[USNA91]

As you may know, I switched from PC to Mac back in November.

On of the things I'm STILL not used to on my Mac is the way that applications (Word, OmniGraffle, etc.) tend to put the document you are working on in one window and all the icon bars, etc., in other windows. I am used to one main window holding everything having to do with that app and then being able to switch from window to window.

Some have offered the excuse that doing it this way prevents "multiple instances of the Word Toolbars" (as one person put it). I think this is bunk, because no matter how many documents I had open in PC Word, I only had ONE set of icon bars.

I find it really annoying when I run OmniGraffle or Photoshop Elements and what comes up is a bunch of toolbars floating over all the toolbars of the other app I was running at the time. It just becomes a right old mess.

However, being relatively new to Macs, I can't help but wonder if I'm missing something. This baby has really made me question some of the paradigms I had about computing, and I'm open-minded enough to believe I might be facing another one here.

So, WHY does OS X behave in this manner?

[Twilly Spree]

I'm not exactly sure what you mean. Icon bars?

Each window in a Mac app represents an open document. That's the general rule.

Are you talking about the application window itself in Windows that contains all the document windows within? And you miss that?

Hmm. In any case it obscures the Desktop if you have one huge app window. I don't know.

Oh and thanks for voting Bush twice!

[CharlesS]

In an application like Word on Windows, every new window you open brings up a new instance of the application, which is wasteful in terms of system resources.

But one reason why I don't like the menu bar being in each window is that it forces you to maximize all windows to the size of the whole screen, even when you don't need to. For example, in an application like Word, generally you don't need the whole width of the screen, but it's length that is important, as it allows you to view more of your document at once. When I use Word, I often find that the window I use is much less wide than the menu bar on top. If the menu bar were in the window, I'd have to make the window wider just to accommodate it, or else have to use the annoying chevrons to access certain menus. On Windows, this results in people basically maximizing every window for every app, and apps expecting to be used this way, and you don't have the wonderful ability to see more than one application at once, or have access to a portion of the Desktop at all times for use with clippings, quick access to the hard disk, etc.

It's really annoying to me how every app has a "bib" over it on Windows. It reminds me of the Mac interface way back in the 80's before MultiFinder arrived, with Switcher. It negates the UI advantages of a multitasking system, IMO.

[USNA91]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
In an application like Word on Windows, every new window you open brings up a new instance of the application, which is wasteful in terms of system resources.

Ok. That makes sense.

But one reason why I don't like the menu bar being in each window is that it forces you to maximize all windows to the size of the whole screen, even when you don't need to. For example, in an application like Word, generally you don't need the whole width of the screen, but it's length that is important, as it allows you to view more of your document at once. When I use Word, I often find that the window I use is much less wide than the menu bar on top. If the menu bar were in the window, I'd have to make the window wider just to accommodate it, or else have to use the annoying chevrons to access certain menus. On Windows, this results in people basically maximizing every window for every app, and apps expecting to be used this way, and you don't have the wonderful ability to see more than one application at once, or have access to a portion of the Desktop at all times for use with clippings, quick access to the hard disk, etc.

I don't know. Maybe I'm used to maximizing. It's one of the things I like the most about Expose; I can maximize all I want, but still switch between apps mega-quick.

However, I will concede the idea that I can have two or more documents open while only having one set of iconbars to work with, and the sizing issue is certainly relevant. I don't do much of that, and I don't think I've had to do it in OS X yet, so maybe I just haven't had the chance to notice.

All that said, your explanation makes pretty good sense. I still get a headache sometimes, though, when I have 6-7 icon bars floating around and I lose track of where I am.

It's really annoying to me how every app has a "bib" over it on Windows. It reminds me of the Mac interface way back in the 80's before MultiFinder arrived, with Switcher. It negates the UI advantages of a multitasking system, IMO.

Bib?



Twilly: You're welcome! I was in Miami both times!

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by USNA91:
However, I will concede the idea that I can have two or more documents open while only having one set of iconbars to work with, and the sizing issue is certainly relevant. I don't do much of that, and I don't think I've had to do it in OS X yet, so maybe I just haven't had the chance to notice.

When you get more settled in with the Mac, you may find yourself becoming more used to the multi-window way of working. It has many advantages for efficiency.

Bib?

What I mean by that is the way apps tend to cover up any space they're not using, so you can't see or click through it. The worst case of this I've seen has been in certain MDI applications which, if you have them open with no documents open, fill up the whole screen with nothing but empty space.

