The menu bar always being at the top regardless of where the window is is one of those crippling UI failures that Macheads keep telling me is a "feature". Dammit, disassociating the controls from the window and making it impossible to reach more than one control set at a time *and* making it difficult to tell which control set is "live" is MUCH worse than the marginal advantage you get by pinning the menu to the top so that imprecise clickers have an easier time clicking imprecisely. And said imprecise clickers then have to click precisely again to select the correct entry *on* the menu, so it's not like you're lowering any ACTUAL attention requirements in practice.
Grr, argh.
(Worse UI fail: Closing the window *does not stop the program*. This is WRONG AND BACKWARDS. If I wanted the program to keep running while the window just disappeared, I'd have used MINIMISE, not CLOSE. Close means STOP, dammit.)
But I suspect you find more Mac users running multiple windows that way because Macs are a closed hardware environment that sacrifices a great deal in favour of "looking good" - which means that Macs tend to have large screens with a high resolution and the ability to hold multiple windows at a decent size each. Combine that with the deliberate by-design crippling of your ability to switch to programs that you can't see and click on an active window of? It makes MUCH more sense to have multiple small windows open all the time.
With Windows users who get similar screen real estate, what I find is multiple non-maximised windows, all placed so that if they do overlap, it's a single click at a place just past the edge of the previous window to bring the new one to the front. Which is, really, similar to the way the Mac users do it.
(Windows 7's various "pin to whereever" functions are just plain useful, for this - drag a window to the top of the screen and it maximises. Drag it to the left or right and it resizes to take up half the screen. It's simple, it's easy, the UI shows you what will happen when you release the button before you do it - it's the kind of UI changed that I like because it's small and unobtrusive and Just Works.)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-16 04:12 pm (UTC)Grr, argh.
(Worse UI fail: Closing the window *does not stop the program*. This is WRONG AND BACKWARDS. If I wanted the program to keep running while the window just disappeared, I'd have used MINIMISE, not CLOSE. Close means STOP, dammit.)
But I suspect you find more Mac users running multiple windows that way because Macs are a closed hardware environment that sacrifices a great deal in favour of "looking good" - which means that Macs tend to have large screens with a high resolution and the ability to hold multiple windows at a decent size each. Combine that with the deliberate by-design crippling of your ability to switch to programs that you can't see and click on an active window of? It makes MUCH more sense to have multiple small windows open all the time.
With Windows users who get similar screen real estate, what I find is multiple non-maximised windows, all placed so that if they do overlap, it's a single click at a place just past the edge of the previous window to bring the new one to the front. Which is, really, similar to the way the Mac users do it.
(Windows 7's various "pin to whereever" functions are just plain useful, for this - drag a window to the top of the screen and it maximises. Drag it to the left or right and it resizes to take up half the screen. It's simple, it's easy, the UI shows you what will happen when you release the button before you do it - it's the kind of UI changed that I like because it's small and unobtrusive and Just Works.)