People generally have pretty good spatial sensibilities, and I feel like modern OS designers seem to forget this. You feel this especially on iPadOS.
Physically arranging windows allows for a much more solid multi-tasking experience, and encouraged direct manipulation of content e.g. drag and drop. Transient "palette" or "panel" windows allow for a short term buffer (think a find/replace panel). To me, this is what made macOS so great for creative tasks. It activated my spatial memory.
I'm grumpy about the recent trend towards apps living in one monolithic window. Apple's going down this route with their recent app redesigns from multi-window to single window, likely due to a (selfish) desire to unify with iPadOS. Electron adds a dev tax for multiple windows, such that folks don't really think to do it.
I think this trend is probably due to the convergence of desktop app design with the web, which is inherently single window -- and traces its roots back to window.open() being abused by pop-up ads.
It's unfortunate because a single window user experience is limiting -- and people are forgetting that anything else is even possible. I miss the days when chat apps had separate windows for each chat, and a buddy list you could pin to the side of the screen.
(If you've only ever got comfortable with a windows-style "maximised window" approach, you'll probably disagree with me, however).
> (If you've only ever got comfortable with a windows-style "maximised window" approach, you'll probably disagree with me, however).
Windows-style? Microsoft's APIs and design paradigms are as floating-window focused as they are maximized-focused. And I don't think I've had a window open maximized since the XP days. Multiple document interfaces were a first class citizen for a decade and a half, so clearly they understand and encourage window use.
Single task, maximized windows are a user paradigm. Usually by regular old users that just want a browser, tax program, video game, etc and that Windows doesn't get in the way of. These same people will use the expander in macOS, or just use their computer with a single half-sized window in the middle of their screen. "Power" users (devs, creatives, traders, PMs, CSRs, etc) will best use the environment in any OS, for their use case.
In addition, maximized windows are ubiquitous on mobile platforms and are a paradigm that Apple seems insistent on, considering how hard the Android (and Microsoft before their inevitable mobile death) companies are working on solving the multi-tasking problem. Even now, I can have multiple floating, resizable windows on a Galaxy device; while I can not on an iOS one.
Windows 10 brought in some decent tiling/snapping, and windows 11 greatly expanded the tiling options for windows.
It’s not i3 or bspwm or anything, but Microsoft does at least seem to understand desire for the window manager to help you nicely place several windows in to nice places.
Windows has had Tiling functionality since Windows 1.0, but retrofitted onto a stacked manager from Windows 2.0+ (same as Gnome, macOS, etc do). "Side-by-Side" (exclusive tiling mode) was added to Windows Vista, and upgraded to "Aero Snap" in 7. It has been iteratively improved from there.
I really appreciate apps that open new windows where it makes sense, but I'm pretty sure the reason it died out is because people started using too many windows for conventional floating window managers to handle. I'm not sure if many people really felt the burden it would have caused, because the growth in number of windows arguably began with having many webpages open at once, and firefox, and then later internet explorer with version 7 (or maybe 6?), introduced tabs as a core part of using a web browser.
When I'm using a tiling window manager that supports tab-style layouts (i3, sway, gnome+popOS) applications that open new windows liberally are great because the alternative is to have an ad hoc bespoke window manager inside every application, and it's much better to have a single consistent window management experience at the OS level with one set of keybondings and predictable behavior.
But if I had to have a floating window for every webpage I have open, I'd never find anything!
Not everybody works in a browser. I usually have an Edge, a Teams , an Outlook, a Total Commander and an Excel window always open. Then the working windows depending on the task: doors, CAD tools, etc.
Window management is a solved issue: just give me a fvwm window manager and i'm happy.
But of course, on Windows (see above) no fvwm and Gnome must reinvent the wheel every other year.
I would take issue with your first claim. People, in general, have very mixed spatial sensibilities. Is why it takes herculean efforts to keep dishes organized in a family. Some people have organizations they want. Some have different and incompatible organizations they want. Some people just don't care.
Seriously, look at the insane amount of effort that a grocery store has to go through to keep things organized. Keeping things spatially coherent is just not a thing that people do for things they don't care about.
To get even crazier, look at the vast differences in how different clothing stores spatially organize each other. Each is organized. Each is fairly incompatible with the others. Even department stores have a great deal of variability in the different departments.