There was an ancient drawing program for kids back in the 90s called Kid Pix that used to have a feature very similar to this. It would put a full-screen window behind the open document windows so a kid couldn't accidentally click on the Desktop. The feature was called a "bib" and I have always found that term appropriate for this kind of thing.

[USNA91]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
What I mean by that is the way apps tend to cover up any space they're not using, so you can't see or click through it. The worst case of this I've seen has been in certain MDI applications which, if you have them open with no documents open, fill up the whole screen with nothing but empty space.

Oh! Is this the space where the toolbars and such go? In other words, if you close the files but lea the app open, all the blank space underneath the iconbars and such?

It really DOES look like a bib, doesn't it?

[Cadaver]

Fortunately, there is no equivalent to the Windows' MDI window interface (Mother-Daughter window interface) in the Mac world.

In Windows applications like Word and Photoshop, there is one main window, and all other toolbars, palettes and document windows (i.e., the picture itself in Photoshop or the text in Word) are windows inside the main window.

In the Mac philosophy, there is no such thing as these mother-daughter windows; there are no windows inside windows.

OS X solves the button-bar/toolbar issue with the customizable toolbar like you see in apps like Keynote, Pages, Finder, Omni's apps, etc.. So each document window gets its own set of tool buttons.

Now, I'm not necessarily suggesting the Mac way is 100% correct, but I have seen some really, really horrible implementations of the MDI window system in certain Windows' applications.

Here's one really horrible example... EndNote for Windows. EndNote is a very, very popular reference and bibliography app for both Windows and MacOS. Something I use nearly daily. On the Mac, the application presents you with a couple of windows (a reference library window and a search window, typically). Each can be resized and moved for connivence. On Windows, the EndNote application first opens a "mother" window, and inside that will be windows for the library and for searching. You can move these two daughter windows around, but ONLY inside the mother window. If you want to resize it larger than the default mother window, you've got to first enlarge the mother window, then enlarge the daughter window(s). Hit the Maximize button and guess what happens? Can't see the desktop any more. No access to stuff you've got there (drag & drop, etc). Want to see your library window while writing? You've got to move the mother window first, the resize/reposition the daughter window next. It is THE MOST ANNOYING AND TIRESOME Windows application I've ever seen.

Trouble is - each main window of a Windows' app is the application, so it would be difficult to rewrite EndNote to do away with the MDI interface. Where would the Menu bar go? Which window? Library? Search? Both? If it was only one of the two, and you closed the one with the menu bar, how would you get it back?

You can see it creates a problem.

Now, I will also give you that too many Mac applications spawn far too many individual windows, littering the screen with toolbars, palettes and documents. Microsoft applications like PowerPoint and Word come to mind. Photoshop ain't much better. This is why I personally like single window apps like iTunes, iCal, Mail, iPhoto. Other apps like Keynote, Pages and Onmigraffle are better at least by integrating the toolbar window(s). And the tabbed palette window helps reduce the number of palettes required.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by Twilly Spree:
Each window in a Mac app represents an open document. That's the general rule.

Not quite, but close. In an app which works with documents, the philosophy is that the window should be indistinguishable from the document itself. It doesn't just represent the document, it is the document. This was one of the principles behind the idea of spatial orientation as well; a folder's window was the folder, and a file's icon was the file. Toolbars did not belong in windows, since they were not parts of the document or describe any of the document's properties.

This was the philosophy of the Mac OS interface up through OS9. It no longer holds in OSX, whether in the Finder -which no longer treats folders as documents- nor in apps like TextEdit, which include toolbars as part of the window. However, many apps with older roots, such as Word and Photoshop, still cling to the old ways. The merits and flaws of those ways are a subject for another thread -actually, many other threads- but that's what happened.

[Brass]

Note that in most Mac applications, if you switch between apps, most of the ancillary windows (palletes, toolbars, etc) disappear when you change to another app, and re-appear if you switch back to that app. This means that you should only ever get the ancillary windows for one application at a time (ie, the frontmost app).

[RonnieoftheRose]

Applications on Mac OS have always behaved or appeared this way because the desktop has always been an important part of the GUI whereas Windows had the Program Manager before it had a proper desktop. With the Mac it meant the files you were working on could be placed on the desktop for you to see and open even with an application running over it, very much how you would work on your desk. You see a sheet of paper in front of you, the tools and the desktop.

