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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?"
In reality, it was very difficult to duplicate, because it did not yet exist. Atkinson (Apple) ended up creating the algorithims to do overlapping windows on his own. At some point he was in a car accident, and there was alot of concern, because at that point, he was the only one in the world that had the knowledge.
That's one disappointing thing about today's GUIs, that there's no dialogue. The technology exists for the computer to, say, anticipate your next move, complete it ahead of time, and wait for you to tell it if it "done good" or not. For example, completing commands at a UNIX shell prompt is quite possible (in fact, it's been done before) and useful. One of these days (it's always "one of these days") I'm going to write a shell that does this.
Windows are a useful abstraction of display space and a useful way of dealing with user input. I wouldn't want to try to program a GUI without them. However, I'm not convinced that overlapping windows are not an unnecessary and cumbersome user interface element. I myself am an advocate of non-overlapping tiles as an efficient way for a user to manage his screen space.
Some say the web browser is the most popular GUI program. But the Web browser suffers from a whole host of problems. Just like the CD player programs that looks like the front of a CD-ROM driver, Web browsers only support plodding motion through the Web. The Forward/Back/Stop formula has got to go. A really slick Web browsing scheme that I saw at U. of Maryland, I think, provides a visual browsing history in the form of miniature views of past Web pages you've visited, with more recently visited pages still visible at about half the size of the page you're presently at, and pages visited very long ago appearing very small. I don't recall if the hyperlinks on the miniature pages could be activated, but I think that they *should* be, as that would make it really easy to move from one page to another if, say, you're at a Web directory of some sort.
As for ion, it appears to be a restriction on user ability, rather than an increase of user ability. I can already align my windows such that they don't overlap if I desire.
But I already have the flexibility of using my graphical interface almost entirely without my mouse. I'm running Gnome and Sawfish, and I can setup multiple desktops, indexable with alt-F#. Then if I keep the number of windows on my screen down to a reasonable number, no more than 3 or 4 (which is what ion would be limited to anyway for reasonable space consumption), then I can tab between them almost instantly with alt-tab. Then I can access them all immediately without the mouse, and without sacrificing the size of my windows, because they can all be close to full screen. As for organizing by graphical tabs, that's what the tasklist in the gnome panel is for, which is always an option when one feels the urge to reach for the mouse to find a window.
Every application I use regularly on my computer has an associated Sawfish shortcut. Mozilla, gnome-terminal, xmms, etc... Even shortcuts for common functions can be created in Sawfish, such as a shortcut locking the screen, shortcuts for raising and lowering volume, shortcuts for playing cd's (all using console-based tools, and the ability to bind a key combination in sawfish to the launch of arbitrary programs), shortcuts for closing a window, and shortcuts for bringing up frequently accessed files.
Excluding web browsing and copy/paste, I could go an entire day without having to reach for the mouse.
So, most current windowed gui's are based on the idea of a desktop, with file folders, documents you shuffle bach and forth, etc. Seems like what people are asking for here are some of the normal office desktop tools, tape, stapler, scissors, pen, etc. So, should there be a gui that has this kanda stuff, a stapler to link/stack documents, tape to bind stuff, scissors to split, pen to annotate. Any other tools that would work like this?
It also has an advantage for desktop users because these heavyweight applications have the unique possibility of using paradigms different than windows for managing documents/tools reducing the window clutter on the desktop. E.g. in a PIM several related applications are presented in one window (where if needed the different components can often be opened in a seperate window anyway); in an IDE it is common to have a form editor, code editor, class browser, debugger all in one window.
But there are other approaches that can be taken. I've read dialog windows in MacOS X stick to their owner which is nice because it reduces the amount of windows you have to manage. X window managers could probably implement this feauture pretty easy.
But more can be done, e.g. it would be nice if there was a Nautilus-like panel on the right side of the screen in which things like music players, instant messengers, calendars, RDF-boxes, etc. could be embeded (these would be Bonobo components or KParts). An idea would be to model the panel after Nautilus' sidebar, only when hiding a tab the panel should disappear completely except for the tabs at the bottom of the screen.
In conclusion, it would be nice if the desktop environments started to work more towards reducing the number of open windows rather than taking the GLADE appraoch where there's a window for the menu and tool bars, a toolbox window, a property window and a window per form. (Yes, I know of workspaces but that ruins the advantage of windows even more.)
