[Could you change your quoting to not start with a space? It completely screws up most mail readers' ability to recognize quoted text and then reformat it appropriately with added quotation characters]
On 18 Dec 2003 at 7:08, Phil Daley wrote: > At 12/17/2003 03:12 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: > > >> 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. How many documents do you have open? The most room you ever have on the TaskBar is for 7 or 8 full-size TaskBar buttons. If you operate as most people do with at least one TaskBar button width of icons in the system tray (by the clock) and and the same width in the quick start bar, you're down to 5 or 6, and the lower your screen resolution, the fewer such buttons are possible. If you open more apps, the narrower the buttons become and the less you can see of the document name. And this is assuming that you're using apps that have been programmed to put the document name first in the title bar, contrary to MS's original UI recommendations. If your apps are a little older (such as Office97), you get a bunch of buttons with the app name, and maybe one or two characters of the document name, if you're lucky enough for the application name to be short. Microsoft Word 97, for instance, leaves no room for the title of the document, even when you have only one application running. The more apps you have running, the more this becomes 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. So, to get around the problem, you'd permanently sacrifice screen real estate? OK, you have a solution to a problem, but Expose solves this problem without reducing the size of your working area. And it isn't 10 programs you need to run. It's more like 5 or 6, if you run with the normal complement of system tray icons and the quick launch bar. > >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). Thirty-two applications with 6 buttons across is going to take up about 1/4 of the screen, vertically, if you want to be able to read enough of the title to distinguish the documents, because you don't get the most efficient use of the TaskBar in the resizing of the buttons. And it's not something you would do temporarily, as it resizes your desktop, moving icons from their original posisitions, and resizing any windows that you have open that are not maximized. In other words, IT DOESN'T WORK. > >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. Well, some people have real needs for something more than a text editor. And that's not the point. The point is that most people in the world use MS programs and Expose on Windows would make it easier to manage windows. > >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. Well, then, so far as I can see, you are not much of a multi-tasker. My normal working environment has more than 10 apps running, and it's not because I've forgotten to close things I don't need (e.g., having two instances of Access 2K running viewing code takes up 2 windows each, so that's 4 right there, and it's not at all uncommon for me to work on one Access project while having my code library or another project open in another instance of Access; add to that my email client, my web browser, an instance of Word for my note taking, and I've already filled up my TaskBar to the extent that the titles are not very readable). Just because you don't encounter the working environment that Expose helps with does not mean that Expose is not a great thing for those people who *do* encounter that environment. I encounter it on an almost daily basis. > >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. Then you are never running very many apps at a time. I've experienced the problem of distinguishing TaskBar icons from the very beginning of using Win95. It's a problem that has not gone away, though it has been greatly ameliorated by my use of Mozilla's tabbed browsing in place of multiple windows with IE and Netscape 4.x. -- 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
