Re: [lmi] Two GUI defects removed

[Greg Chicares]

On 2005-12-7 19:52 UTC, Murphy, Kimberly wrote:
>
> The 'Window' menu does exist and the available options behave
> as I expect. Any thought to adding other options to the menu,
> such as 'Arrange Icons', 'Close All', 'Minimize All' or
> 'Restore All'?

Many MDI applications had such things in the windows 3.1 heyday
of MDI. Now, ms pooh-poohs the whole idea of MDI, and they've
changed the operating system so that iconization isn't as useful
or important as it once was. In windows 3.1, an application
could manipulate its icon in real time, for instance changing
its appearance to show progress on some task. Now, I guess we're
supposed to use the 'Notification Area' of the 'Task Bar' for
that. And windows 3.1 was so limited, and ran on such limited
hardware, that you had to iconize most things, to prevent them
from consuming excessive resources.

Now, there's little point to iconizing a window, so there's
little need to iconize (minimize) or restore them, or to arrange
iconized windows. Today, ms word has a picklist and an 'Arrange
All' option that really just tiles windows horizontally, but
none of the other once-popular menuitems you mention; and excel
is much the same, although it offers 'Cascade' and lets you
choose the tiling orientation (yet what's the difference between
its 'Vertically' and 'Tiled' options?).

'Close All' isn't built into wx. It could be a workaround for
this problem:
  https://savannah.nongnu.org/support/?func=detailitem&item_id=104485
but I think it would be better to fix that problem directly.
Yet I don't think anyone's really eager to revise the MDI code
in wx--it's tricky work, and MDI isn't as popular as it once was,
though I still think it makes sense for lmi to use MDI.