Monkey sense
A good example: I do computer support, and sometimes I'm looking at the logs for two computers to compare and contrast events between them. I need a certain amount of the log to be present, I need enough width that line wraps don't hose the legibility of the log, and I need to switch between the two windows easily to compare them. If they overlap, a front button (handy on my Sparc workstation) lets me switch between them without mousing, and away I go.
If I had to make the two windows fit on screen at the same time, it would be an enormous pain.
It's all about giving me the freedom to work how I work best; if any window manager refuses to allow me to use the paradigm I know and love, I won't fscking use it.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I've been thinking about this for a while, nothing frustrates me more than having windows obscured behind something else, and having to either drag the front window out of the way, or else alt-tab through everything. In a lot of ways this is what first got me hooked on linux as a desktop replacement for windows, the well developed multiple desktops system. So I can hit a key combination and cycle from one desktop to another. One has my mail and IM open on it, the other one browsers, the next nothing but terminals, and then filemanagers/xmms.
A lot of application shave taken a better look at how they're actually used. Sometimes the UI is bad bad bad (StarOffice 5.2). Other times it's really appropriate, like the tabs in galeon which are great for organizing all the browsing into different windows based on subject (for those of us that like to have 20 pages open at once. Right clicking to open in a new tab is great for s site like slashdot, K5 or Adequacy, where there might be 7 or 8 links on the main page that i want to get to, but not forget if I get sidetracked.
When I first grasped mozilla's power as a platform I had the epiphany that since 90% of the apps I ran were network based and mozilla provided an API for creating spiffy looking network applications, it wouldn't be a stretch to do everything in tabs within one maximized window, and that it could eventually function as an OS for lightwieght computers. If you type chrome://messenger/content/messenger.xul in mozilla you can get the entire mail application dropped into your browser window. Press ctrl-T on a recent build and you have a new tab to browse in, but you can switch back to your mail real fast. Add Jabberzilla to your sidebar. Throw in a few more apps from MozDev.org and you can do most of what you'd want within a single window. It's in no way complete or stable, but it's enough to shed some light on a usable way to avoid the worst of window overlap. Apparantly there is a company that's working on using mozilla as an operating environment for appliances called OEone. You can check out the screenshots of their calender application here.
We already have a modern successful non overlapping interface, and it's called PalmOS. Just as it took a limited use platform to accept "modeing", probably not a lot of desktop users will be willing to give up the poer that free windowing gives them, but for appliances, or special uses, such as subject-centered web browsing. Things like tabbing and fullscreen interfaces are a good idea, and have already been implemented.
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Noone thinks of Ctrl+C when they need to copy stuff, they just put their pinky on the Control key, and press the key which is about 7 cm to the right and 2 cm above.
Sorry, but the guys who actually sit around with stopwatches (and, occasionally, EEGs and CAT scanners) to quantify this sort of thing disagree with you.
Think of muscle memory as the instruction prefetch cache on a CPU. Yes, if you "hit" the cache, you'll execute the instruction faster than if you didn't. But there's still a delay involved, and (important bit here) some caching strategies are more efficient than others.
Keyboard shortcuts are a lot more intuitive to muscle memory than mouseitems can ever get.
The research that Tog cites proves the exact opposite of this claim. Where is the you research supporting it?
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
The ideal interface, in my opinion, would be to support nesting of window managers within other window managers and/or within applications. The biggest problem with MDI is that every MDI application basically acts as its own window manager. Usually this "embedded window manager" is a really crappy one, which turn people off to MDI in general, but there are exceptions; my preferred browser and text editor both use tabbed document windows to very good effect. It would be cool if we could tell applications what window manager instance (WMI) to use, so that the app can delegate window management to the WMI of the user's choice. Want SDI? Tell the app to plop its subwindows into the same WMI as the parent window. Want MDI? Tell the app to plop its subwindows into a WMI ("using *this* window manager, please") embedded within the parent window. You could use the same interface to switch between a Mac-style single menu bar and Windows-style per-window menu bars. All of this could go into a fairly simple config file, allowing users to choose whatever combinations of overlapping/tabbed, MDI/SDI, Mac/Windows styles - including hybrids and mixed modes - that they want.
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I recall this was the case. This was supposed to
avoid Apple patents by reverting to a Xerox look.
