Matthew Thomas writes an interesting post titled
"When good interfaces go crufty". It's an interesting read and he raises a lot of good points: why we have to manually save (still!); the reasons for the "Quit" command in programs, etc.
That latter one was one of the things that
Compound Document Systems like
OpenDoc were supposed to save us from. When you opened an OpenDoc document, there was no "File" menu (it was replaced by "Document", at least when using Apple's OpenDoc Framework (ODF)), and there was no "Quit" command. When you wanted to start a new document, you were supposed to find the right
stationary to start from. Stationary, in Mac OS terms, represents documents that upon opening are pre-populated, but are flagged as a New Document, so that the first time you did hit "Save" you'd have to choose a new name. The Office Suites (both big ones like Office and small ones like AppleWorks / MS Works) do similar on their startup screens. OpenDoc was significant because it put such functionality basically at the Operating Environment level instead of the Application Level.
Unfortunately, OpenDoc was killed before there was really enough computing power to make it work - it was painfully slow on the Macs that existed at the time. And, even though the paradigm
should have been common to people who used the office suites (big and small), it was still really awkward to shift away from the application-centric paradigm.
"And the world has suffered for our silence..."
Windows has been interesting. From the whole "New >" contextual menu item that showed up in Windows 95 where you could create new text, picture, etc, documents to the more recent usage of multitasking to spawn separate instances of Applications for each document that still feel like a single multi-document interface (Internet Explorer on Windows has been like this for a while, Office has gone this way). But MDI on Windows can be just...weird, due to what Windows marks off as an application. It could be that I'm just used to the Mac. But, doing some Zope development on Windows lately, it was hard to figure out when
TextPad would spawn a new application instance, and when it would open a text file in the main TextPad window.
So, on the Mac side, how are things in this area? I don't think that the application -> quit paradigm is going to go away anytime soon, partially because of
Cruft. But things are changing. For one thing, due to Mac OS X's memory management, it's not that big of a deal to keep an application running even with no documents open. And many such Applications respond intelligently to the dock - when you click the Finder, IE, Terminal or other apps that are already running with no documents open, you'll get a new window (this behavior is often configurable). It varies between applications, but most of the time the apps do the right thing. When my cable modem was installed and my home iMac was still running Mac OS 9, I watched the serviceman click the running IE icon numerous times, obviously expecting a browser window to pop into view.
I'm cutting off this post here. It's late, I'm fresh home from the bar, but I hope to post more on this soon. It's a topic that interests me. It's interesting contrasting Microsoft's
Tablet PC with the designs of the venerable
Newton. I think that the Newton was one of the more interesting Operating Systems in recent memory, while Tablet PC is kindof like Mac OS X 10.2 with Ink recognition - basically Windows XP with...handwriting recognition... Nothing
dramatically new. But there are interesting designs that are going deeper into the heart of Apple's and Microsoft's offerings that could be indications of where things are going. And again - I'll have to promise to try to get back to this topic very soon.