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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?"
but this falls into the "I want the computer doing what I say, not what it thinks I want." category.
I mean, it is a personal preference, but I don't want a system that refuses to arrange windows the way I want because "it knows what's best" for me.
So, my answer to your question is "no."
-Peter
Back in the late '80s for a while I owned a small OS-9 computer (some of you will guess which one) which used to lay its windows out this way. As time went on and Windows and X became bigger items, I started to desire those "overlapping windows" and eventually moved to Linux in '93 or so to get them.
Now you're telling me that tiled, edge-to-edge windows are the wave of the future? I don't know. How about some sort of compromise which allows overlapping windows but doesn't "require" them to the same extent as today's desktops? I'm not sure I'd really like to do away with them altogether... sometimes you just run out of display space, and I'm not really interested in 45" of computer display.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
My friends always laugh at me when I say that I hate using the mouse because when I'm really tooling along on my computer reaching for the mouse slows me down....I'm glad someone else finally understands this!
Your friends are laughing at you because, although using the keyboard "feels" faster, nonetheless you are wrong.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Why? Because it just isnt an improvement. Come up with a useful improved desktop environment that increases productivity by introducing 3d. Yes, it would be cool, but as long as it isnt *better* it is also *useless*.
I dont believe it can be done. Not until we have real 3d displays with 3d input devices and probably not even then.
Why? Because most of those working with computers are working with information. Information is almost always most efficiently conveyed via text, sometimes with added images. Text and images are 2d. You spend most of your time working with a 2d environment, in either case. So where is the gain in 3d? As an alternative way of navigating workspaces it's merely 'cool', but not even a navigational improvement over the pagers of multiple desktop spaces in most window managers, not to mention the problem that 3d spatial awareness isnt exactly something that most people find easy. I'm sure you or I could easily say at what exact position our wordprocessor is if we rotate the polyhedron a few steps around, but a lot of people dont find it a trivial task.
I don't buy it. For one thing, his comments are too wide-sweeping to be taken seriously.
For example, consider a user wanting to close a window. The user has two choices. She can type Ctrl-W and close it, or take her hands off of the keyboard (which she was using) and go for the little 'x' in the corner to close the window.
If we apply Fitts' law, we can come up with some numbers for it.
Fitts' law: a + b log2 (D / S + 1)
a and b are experimental values, but we can use 50 and 150 for them, respectively. (I'm getting these numbers from 'The Humane Interface' by Jef Raskin. No, I'm not pulling them out of my ass.)
The 'x' in the corner of my window is about 5mm a side. By my rough calculations, from the middle of my window (assuming the window takes up most of the screen, as my IE window currently does), I have to travel about 15cm to the 'x'. That's 150mm. So, S = 5mm, D = 150mm.
Our equation is then:
50 + 150 log2 ( 150 / 5 + 1) = 793 ms
It's generally agreed that it takes about 0.25 seconds to even get moving once you have your hand on the mouse. The propagation time of your hand to the mouse is probably another 0.5s at least. So, you're looking at about 1.5s to get to where you want.
By comparison, it takes about 0.2s to tap a key on the keyboard. If we assume that the user taps first one key, then another, we have a total time of 0.4s. (I'm also getting these numbers from 'The Humane Interface'.) Mental preparation time for the actual action is about 1.35s, but you have to mentally prepare for an action regardless of whether it is a typing action, or a mousing action. We can ignore it to simplify things. Since the 'ctrl' key can sometimes be odd to reach, we'll even ramp it's time to type up to 0.75ms. We're still looking at a total time of 0.95ms.
That was just to close a window. Selecting menu items (once you've successfully moused to the menu) is even longer. Time saving devices like the Apple (NeXT) dock speed some things up considerably.
Fitts' law explains why it's easier to use the Mac menu system, where the items are up against a barrier (the edge of the screen). It ends up making a larger effective target. This is also why the dock is effective.
Long and the short of it: an expert user is probably better off sticking to the keyboard. While I appreciate the research that Apple does (I honestly believe they know quite a lot more about UIs than basically everybody), this guy's assessment that it takes a full 2 seconds to do anything with the keyboard is pretty far out there, and I don't see any references to papers or any published results.
I often find that it's slower to use the keyboard, but it saves me the trouble of moving my hand on and off the mouse, which amounts to a comfort thing at the end of the day.
I mean, if the real estate is there, don't overlap, tile.
If the realestate isn't there, overlap, but offset. That's what virtual desktops are for.
I find one thing.. and I'm not picking on OS's here... but in windows, I find window management a pain in the ass. I find myself using the taskbar to flip between windows more often than not.
On unix desktops, I tend to have several things side-by-side or neatly arranged so I can see the data I need, the way I need it.
I've never analyzed why.. but it always seems less intuitive, or downright harder to do in windows.
It's probably due to a combination of different focus mechanisms and the types of applications run.. and I realize windows can be tweaked to have similar, if not the same, focus mechanisms.. but still.
As a general observation.. I find the typical KDE desktop a lot easier and more intuitive to work with than a windows desktop.
Secondly... a few things about windows that piss me off (that generally, though not always, only happen in Windows).
one is the popup dialog box that steals focus from whatever you are doing. That's a nono.
Stealing focus from the app it's related to.. that's one thing... but from unrelated apps.. it's a nono. Second is when one dialog box pops up and I cannot move the underlying windows. THAT is a nono.. I should be able to move any window on the screen at any time, period. I should be able to hide it, peg it, minimise it, shade it, whatever the WM wants.
That's probably another reason I find X a bit easier to work with.