#Mac close unlox windowsConsequently, as Linux grew in popularity over time, many developers were coming from a background of using Windows UI conventions rather than UNIX UI conventions. #Mac close unlox PcMost users has a Windows PC rather than a Macintosh or a UNIX X11 workstation. For more basic users, the upredictability about what exactly qualified as a "top level window" was sometimes confusing as there was no learnable rule about exactly which windows would actually show up on the bar.īy the late 90's, Microsoft's GUI was the most commonly used. For heavy multitaskers, the "task bar soup" proved unweildy. While the Macintosh had an "Applications" menu for switching, Windows popularised a "task bar," which displayed all top level windows without any regard for the process that had opened them. (Except to notice it in the task manager, and kill it.) Also, a user couldn't choose to leave a process running so that they could get back to it without relaunching it, except to keep some visible UI from the process cluttering up the screen, and consuming (at the time, very limited) resources. A Macintosh user could easily switch to an application that was running without windows to quit it, or to use it, but Windows provided absolutely no way for the user to interact with such a process. The trouble with the Windows style approach was that you couldn't do some forms of user interaction, such as opening with just a menu bar, and the user had no real guarantee that a process had actually exited when the windows were gone. A single process could even open up windows on multiple displays connected to several machines across a (very new-fangled) local area network. X11 also considered an application largely unimportant from a UI standpoint. While the Macintosh was built around presenting a UI of Applications, Windows (as the name would suggest) was built around the philosophy that the Window itself should be the fundamental unit of the UI, with the only concept of an application being in the form of MDI style container windows. By the early 90's, Microsoft had Windows 3.X working well, and Motif on X11 had been heavily inspired by Microsoft's work. Meanwhile, Microsoft had been developing Windows. The result was a clean distinction in the UI between a visual GUI element (a window), and an abstract running process (the application). Since the tools for doing this had to retain backwards compatibility with existing applications, they naturally weren't going to change the basic UI conventions and go killing applications without any windows open. Exiting the process just because a window was closed didn't make any sense at the time, because there would have been no other process to yield focus to.Ī few years on, the Macintosh of the late 80's advanced to the point where there was enough memory to have multiple applications open at once. When you closed all the windows of an application, it made sense to keep the application open because you could always use the menu bar to create a new document, or open an existing one. It was perfectly reasonable for an application to open with no windows because the application always had a visible menu bar at the top of the screen. #Mac close unlox macSince Windows and X11 both post date the original Mac GUI, one might say that Windows does it the Windows way "just to be different" rather than suggesting that the Mac is the oddball.īack in the earliest days of the Macintosh, you could only run one application at a time. In some sense, it is a UI convention with history that goes back all the way to 1984.
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