In complex apps (e.g. CAD apps, IDEs) a given document has many auxiliary windows. The trend in UI at Apple has been to consolidate these into panes in a single window. I've always preferred separate windows (e.g. separate toolbar window).
One more concrete example is in a CAD program: the objects in the document are often related to each other hierarchically. There's usually a view of this hierarchy using something like an outline table. I can see this naturally fitting as either a pane in a split view, or as a separate window. Best of both worlds, I suppose, would be a dockable window (a window that can be separate, or live as a pane in a split view), but that might be a lot of additional coding (is there a nice library that offers this?). Complicating matters is whether or not each open document shares a single instance of these auxiliary windows or has its own. I think something like a tool palette is clearly shared (it's more app-global then per-document), but the model object hierarchy window is probably per-document.f Separate windows have tremendous advantages, but I think panes are considered more "simple." Simplicity has advantages, but we're talking about complex apps that by their nature demand more of their users than something like iPhoto. Thoughts? -- Rick Mann rm...@latencyzero.com _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
