more mdi

[Richard Gaskin]

Meitnik at aol.com wrote:

 >> does your app use multiple windows for separate documents, or
 >> for different views into the same document?
 >
 >-- 3 palettes, 1 menubar, and 1 toplevel stack as templete for cloning
 > as a document for content for diffrent docs.
 >
 >> If the former you may find SDI sufficient, and if the latter you may
 >> find moving the contents of those auxilliary windows into groups
 >> within a single window will simply your user experience.
 >
 >-- yep, if I was not fighting a deadline, I would rewrite   my doc
 > stack as a grp with fake titlebars etc..but am concerned for
 > preformane on lower end MS boxs. At this point in time, I am
 > accepting Gates' branding of my documents just to so something
 > for MDI and access to taskbar.
 > There is a good chance I maybe forced to ship the Mac version first
 > and get RealBasic to the Windows verison a year later, eating lost
 > sales on Windoze and making it very difficult to justify renewing
 > RR in 6 months at 500!.
 >
 > Thanks for your help and well worded explaining of MDI for all.

It may be worth a second read.  The thrust of my post was that MDI is 
very rarely needed, most often replaceable with SDI which also provides 
a simpler user experience.

Your palettes are fine with SDI; palettes and other non-document windows 
are not addressed distinctly in the MDI model, which deals exclusively 
with providing a parent window to contain multiple documents.

MDI appears to be a holdover from the Win 3.1 days, and as Ken just 
pointed out to me on the phone, not even M$ Word uses it:  While Word 
documents open within a parent window, opening a second document -- even 
from within the program -- will spawn a second parent window for it, 
ignoring their own description of MDI behaviors and acting like an SDI 
instead.

So if Micro$oft is any indication, it seems the world is migrating away 
from MDI.  It's needlessly complex to interact with, new users find the 
dual window controls confusing, and it provides few if any measurable 
benefits for the user over SDI.

What is the benefit of an MDI parent window for the app you're building?
Is whatever benefit there may be strong enough to triple your 
development costs by writing and maintaining a second code base in a 
lower-level language?

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  ___________________________________________________
  Rev tools and more:  http://www.fourthworld.com/rev