On Mar 28, 2007, at 11:14 AM, momo wrote:
Ok, then tell me why the concept of multiple document windows in a single program window it still used in Indesign, Corel, Photoshop, Illustrator, XaraXtreme, and many other professional programs? Having several program windows for every opened document is confusing, specially when working with lots of documents in several applications at one time. You'll end up with a whole bunch of windows all over the screen...
It is a question of ergonomy, multitasking has nothing to do in this...
Simple.
The main reason many of those programs do that is due to legacy behavior in coming from Windows 3.1 or Mac OS 4.
In fact, when Microsoft introduced Windows 95 their official requirements were that applications drop MDI and switch to SDI. That was due to many studies done on the efficiency of MDI, etc. However, since the large vendors already had programs that did things the ancient way, they were able to get "grandfathered" in with exceptions.
To give a counter example, think of a designer working on two jobs. One graphic for client A and one graphic for client B. The requirements for client B's artwork happen to be in a MS Word document. So the artist opens up that "MS Word doc for client B" and also the "Photoshop document for client B" and has them side-by side on the screen. That way he can copy and past and also just read things now and then from the requirements as he does the design. This is especially useful if some rough storyboarding or such diagrams are included in the Word doc.
However, during that day he also has to complete some work for client A, and so has the "Photoshop document for client A" open.
Artists generally find it very annoying when doing the work for client B if just clicking on the client B artwork document causes the client A artwork document to *also* come forward and obscure the client B requirements/design doc.
Or think of the case where an artist is referring to some MS Word requirement/design doc and *also* some web page on a specific technique. It's *very* counter productive if just bringing up the photoshop document brings up the full "photoshop application" with it's MDI parent frame that takes over the entire screen. (That's what you showed in your example screenshot)
In general, studies keep showing that it's far more productive for people to work with "documents" instead of working with "applications"
Yes, it's a question of ergonomy... however they MDI paradigm *came* from the ancient requirements of older operating systems and has just hung around because "that's the way we've always done it"