Re: return of the MDI

[Hassan Aurag <aurag CRM UMontreal CA>]

> 
  I will just give this example.

 I am writing an app that is supposed to launch many subapps in the future.
 Call it a central tool for other tools!

 I am aiming at MDI and in this case I don't want windows in windows because each top-level or notebook page window (MDI doc) has its own stuff and I don't want to force people to minimize everything once one of them is minimized.

 All those sub-apps are really separate entities except that I want a common interface and no werid behavior.

 However, I think that it would be a much easier thing for any coder to have the following:

 some sort of MDI, call it MDI2, that does the following:
 
  -swallow a GnomeApp, any amount of them in a parent MDI2 window (the idea discussed below)
  -Have MDI2 behave like the window manager. Since we have specs we can use them! Look at StarOffice if you want to see what I mean! 

 -You don't need to implement many window manager features. The only as far as I can think of are decoration, kill-minimize-fullscreen buttons.

The reason this would be good, is that with an app such as mine it's really more like MS Visual Studio (for math) than GIMP. But even gimp could benefit from this.

 Again the reason is simple, keep apps separate. So if you have many sub-apps in your app, and some point someone will do this (I am starting humbly to do it), people will have a clear view of what is what!


> On Fri, Jan 14, 2000 at 01:19:28AM +0100, Antonio Campos wrote:
> > When I once asked if GTK supported of should support window-in-window
> > MDI a la Windows, I received a "No" for response. The only way to make
> > my application behave MDI style would be to use gnome libraries and the
> > famous notebook style (or modal style ...).
> 
> Well the thing to do is to take gnome-mdi and extend it to add window in
> window as one of the options.  The apps use a high level interface and the
> user can choose the mdi mode that suits him the best.  This is one of the
> advantages of a high level library like gnome.  And if you add such a mode
> existing gnome-mdi apps won't have to be modified to support it and users
> of apps won't need to change the way they work with their apps.
> 
> For all it's failings I think gnome-mdi is an excelent framework.  It highly
> encorages OO design of the app and a model/view/controller framework.  (in
> fact it's really hard to do otherwise in that framework).  I'm one of those
> people that think that every app (including gnumeric miguel:) should use it.
> The app author can make it default to the MDI mode which he thinks is best
> for that app, but the user can still change it.
> 
> But obviously there wasn't much interest in the window in window approach or
> someone would have implemented something like it.  I thinkt he toplevel model
> is basically the same except that the windows are toplevel.  And it's a
> matter of just setting up the window manager to do the "minimize all" and
> things like that.
> 
> George
> 
> 
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