>> Seems useless to me, but maybe the Mac doesn't have a row of buttons >> for every program on the start bar. > >And how useful are those buttons under these circumstances: > >1. you have multiple instances of the same application with different >documents.
The row of buttons on the start bar contain the document name for each invocation. You just choose the one you want. Works easily and is not a problem.
>2. since the taskbar displays the title bar text of the window it >represents, if the app's title bar is of the format "Application Name >- Document Name", when you have any number of apps running, you can't >tell which document is represented by which window without scrubbing >the mouse over them to trigger the tooltip that gives the full title >bar text.
I don't usually run more than 10 programs at once, so this is not a problem for me, but, if you do run more programs than that all the time, I would make the task bar 2 lines big to give the icon buttons more room.
>3. compare scenario 2) with 4 running taskbar buttons to running with >8 and then with 16 and then with 32. It's pretty clear that the >taskbar becomes useless for identifying which window is represented >by which taskbar button very, very quickly.
Only if you constrain it to one line (see above).
>Office 2K forced the issue >because of MS's stupid insistence on moving to the single document >interface (i.e., each Word document gets an independent window, >rather than child windows of the parent Word window),
I agree that was a stupid move. I try not to use Word except when I have to. I normally write in a programmer's editor.
>WinXP, MS had to come up with a solution to the proliferation of >taskbar icons created by the stupidity of regressing to the single >document interface, and they did this by putting an option in the >Taskbar that would group all the windows for a single application >instance in a single button, with a dropdown menu for navigating >between them.
I never knew that. But I don't have a problem with too many task bar buttons.
>The taskbar (and OS X's Dock) are not big enough to solve problem of >identifying what the iconic items represent. Making them large enough >would take over too much of the working area. Enter Expose, which >easily toggles you between what amounts to a full-screen Dock >(taskbar) and your applications. It's rather as though in Windows Alt- >Tab used the whole screen to represent the apps that you can cycle >through.
I never use alt-tab. A mouse click is much faster, to me.
Phil Daley < AutoDesk > http://personal.monad.net/~p_daley
_______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
