On 18 Dec 2003 at 7:21, Phil Daley wrote: > At 12/17/2003 03:23 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: > > >On 17 Dec 2003 at 7:26, Phil Daley wrote: > >> I don't get it. Why would it be hard to find? That's how I work > all >> the time and any window is just a mouse click away. > >Mine > aren't. Some windows are two clicks away because MS changed the > >behavior of a click on a taskbar button to toggle the window's state > >between Restore/Minimize, instead of having the click restore focus > >to the window represented. > > I always minimize a window I am not using. I only have one open > window in the desktop pretty much all the time. (IE excepted)
Well, I *don't* minimize, because I don't see the point. Why minimize when you can simply switch to a different task? But let me point out that by minimizing, you're doing the extra clicks yourself. > >> If you hover the mouse over the taskbar, it will give you, not > only >> the window name, bur also the open document, if, for some > reason you >> don't know what button to press. I can't imagine not > knowing which >> button goes to which program window. > >The point of > expose is that it gives you the information without >needing to scrub > the mouse over taskbar. It gives you that >information with an easy > mouse movement (going to the hot area in one >corner, a corner that > is always the same once you set it), rather >than with a mouse > movement that requires you to navigate horizontally >across a > vertically narrow space. > > The information in the taskbar icon is sufficient to distinguish any > one program from all the others. . . . Only if you're not running very many apps simultaneously. > . . . I never find it necessary to hover > over a button to see what it is. I was just suggesting that people > who lose windows could do this. I never "lose" a window. The key word there is "I" -- your working style is not the same as everyone else's. > >1. Microsoft Office 2000 programs or later. > > Word and Excel. I might have 2 instances of Word rarely, I would > never have 2 instances of Excel. Who gives a rat's ass if you never edit more than one Excel spreadsheet at a time or more than one Word document at a time? That this would be true for you and any number of other people does not in any way alter the *fact* that it's *not* true for some significant number of users. > >2. Internet Explorer. > > Sometimes I have 2 or 3 instances when I am googling. But then I do > not use the task bar, I just click on the portion of the visible > window. I know which instance is the main search one by its screen > location. Sounds to me like you use Windows like DOS 3. > >All of these programs proliferate taskbar icons, by (ill-conceived) > >design. WinXP groups windows of a process into single icons > >accessible through a pop-up menu. > > Never have seen that one. It's a kludge to get around the problem MS created for itself by abandoning the MDI. > >The feature of accessing child windows of all running apps from a > >single location is one that Expose has over Windows. WinXP can group > >multiple windows of one application (i.e., if you open Word and > >launch 3 documents, they are represented in WinXP as a single > taskbar >button, whereas in previous versions of Windows, they were > three >independent buttons), but other versions of Windows cannot. > But WinXP >*cannot* give access through the taskbar to the document > windows of >multiple-document interface programs, or to the tabs of > Mozilla, for >instance. > > It does not do that on my system. I get a separate button for each > instance. > > Seems like a useless Windows feature. Windows XP? Well, then you haven't turned on the feature. It's in the TaskBar properties. In any event, it's not useless at all -- it conserves TaskBar space so that you can navigate easily to your application windows. > >Sounds like you are happy with what you have simply because you have > >it. > > It works well, it is not broken and it is fast. But I hate a screen > full of open windows, so I work in a method that minimizes that aspect > of running multiple programs simultaneously. . . . I run as many applications as I need for the tasks at hand, some of which are ongoing, if not immediate. My email client is always running when I have the PC on. My web browers is almost always running. I'm also very old-fashioned in using as program group that I keep open all the time with shortcuts to the apps I use a lot. So I have a minimum of 3 windows open at all times. When I start work, I'm likely to have 3-6 additional windows open. When doing Web research, I'll often proliferate Mozilla windows to keep groups of topics together (one window has tabs related to one subtopic, another window has tabs related to another). And if I need to hit the Microsoft Knowledge Base, I have to use IE (MS won't give you the advanced search in any other browser but IE), so then I could end up proliferating IE windows. If I'm doing web page design, I'll have all my browsers open, which would be Mozilla, Firebird, Opera 5.x, Opera 7.x, Netscape 4.x, IE4.1, IE5.1, IE5.5 and IE6.0. That's in addition to my email client and my HTML editor (HomeSite). I might very likely have my graphics editor open, as well, (Paintshop Pro). That comes to 12 windows right there. Expose would be *very* useful in this scenario. > . . . Also, I have been > working that way for 20? years, since Win2.1 came out. Perhaps Mac > users, since they only had the possibility of running multiple apps > more recently, are less familiar with the concept. Also, I agree that > it takes a large screen to make managing multiple windows easier. I > have a 21" monitor cranked up to its highest resolution. Most Macs I > have seen have much smaller screens. I could never use a laptop. The > screen is abysmal and their substitutes for a mouse are useless. \/\/hatever. You've been working, it seems, under the limitations of a version of Windows released 15 years ago, not realizing, it seems, that Windows is a lot more able to multi-task now than Win3.0 was. That's your choice, but it doesn't mean that your working style is normal, or that tools that help those who use lots of apps at one time are not really useful. Useless to *you* does not indicate complete uselessness to everyone (or to most everyone). > >I have always been frustrated by the limitations of the Windows > >Taskbar, and have complained about it from the very beginning. Apple > >is trying to solve those problems in its implementation of the > >onscreen representation of all the programs running, in order to > >improve navigation between apps. This is a good thing. I hope that > >when Microsoft copies it, they do better job than with their usually > >UI copying from Apple. > > I hope they skip it. I like it the way it is. You won't have to use the feature, just as you don't seem to be using much of what Windows provides today. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
