On Tue, 17 Mar 2009, Roger Burton West wrote: > > Given the usual Windows innovation system, I assume that it had been > briefly standard on Apple machines a year or so earlier.
No, MDI is something they got from IBM and OS/2 - it started off as the Common User Access standard. (Other things that come from CUA are Windows' use of Alt, Tab, Esc, F1.) I suppose you could view the Mac as a sort of simplified MDI: instead of putting an app in a window which contains its menu bar and document windows the Mac uses the whole screen. But unlike the Mac, MDI was designed by (and for) programmers who didn't understand how to keep the document metaphor simple nor how to avoid wasting pixels. Hate. I cut my GUI teeth on the Archimedes so I think menu bars are hateful (e.g. on the Mac they screw up focus-follows-mouse, and on MDI they aren't at the top of the screen so require too much long-distance precision mousing) and I think everything should hang off a popup menu that's no more context-sensitive than menu bars are (i.e. not a hateful randomly changing context menu). Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <d...@dotat.at> http://dotat.at/ GERMAN BIGHT HUMBER: SOUTHWEST 5 TO 7. MODERATE OR ROUGH. SQUALLY SHOWERS. MODERATE OR GOOD.
