tabs. And users like this. In fact, they prefer tab organization over desktop window management — this turned out to be one of Firefox’s killer features back in the day.
But why? Why two different window management techniques for web apps vs desktop apps? If one style were superior to the other, then it should grow to occupy both roles. In the desktop GUI, “browser tabs” would be analogous to maximizing every window on your desktop and switching among them via the Windows taskbar. And in fact some people do use computers like this. The task of digging through a stack of overlapped windows is gone, and you maximize screen real-estate for each application you look at. The concept makes a lot of sense in retrospect; maybe window managers should have been designed like this from the start?
via vimeo.comPosted via web from Jeff Hui | Comment »
