Slashdot Mirror
The Waning of the Overlapping Window Paradigm?
Bingo Foo asks: "The paradigm of movable, overlapping windows on the desktop has been around, and indeed dominant, for a long time. The original motivation for this was to mimic sheets of paper on a desktop. This is a useful metaphor, but may be a bit limiting given the capacity a computer has for automation of the layout and display of "desktop" objects. Lately, I have been pleased to see an increase in 'framing,' 'docking,' 'stacking,' and 'tabbing' being used, starting most conspicuously with frames in the web. More significantly, it has shown up as an application workspace paradigm that improved previously crappy MDI implementations in programs like Visual Studio and KDevelop. In my opinion, the most promising experimental application, even if still immature, is one of the neatest window managers around, ion. Does anyone else see a time when movable, tear-off docking and automated full-time tiling completely take over from the free-floating manually arranged desktops of today?"
Then you believe wrong.
I personally used Xerox 1108 ('Dandelion') and 1186 ('Daybreak') machines from 1984 until 1988. They definitely, without question or possibility of doubt, had multiple overlapping windows, and, indeed, all the features of a modern WIMP environment. Xerox Stars, Dolphins, Dorados, Dandetigers and a number of other Xerox machines (including the Smalltalk ones whose model designations I've forgotten) had multiple overlapping windows at least as far back as 1978. It's probable (but I don't know this for a fact because I never saw one) that the Alto also had multiple overlapping windows, at least in it's Smalltalk mode.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Actually, I do the same thing using fvwm, maximized windows, and a program I wrote - Xmerge, which merges two windows into one with two frames.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
Man, I think alot of people posting here have no idea what Ion is really like. You *can* overlap windows in Ion. You just design the frameset for them. For example:
I have a left frame that is the height of two xterms stacked, this is god for programming, on the right, I have two seperate frames each the size of an xterm (one long frame on left, two regular sized frames on right).
in each of these frames I can have as many xterms as I want (or any other type of program). To move between frames, I use Alt-, to cycle through the xterms in that frame I use Alt-tab.
On the bottom, I have a very short frame that is as wide as the entire screen, this is great for log files, and I can easily switch between them.
Multiple desktops aren't quite good enough in most implementations I've seen (enlightenment comes close) - I've been spoiled by Amiga pubscreens.
Later versions of AmigaOS, in conjunction with common Amiga GUI toolkits such as MUI, allowed you to _persistently_ associate an application with a particular "screen" (a named virtual desktop). - So you could set your web-broswer to always open on its own screen called "Internet" for example, while your word processor opened on another screen called "Work", as did your spreadsheet.
The automatic creation/destruction of screens on an as-needed basis, the persistence of the application associations with particular screens, and the ability to name each screen, tend to be missing from X window managers. You flicked between screens by clicking the top-right hand corner of the screen, and you could drag them up and down to partially expose screens behind.
The "pub" in "pubscreen" comes from the fact that more than one application could use the same screen - in earlier versions of the AmigaOS, each application tended to use its own screen anyway, rather than being under user control.
I miss screens!
Choice of masters is not freedom.
Apple's user interface improved on Smalltalk-80 by making it easier to learn (more user interface functions are represented by explicit graphical elements) and with its graphical design. But I have a hard time coming up with any area in which Apple improved on Smalltalk-80 in terms of functionality or usability for experienced users. Even today, I find the Smalltalk-80 interface better than what you get on the Macintosh. Furthermore, Smalltalk-80 came with a development and debugging environment that puts even the best C++ and Java environments available today to shame.
Like many other people who have been in the computer industry for more than two decades, we can't help but shake the feeling that innovation in software has basically stopped since the 1980's; most of the change that we have experienced has been to make things "bigger" and "faster", but very little seems to have gotten "better".
To all the people who are working on software like Gnome, Java, KDE, etc., my message is: do your homework first. Find and use some of the old user interfaces. There is way too much reinventing the wheel, mostly very poorly.
An alternate subject for this might be "Another Xerox GUI idea rises from the dustbin". Dunno how old Cliff is, but around 1982 the original Xerox Star/8000 desktop forced users to tile their documents (B&W on a 1024x768 display, if I recall correctly). General user community reaction was "Bleah!". Some folks liked it a lot, many didn't. The next software release included the option of choosing betweeen tiled and overlapped windows. [OK, the idea might not have been Xerox's originally, but it's the oldest one I'm acquainted with] Personally, I like to choose between the two models, and frequently find myself using a hybrid, with some windows tiled (whether in an MDI or within the wm) and some overlapping. Additionally, as I grow older, I find that even with a 21" 1600x1200 display, I require larger fonts. There are times when the amount of information required simply will not fit on a forced tiled screen, unless I make the font smaller and put my face right up next to the display. But basically, it's the old light beer question. Some people want one, some people want the other. Some people want both. As a side note, I must say that window managers that force the active window to the top of the stack of overlapped must die! Or at least be rewritten. I like my windows to stay where I put them, thank you.
Racing is an addiction that makes heroin look like a vague hankering for something crunchy.
I never used to realize how constrained working with the desktop metaphor felt until I played with vtwm.
The big distinguishing feature of vtwm is how it implements virtual desktops. Unlike most virtual desktops in other UNIX window managers, this one can be of arbitrary size and you can scroll through it freely, instead of one chunk at a time.
I have vtwm set up so that the top 90% of the screen or so can be the "focused" area of the desktop, and the bottom 10% represents the entire virtual desktop, with boxes that represent where your windows are.
A blue box on the virtual desktop bar represents what the screen is currently focused on. You can either slide the blue box over to other windows, or pick windows up and move them into view.
You never feel cramped, and things like iconification are obviated. Simply move to a different part of the desktop if you need space. Also comes in very handy if you're at work and looking at porn and the boss comes by. Just click on the portion of the desktop that contains all of your busywork.
Here's a screenshot [if you see nothing but pitch black, scroll to the bottom right] to better illustrate my setup. The screen is right-center, and the gimp's toolbar is off further to the right off screen which is how I took the screenshot.
It's amazing how restricted I feel sitting at a windows box now, or with a window manager that doesn't support this. It's also great if you want to show how much of a badass you are, since with no windows open, the screen is entirely black, except for a thin white horizontal line at the bottom and a blue box beneath it.
So many answers in this thread talk about wanting overlapping windows. I'd like to point out that the utility of overlapping windows comes partially from "focus-follows-mouse" behavior (without "autoraise"). You can look at both logs at once, while scrolling through both without changing which is in front.
If you don't have focus-follows-mouse, the bottom window is less useful because it is static.
-Paul Komarek