No one really bought Windows until version 3.1
and MS Office requiring it.
Two words: keyboard navigation. In the Windows world at least (yeah yeah, bite me), anyone who bothers to learn the relevant keystrokes and combos can whoop the pants off a mouser in basic, nuts-and-bolts text editing tasks like selecting ranges, cutting and pasting, applying attributes, etc. Why? It's not the amount of time it takes to reach for the mouse; that is as nothing against the amount of time it takes to orient hand/mouse to screen/pointer, navigate the pointer to the appropriate button by eye, and click. I type 100 wpm on a good day, and my fingers know exactly where to go at all times. The visual interface is fine, but (for me at least) it lacks the benefit of proprioception. When I use the mouse, I am forced to stare at the screen in order to be sure of the result of my mouse movements, whereas I always know exactly what my keystrokes are doing without having to look.
For example, in most Windows text editors, pressing Control-left-arrow moves back one word. Further, holding Shift while using any navigation key combo changes the navigation action to a select action. Therefore if, for example, I want to select the paragraph I am currently editing, all I have to do is press Control-Down (end of paragraph), Shift-Control-Up (Select to top of current paragraph), and it's done. Elapsed time, about a tenth of a second. A couple more keystrokes and I can cut or delete the paragraph, add formatting (B/U/I, justification, etc.), and so on. Compare that to the time it takes to lay your hand on the mouse, move the pointer to one end of the paragraph, click and drag to sweep out the paragraph by eye. No contest.
Heck, my typing speed wouldn't even be what it is if it weren't for keyboard shortcuts. As an instinctive touch-typist, I seldom miss a typo as I go along, and by now it's a perfect reflex when I notice I've just mistyped to press Control-Shift-Left and retype the word - elapsed time, maybe half a second; expended effort, negligible.
"The deep-fried Mars bar is a symptom of a wider crisis." -- Nutritionist Ann Ralph, on the Scottish diet
>That depends on one huge-arse variable: where the menus are.
Absolutely. Like I hinted at, Fitts' law will tell you that going to a menu like the Macintosh ones is fast and easy. However, a memorized hot-key will still be faster depending on where the menu item is in the menu.
Studies show that the 2rd or 3rd item is usually the fastest to get to. If your menu item is nested, you also have to take into account the possibility of overshoot, etc.
There is certainly a balance somewhere in there. I like my hot-keys, but I can't deny the usefulness of menu items. In the UNIX world, however, where everything is text-driven (mostly) anyway, it's usually faster to do some memorization.
In the OSX world (where I'm happily typing this from, I might add), the GUI actually extends the interface experience. I'm much more willing to use the mouse now than I was before. In Windows, I feel crippled. I haven't put any time into memorizing the interface, so I'm constantly using the mouse to get things done, and I feel like the productivity is draining out of me when I do it....
Okay, I just downloaded and installed Ion. While I appreciate its many keyboard shortcuts, I think the real power it possesses is the ability to all but eliminate unneccessary window-resizings.
Think about it. There are only two reasons people resize windows: (1) To focus on one particular task (window), or (2) to focus on more than one task/window, without eliminating the first focus. (The case where the user wants to switch between focuses or close the current focus in most windowing systems are handled by mechanisms like taskbars and close buttons. ). Most of the time users spend in 'focus adjustment' is simply futzing with the window borders in an attempt to maximize screen coverage while preventing overlap. Even 'timesaving' options like 'tile windows vertically' are usually wasteful, because, while they speed up the initial operation, the minute you attempt to make a small alteration to your focus (say, by making one window a little larger) you actually have to perform two or more tasks: Resizing the window under consideration and resizing its neighbours to concur with the new arrangement.
Since a framed-window system allows adjustment in a single motion, it saves time. (Although there are other window-management paradigms that acheive the same trick).
Personally, I really really like Ion -- I'm running it right now, and I have no intention of switching back to Oroborus any time soon (another very good window manager, IMO....)
- undoware.ca
If you mostly use terminal apps, try using "screen" as your primary switch-between-programs environment.
I always have the same app running at a particular screen number, so switching never takes more than a second. Editor? ^]0 and I'm there. Email? Mutt is running at ^]1. News? See slrn at ^]5.
I've been using this type of setup for a year now, and it's great! I almost never interact with my WM at all, and have disabled all window decoration.