So, any attempt at rethinking window management with the idea that you can find a superior form of management is so doomed to failure that it is kind of comical.
Not only this, after decades I have decided that fewer visible windows is better for my focus. I went from using ultrawide and multiple monitors to a single 27” 5k monitor and find myself more productive than ever.
If the window is out of the way, on another virtual desktop or behind the current window it takes less of my attention.
I don’t respond to email or chat as fast because I’ll only check these apps infrequently throughout the day. At most I’ll have two app windows on display at once now.
Everyone is different and people are different from one day to the next.
I wouldn't cite grocery stores as a model for "organization" given that their "information architecture" of where things are in relation to another is driven by dark design patterns like "put the most often sought after items at the BACK of the store (like milk / eggs) so people have to walk through and see all the other products". There's nothing "organized" about this insofar as being an optimal organization for anything but manipulating people.
Ohhhh no. It's organized all right, very much so... just not for the customers' benefit.
No no, it's organized for the shops' benefit.
Some hlalmarks:
* Perishables around the edges for quick stocking and restocking. Non-perishables around the middle where they don't need to be changed so much.
* Areas that need environmental controls are grouped: so...
- bakery products in one area, lighting is yellow-gold, air fresheners emitting maltol, etc.
- chilled goods in another area, with a lower ambient lighting level and a different colour palette;
- fresh fruit & veg in another area, lit with greenish light, air fresheners emitting something piney or something herbal-smelling;
And so on.
On the shelves, typical eye-levels and eye-lines measured, premium products put at eye level, budget ones down where they are less visible so fewer shoppers will find them, meaning more stuff with higher profit margins sells;
Tempting fresh stuff is encountered first, in case the customer is hungry, to tempt them.
Boring slow-moving stuff, frozen goods, imperishables, toilet paper etc., right at the end.
It's highly organized but not _for_ you; no, it's organized to exploit you.
> I miss the days when chat apps had separate windows for each chat, and a buddy list you could pin to the side of the screen.
It's weird that ability to see 2 chats at once is now both more arcane and complex than when the chat apps started; in most you'd need to explicitly have 2 separate instances of either webapp or webpage running to do that.
This is exactly how I feel, and you put it very well. The one nice thing (to be fair, there's probably others but I haven't used it very long) about Win 11 is that your external monitor remembers your exact window configuration at the time of disconnection, so when you plug your laptop back in, you're good to go.
But the broader issue of spaced out information, wasted space, and a lack of *density* is what really drives me nuts. Cyberpunk promised me pic related (https://i.redd.it/dqipakmui3161.jpg) but we got tiling into preset (aka rigidly defined) configs instead. Note that I'm talking about the by-default experience.
Single window apps came in with NeXT. I heard a theory early on in the NeXT/Apple merger that it was because the window server buffering was so heavyweight on early hardware that multiple windows just made things too slow.
While I personally agree with you, I think you're overestimating the desire of most users to manage multiple window clutter themselves except in very limited contexts.
that sounds very weird to me. NeXT applications very much had multiple windows, and NeXT computers as well as PCs running NeXTStep could handle multiple windows just fine. even the app menu was its own window floating independently from the actual application window. so i really do not see where the claim would come from that multiple windows made things slow.
I honestly don't know how someone could do much of anything in a "single window" on a 27" iMac screen. (Anything beyond, say, watching a movie or the like.)
On a laptop, sure, to a point. But these drive in theater style displays? Not quite sure how that works. Maybe it's great for video editing, but the screen is so large, and the eye can really focus on just a small portion of it, just seems like a lot of wasted space.
For example, I have this in a browser window, on my 27", with the text box, at, say, 6" wide by 2" tall, is roughly centered on the screen, about 30% down. The unexpanded text area has, I'd say, 6" of "margin" on the top, 8-10" on each side, and similar amount to the bottom. (Arguably it's a bit too hight right now for me.)
Not the window, mind, the text entry box (which could be expanded, but I don't). So, I'm easily "wasting" over 90% of my display right now. If it was "full screen", it would be crammed in the upper left corner. I'd either have to chronically cock my head, of simply shift the entire display over to put it in a comfortable position.
