Do people really want to look at multiple windows at once?
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Do people really want to look at multiple windows at once?
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Re: Do people really want to look at multiple windows at once?
#2From the comments :
"Imagine you were doing research and instead of spreading a number of books across your floor all open at the correct page you had them open stacked on top of each other and switched books when you needed to... Now tell me how frustrated you feel. Stuart Wakefield"
Although mostly single window, multiple screens kind of person myself I know the frustration of having to argue over the correct way for me to do my work that my paycheck depends on..
Re: Do people really want to look at multiple windows at once?
#3Only when switching between them requires an ounce of thought, OR they interact in some way.
Like if you're recording your screen, you want to be able to see the controls, the viewport, and the recorded region all at once, typically on many monitors.
Re: Do people really want to look at multiple windows at once?
#4I can see tasks where I might not need multi-windows like generic web-browsing (e.g. reading Hacker News).
But in general I often have multiple things going on concurrently, be it video-chat + work, debugger + IDE, responding to an e-mail (having two e-mails open concurrently is useful), or just any task involving assembling information (e.g. searching with one window while building a "list" in a second).
The Metro/tablet style of interface is useful for content consumption, but as soon as you move into the realm of content creation then it starts to get tricky.
Re: Do people really want to look at multiple windows at once?
#5From the comments : "Imagine you were doing research and instead of spreading a number of books across your floor all open at the correct page you had them open stacked on top of each other and switched books when you needed to... Now tell me how frustrated you feel. Stuart Wakefield" Although mostly single window, multiple screens kind of person myself I know the frustration of having to argue over the correct way f…
> Although mostly single window, multiple screens kind of person myself
I'm the same way myself. I will say that even with multiple monitors "Metro" (modern) apps don't really perform well.
For whatever reason many of them aren't very information dense. So even if you move each one onto its own monitor for whatever reason much of the available space is wasted with solid colour or nonsense.
Take a look at this for example: http://i.imgur.com/TMSwc.png
Note how little of that is actual information and conversely how much of it is solid green background.
Re: Do people really want to look at multiple windows at once?
#6As an old Amiga user, I find the "new" movement to full screen UI's amusing. It's back to the future. 1985 all over again.
And I like it.
I've run most my apps full screen for years, trying to get back to simulating something like the Amiga "screens".
Now, I do need to see multiple windows at times. But I also prefer not to most of the time. On the Amiga this was well catered for:
- You started with the Workbench screen, equivalent of sorts to a normal desktop + explorer.
- Applications could open private screens. On a private screen they could open a "backdrop window" covering the whole background, and treat it as a full screen UI. And/or they could also open floating windows on top of it.
- Applications or a utility could open public screens or place windows on existing public screens. These acted as extra desktops. Say I wanted a shell and a text editor in it's own workspace per project I'm working on.
Most larger applications let you choose between working in a window on the workbench screen, "fullscreen" on a private screen, or in a window on a public screen.
Screens can be "pulled down" to reveal the screen behind, if you for example want to have a quick look without losing your train of thought.
I'm 95% of the way back there now, with Ubuntu with Unity (even got the global menu bar back - yay!), but there are still annoying niggles in my workflow..
Another 10 years and maybe the rest of what I miss from AmigaOS will have made it back into the mainstream (datatypes, more pervasive unified scripting support of applications, user interfaces that don't grind to a halt when the machine is under a bit of load, to mention three...)
Re: Do people really want to look at multiple windows at once?
#7YES. No doubt at all.
But, then again, the article the question are referring to are kind of wrong anyway. The Windows 8's single window thing is meant for tablet and other consumption that is suitable for that kind of thing. His argument about the Windows 8 becoming less usable for power users are completely wrong, the metro interface is meant for the things that you would do on tablet, i.e. not power user-ish things.
Re: Do people really want to look at multiple windows at once?
#8From the comments : "Imagine you were doing research and instead of spreading a number of books across your floor all open at the correct page you had them open stacked on top of each other and switched books when you needed to... Now tell me how frustrated you feel. Stuart Wakefield" Although mostly single window, multiple screens kind of person myself I know the frustration of having to argue over the correct way f…
I find that analogy horrible. Switching rapidly between books in a stack would be slow and cumbersome. When you do spread the books out, on the other hand, you have an easy way of making one of them your single focus: Lift it up until it covers your field of view. With books spread out, you do have access to a single window user interface that way.
I'm all for having a multiple window UI accessible, or getting a rapid overview. But I find myself much preferring to unclutter my workspaces and have a single focus most of the time, and resort to the overview only rarely, especially because switching is so easy - I don't have to move big physical objects around in a stack, I can rapidly flick through a bunch of open windows on a carousel or get a display with a zoomed out overview.
I do find it important to be able to line up multiple windows though. Every now and again a single task will demand more than one window. I think that's where a lot of the disconnect comes from: Multiple windows on screen at once representing multiple tasks is a recipe for mental clutter. Multiple windows on screen that correspond precisely to a single, cohesive task is not.
Re: Do people really want to look at multiple windows at once?
#9From the comments : "Imagine you were doing research and instead of spreading a number of books across your floor all open at the correct page you had them open stacked on top of each other and switched books when you needed to... Now tell me how frustrated you feel. Stuart Wakefield" Although mostly single window, multiple screens kind of person myself I know the frustration of having to argue over the correct way f…
> Although mostly single window, multiple screens kind of person myself I'm the same way myself. I will say that even with multiple monitors "Metro" (modern) apps don't really perform well. For whatever reason many of them aren't very information dense. So even if you move each one onto its own monitor for whatever reason much of the available space is wasted with solid colour or nonsense. Take a look at this for exa…
Ouch. I find myself pulling back from the screen, and then zooming out until it covered a small corner of the screen before I found it readable... At full size I had to move my eyes too much. That's really awful.
Re: Do people really want to look at multiple windows at once?
#10YES. No doubt at all. But, then again, the article the question are referring to are kind of wrong anyway. The Windows 8's single window thing is meant for tablet and other consumption that is suitable for that kind of thing. His argument about the Windows 8 becoming less usable for power users are completely wrong, the metro interface is meant for the things that you would do on tablet, i.e. not power user-ish thing…
Yet I think he has a point - Metro is the default interface not just on tablet but also on PC. Microsoft are clearly pushing for this to become the main Windows interface, this is clear both in their App store, where regular applications are second class citizens, and the system itself where the regular desktop is a kind of optional interface.