Re: Menu guidelines updated

[Adam Elman <aelman users sourceforge net>]

At 12:29 PM +0100 8/24/01, Calum Benson wrote:
> Adam Elman wrote:
>
> >  As I said, there are other ways to handle this feature.  A "clone
> >  this window" menu item or button would not be inappropriate, for
> >  example.  But I believe that the same command should never have two
> >  different behaviors depending on any "preference" setting.
>
> Another issue is that people (myself included!) often struggle with apps
> that allow you to open two windows on the same document, because the
> outcome isn't always obvious.  It's often not immediately clear whether
> the two windows are just different views on the same document, or
> whether one is just a snapshot of the other at that moment in time,
> which will be saved under a different filename when you hit Ctrl+S. 
>
> Both features are useful in different circumstances, so we may want to
> think about standard ways of presenting each.

I think that if you have two windows open on the same file which are 
labeled identically, i.e. with the exact same filename and file 
information, they should be directly linked somehow and not 
snapshots.  Ideally this should even happen across different apps, 
although I have no idea how that could be implemented.

The cases where it is useful to have two _separate_ instances of the 
same document generally seem to me to fall into the category that 
Colin mentioned, where what you really want is to have a new _copy_ 
of the document that you'll end up saving into a new file.  In that 
case I think it's better to have an explicit way to do that, and that 
when that happens the windows would be labled differently -- one 
would be the original file, and the other would be "Copy of ..." or 
(not as good) "Untitled N" or something like that.

Adam
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