> I honestly don't know how someone could do much of anything in a "single window" on a 27" iMac screen. (Anything beyond, say, watching a movie or the like.)
Well, IDE windows have sub-components while still techncially being "single window". CAD/graphics related ones like space. Most other apps don't need more than half of that screen.
> Physically arranging windows allows for a much more solid multi-tasking experience,
I think so, too, but I wouldn’t bet on it being true. I think we spent a lot of time rearranging windows, losing productivity, especially on the small screens of the day.
In some cases I think that was worth it in the sense that you could set up your workspace with the tools you needed for the job at hand.
Maybe, the issue is more that modern applications dictate your work setup too much, not allowing you to make them feel your own?
> and encouraged direct manipulation of content e.g. drag and drop.
That’s true, but I think the usefulness of drag and drop is limited, anyways (for example, when did you last drag and drop a picture between windows or a text selection? And aside: do you know iOS supports dragging and dropping text selections?)
> To me, this is what made macOS so great for creative tasks. It activated my spatial memory.
I don’t follow that chain of thought. How does activating your spatial memory make an OS great for creative tasks?
Also how are the current single-window-with-inbuilt-palettes applications worse for “activating your spatial memory”? The palettes still are there, and in more predictable locations.
You made me think about how my phone has 5 times as many pixel across as my first PC(I personally owned) yet I can't do half as much with those pixels as I could with that PC....
How is 3000 pixels not enough to let me arrange windows myself but 640 was?
I know you are just ranting, but the size of the corresponding pixels is just vastly different. You can VNC/RDP into a desktop from your phone — try to actually click what you want afterwards. Let’s not pretend that designers are mentally challenged or something.
I think we'll see gui toolkits adopt something like reactive design, where if you have the screen real estate the single-window-with-tabs will permit you to break them out to a dockable window, a modal, etc. Less choice, but I could see it going this way.
Conversely I regard modal dialogs as one of the worse sins a ui designer can commit. Sometimes necessary, but they should never willingly interfere with interactivity. This then sort of leads into the next point.
Overlapping windows. It lets you put more applications on the screen at once but it does not really do much for the user in terms of workflow. The window underneath is obscured so I can't really use it without fishing for it. When I am working I ether want to see a few windows at once(documentation|editor) (reference|photoshop) (chat|web) or I want to only see one application, I never go "Oh boy I am glad I can only see half this window". So tiling window managers are close to the end game for desktop productivity. It is a shame that windows/mac are so entrenched in mediocrity and make implementing them fiddly and awkward.
> When I am working I ether want to see a few windows at once(documentation|editor) (reference|photoshop) (chat|web) or I want to only see one application, I never go "Oh boy I am glad I can only see half this window".
Actually, thanks to "responsive design" and whatever other new inventions, I often go "boy, would I like to only see half this browser window" when I want to have the (documentation|editor) setup on a smaller screen (i3 on a laptop). Because I want to see the actual documentation, not the multiple navigation menus that take up half the browser window. And no, I can't zoom in and pan, because then it will trigger some breakpoint and whatnot and the text becomes comically huge as it thinks I'm reading on a phone.
That is not obvious to a British English speaker such as myself; in my language, "I got pissed" means "I became very drunk". The American usage, I suspect, evolved from our "pissed off".
Physically arranging windows allows for a much more solid multi-tasking experience, and encouraged direct manipulation of content e.g. drag and drop. Transient "palette" or "panel" windows allow for a short term buffer (think a find/replace panel). To me, this is what made macOS so great for creative tasks. It activated my spatial memory.
I'm grumpy about the recent trend towards apps living in one monolithic window. Apple's going down this route with their recent app redesigns from multi-window to single window, likely due to a (selfish) desire to unify with iPadOS. Electron adds a dev tax for multiple windows, such that folks don't really think to do it.
I think this trend is probably due to the convergence of desktop app design with the web, which is inherently single window -- and traces its roots back to window.open() being abused by pop-up ads.
It's unfortunate because a single window user experience is limiting -- and people are forgetting that anything else is even possible. I miss the days when chat apps had separate windows for each chat, and a buddy list you could pin to the side of the screen.
(If you've only ever got comfortable with a windows-style "maximised window" approach, you'll probably disagree with me, however).