It is also more memory efficient in some cases. Internet browsers take up more memory each time a new window is launched on Windows and it is also possible to launch the same app more than once on Windows. Not the case on a Mac.

[USNA91]

On a related topic....

What, then, is "single application mode"?

Does it eliminate the ability to have two apps open (i.e. - on the screen) at once?

[Millennium]

Originally posted by USNA91:
On a related topic....

What, then, is "single application mode"?

Does it eliminate the ability to have two apps open (i.e. - on the screen) at once?

Yes, and no; that's what the feature was supposed to be, but it was never released.

It was planned for OSX way back in the Developer Preview (before the Public Beta) days. It was to have been activated by a round purple window widget, which was located where the oblong blue Show/Hide Toolbar widget is now. The idea was scrapped before the Public Beta was ever released.

[USNA91]

Originally posted by Millennium:
Yes, and no; that's what the feature was supposed to be, but it was never released.

It was planned for OSX way back in the Developer Preview (before the Public Beta) days. It was to have been activated by a round purple window widget, which was located where the oblong blue Show/Hide Toolbar widget is now. The idea was scrapped before the Public Beta was ever released.

Woops. I goofed.

Single-Application mode is a setting in TransparentDock, not OS X.

What widget are you talking about?

[Big Mac]

When OS X was first introduced to developers, the Finder had a single window mode (I think it was called "browse in place") which only showed one window at a time. It was billed as a feature that would reduce excess window clutter. It was a pretty alien concept to Mac users. The Finder browser (which is brushed metal in Panther and is alternated with window mode by clicking the jell cap widget on the right side) is what became of that feature.

[Dog Like Nature]

Having grown up using OpenLook/Motif (and to a lesser extent Windows), I find the single menu bar to be a great way to save screen real-estate, and (as others have mentioned) ensure that all the options that can possibly be displayed for a given screen width are actually visible.

Also, it's important from a spatial point-of-view for the menus to be in a consistent place on the screen, and you can see the current foreground app at a glance (good to know when using keyboard commands!)

So, there are four good reasons for the single menu bar.

Regarding the floating tool palettes -- they take getting used to also if you weren't raised on Macs. Of course, they share some of the same advantages as the single menu bar when working with multiple documents in the same app (namely less space wasted with repetitive blocks of icons, and consistent positioning on screen). Also, there's no blank space on screen (as there is in Windows when the window is wider than the width of the toolbars).

I believe the Mac way is much more consistent and facilitates a more efficient workflow.

...and I've only been a Mac user for a year!

[OreoCookie]

Originally posted by USNA91:
Ok. That makes sense.



I don't know. Maybe I'm used to maximizing. It's one of the things I like the most about Expose; I can maximize all I want, but still switch between apps mega-quick.

However, I will concede the idea that I can have two or more documents open while only having one set of iconbars to work with, and the sizing issue is certainly relevant. I don't do much of that, and I don't think I've had to do it in OS X yet, so maybe I just haven't had the chance to notice.

All that said, your explanation makes pretty good sense. I still get a headache sometimes, though, when I have 6-7 icon bars floating around and I lose track of where I am.



Bib?



Twilly: You're welcome! I was in Miami both times!

You are simply used to Windows-style computing. When I go back to Windows sometimes (e. g. to fix my parents' computer or something), I find it quite tiresome that most apps make a habit of taking up the whole screen (e. g. installers which clearly don't need all of the 1280x1024 pixels).

If you get used to it, you'll probably work with a lot more apps at once (Exposé makes switches apps a bliss).

For instance, my father still doesn't understand multitasking properly, because he can see only one window (where did the other programs go?).

[baggie]

Originally posted by Dog Like Nature:
Having grown up using OpenLook/Motif (and to a lesser extent Windows), I find the single menu bar to be a great way to save screen real-estate, and (as others have mentioned) ensure that all the options that can possibly be displayed for a given screen width are actually visible.

Also, it's important from a spatial point-of-view for the menus to be in a consistent place on the screen, and you can see the current foreground app at a glance (good to know when using keyboard commands!)

So, there are four good reasons for the single menu bar.

In addition to your points, there is one other good thing about the Mac's menu bar - it is anchored at a screen edge. This is good because you can't go beyond a screen edge with your mouse - and so the menu bar is effectively infinitely deep (or wide, if anchored to the left or right edge) - i.e. screen edges are really easy to hit quickly. Since the Mac menu bar is anchored at the top of the screen, you can literally throw your mouse forward and be certain that the pointer will be over the menubar, and then you only need to worry about being accurate with your mouse in a left-right direction (i.e. selecting the menu item).

