Interesting that so many others like the multiwindow approach. I’ve always thought that a horrible design, because you constantly have to fool with them to get them out of the way as you work on a document. I like the approach taken by Photoshop, where you can dock them them together in the layout that’s most effective for you, then mark some columns as being pinned open while others can collapse when not in use.
I have Photoshop 5.5 or 6 and love the interface, but because I didn’t want to subscribe to Creative Cloud, I try to do photo stuff in other programs as much as possible—to get comfortable with other products so it’s not tempting to use PS every time. Initially I tried to do as much as possible in Pixelmator, but having tool windows scattered all over the place drove me crazy; now I’m using Affinity Photo, and the docked toolwindows are a major reason why. -- Charles On January 9, 2016 at 17:21:14, Rick Mann (rm...@latencyzero.com) wrote: In complex apps (e.g. CAD apps, IDEs) a given document has many auxiliary windows. The trend in UI at Apple has been to consolidate these into panes in a single window. I've always preferred separate windows (e.g. separate toolbar window). One more concrete example is in a CAD program: the objects in the document are often related to each other hierarchically. There's usually a view of this hierarchy using something like an outline table. I can see this naturally fitting as either a pane in a split view, or as a separate window. Best of both worlds, I suppose, would be a dockable window (a window that can be separate, or live as a pane in a split view), but that might be a lot of additional coding (is there a nice library that offers this?). Complicating matters is whether or not each open document shares a single instance of these auxiliary windows or has its own. I think something like a tool palette is clearly shared (it's more app-global then per-document), but the model object hierarchy window is probably per-document.f Separate windows have tremendous advantages, but I think panes are considered more "simple." Simplicity has advantages, but we're talking about complex apps that by their nature demand more of their users than something like iPhoto. Thoughts? -- Rick Mann rm...@latencyzero.com _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/cejwork%40gmail.com This email sent to cejw...@gmail.com _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
