But a tabbed interface is quite different from MDI, even if to some
extent it's solving a similar problem. Maybe a tabbed interface can be
considered a "Mac solution" to the MDI problem, but I would suggest it
only works sometimes. Xcode is a good example of something that would
probably be done as an MDI interface on Windows. It's more limited, in
that you can't place each panel anywhere you like, or rearrange them,
but that's a Good Thing - it allows you some freedom to set up the UI
as you need it but not so much that you don't know roughly where to
find what you want - it's stable.
On Safari, the tabbed interface is good - I use it a lot - but you can
drag a tab out and make it a separate window if you want. MDI doesn't
allow that.
MDI is a solution to a problem of Windows' own making, where window ==
process. As we are not stuck with that false equality, we have no need
to make an MDI interface on the platform to solve the problem that a
single process has multiple windows. There are plenty of examples on
the Mac of consolidating things into a single window, all of them
superior to MDI.
The people that the OP works for (and with) appear to have forgotten
that by definition, the app they are building for the Mac is going to
be used by Mac users, not Windows users, nor themselves, so why they
would insist on forcing a UI parity between the two products is beyond
my comprehension.
--Graham
On 27/07/2009, at 8:22 PM, Simon Hickmott wrote:
I don't really agree, as others have suggested, that this is a
hammering a Mac-shaped peg into a Windows-shaped hole problem we're
dealing with here. There are many successful Mac applications which
use a tabbed view to consolidate multiple documents: TextMate comes
immediately to mind — you wouldn't want multiple separate windows on
screen when developing a Rails app, let me tell you. The solution
there is to use an NSDrawer to manage a directory tree, with a
tabbed view for navigating through opened documents. Mail and
XCode's Organizer use a split view, similarly, without the baffling-
to-some-users,-it-seems Drawer. The way I see it, there's no need to
resort to any third party jiggery-pokery to achieve your solution
when the Cocoa tools are already there, all of which comply with
Apple's HIG.
On 27 Jul 2009, at 04:46, David Blanton wrote:
I am the only Mac programmer where I work; the rest being
windows. I am constantly challenged to make Mac programs look
like windows to some extent.
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