On Windows/X-Windows/NextStep, menu bars are rarely if ever anchored to a screen edge, and so it is slower to select a menu item as you have to be more accurate in the up-down direction as well as left-right. The lack of consistency of menu placement in some OSes compounds this problem, because you can't even rely on getting used to a specific location of menus - and so even more time is wasted finding the locations of the menus in the current application.

Note that menus in a maximised Windows app will be consistent in location with other maximised Windows apps (but not non-maximised apps), but even thought the menus are towards the top of the screen, they are not anchored at the screen edge, so you do not get the benefits of the infinitely deep target that the Mac's menu bar provides. Even a 1px gap between menu target-area and the screen edge removes this benefit.

[ameat]

Originally posted by Cadaver:
Fortunately, there is no equivalent to the Windows' MDI window interface (Mother-Daughter window interface) in the Mac world.

In Windows applications like Word and Photoshop, there is one main window, and all other toolbars, palettes and document windows (i.e., the picture itself in Photoshop or the text in Word) are windows inside the main window.

The Adobe apps (notably photoshop, illustrator, and indesign) all provide a "bib" mode for working with a document (3 buttons at the bottom of the tools bar). It's not a true MDI interface, but it maximizes your document window and hides the window's title bar under the toolbar so that you truly are working on a single document.

Anyways, most apps that have multiple toolbars tend to hide them when the app doesn't have focus, thus preventing too much clutter...

[chris v]

I've always vastly preferred the Mac paradigm that more clearly separates the application itself from the document. when I started out on computers, my time was evenly split between Win 3.1 and Mac OS 7, and Windows always confused me by having a set of menus on every file. As someone who handles art files, I appreciate the more document-centric approach, as I handle many, many files, and most of my tasks relate to a specific file. I just fell into the Mac way of doing things because of this, and I haven't looked back in many years, now.

The obvious exceptions of course are apps that handle more than one document, like e-mail apps, the Finder, iTunes etc. (thus the toolbar items) but I'm still glad that the single-menu-bar and floating window paradigms still hold for these.

I do bring Photoshop files full-screen all the time, but that is totally different from the Windows way of doing things, where the application is full-screen, and the document floats inside that. The few short hours I've spent off-site doing Photoshop work for people on their Windows boxes has always been excruciating for me. Navigating the file system to find/save files is quite a bit more convoluted in Windows (at least 98/2000--haven't really worked on XP yet) than Mac, and ultimately a frustrating waste of time.

I hope to g*d that this debate doesn't catch fire within the Mac programming community-- it's wrong-headed, as far as I'm concerned.

Signed, a lowly end-user.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by USNA91:
Woops. I goofed.

Single-Application mode is a setting in TransparentDock, not OS X.

What widget are you talking about?

In apps which use Cocoa-style toolbars, there's an oblong blue widget on the right side of the titlebar. You can click it to show or hide the toolbar. The Finder actually has such a widget, though it overrides it to do something different.

This idea came to OSX fairly late in its original development. Before that, there was a purple widget to activate SWM, but it was round like the other window widgets. If SWM was on, this widget would have a dark purple dot in the middle of it.

[JMII]

Originally posted by ameat:
Anyways, most apps that have multiple toolbars tend to hide them when the app doesn't have focus, thus preventing too much clutter...

In addition if you have two monitors you can put all the tool bars onto one monitor and leave your document open "full screen" on the 2nd monitor without any clutter. This is really the best way to work in Photoshop (and Illustrator or InDesign) provided you can afford 2 monitors and the desk space. I've done it before using a CRT screen as the main monitor (for color critical work) and a smaller flat panel LCD just for the tool bars/brushes palette.

I'm not sure if Windows can even do this as I've never seen a Wintel box connected to dual screens.

[Dog Like Nature]

Originally posted by baggie:
In addition to your points, there is one other good thing about the Mac's menu bar - it is anchored at a screen edge. This is good because you can't go beyond a screen edge with your mouse - and so the menu bar is effectively infinitely deep

That's a very good point, and an example of Fitt's law.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts'_law:

the edges (e.g. menubar in Mac OS) and corners of the computer display are particularly easy for a user to acquire: because the pointer remains at the edge of the screen no matter how much further the mouse is moved, objects at these positions can be considered as having infinite width