Re: Window manager interaction

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,
> This was why I suggested doing it only if, after calling 
> -applicationDidFinishLaunching in the delegate, there is no main 
> window.  That way, if the application is opening the last document on 
> relaunch, or providing a 'create some specialised kind of document' 
> window, -gui has somewhere sensible to put the menu already and 
> doesn't need to create one.  Note that I was only suggesting this 
> behaviour for applications in the Win95 interface style.  In any other 
> interface style it's not particularly important, because the window 
> location doesn't change when you have no main windows.
>
> Oh, and Riccardo, Microsoft deprecated MDI almost a decade ago now.  
> Any applications still using it are violating Microsoft's HIGs.  MS 
> Office hasn't used it since Office 2000; each MS Word document is a 
> stand-alone window.  When you close the last one, Word exits.
You are only partially correct. It was deprecated, but it is widely 
used. I use Office 2003 at work and it still essentially MDI. Try excel 
and try to have its document not full-sized. The whole excel is a big 
window then. If you program in SWING under Java, you can get the whole 
MDI thing again and sometimes it is the only clean way to port the 
application without rewriting some of its logic.
If you have Multi-documents, which is what we have, there aren't many 
choices: closing/reopening an application is a no-go, IMHO. THus either 
a big encompassing window or a floating menu, which I have seen for 
certain programming IDEs for example. Also under BeOS this approach was 
used. A contorted way to get some OpenStep behaviour.

Riccardo