![]() With that came the window-first UI that John Siracusa dislikes and that I find perfectly suited to the way I work and, fundamentally, correct. Part of the reason Apple bought NeXT in 1996 was to sweep away the cruft left over from the Mac’s original OS design and give it a real multitasking operating system. This under-the-hood prominence given to the foreground app in classic Mac OS made it natural 4 for all the foreground app windows to be in front of all the windows of the other apps. This was called cooperative multitasking, or as I like to call it, not really multitasking. Background applications ran only when the foreground app ceded them a time slice. The main thing it retained was that the foreground application was in control. And even after the MultiFinder came along, the underlying operating system retained a lot of that original design. To switch to a second application, you had to quit the one you were in and launch another. When the Mac was introduced, it was a single-tasking system. I don’t think this was the UI designers’ fault. But the UI for multitasking, which was introduced with MultiFinder in System 5 in 1987, was not one of those things. ![]() ![]() They got so many things right the first time, and they tweaked most of the things that weren’t quite right within a few years. For the computer to help me with my work, it must pretend to be as focused as I am, and that means being able to switch focus to the documents I need (and only the documents I need) when I need them.Īll of this is a long way of saying that I see the the current Mac behavior as correct.īut what about the classic Mac behavior? I am, generally speaking, a big fan of the original Mac UI design team. It just so happens that that one thing requires documents from several apps and those documents are continually changing as the work progresses. To me, this is the essence of multitasking. While I work, I am not thinking “I need to activate Preview” or “I need to activate BBEdit,” I’m thinking “I need to see the basement floor plan” or “I need to add a paragraph about the basement layout to my report.” And, significantly, when I need to refer to that floor plan, I don’t want my report suddenly covered up by all the other drawings I have open in Preview. In one sense, the apps are essential for accessing and creating the information, but in another sense they are incidental. On my computer, the information is contained in documents, the documents are displayed in windows, and the windows are “owned” by apps. The key here is that while I work I switch between different sources of information. Which means I am continually switching between those documents. And as I work, I usually have to refer to one or more documents 3 while I’m creating or editing another. Typically I have two or more Preview windows, a couple of Finder windows, a Terminal window, one or more graphics editing windows 2, and a small handful of BBEdit windows. In my everyday use of the Mac at work, I have several windows open at once, all of them showing different views of the project I’m working on. In either mode, Shift-click on a window to get the opposite of the chosen behavior. In “Modern” mode, only the clicked window comes to the front. In “Classic” mode, clicking on a window brings all the windows in that app to the front, just like it did in classic Mac OS. I came to the (admittedly self-serving) conclusion that my snap judgment was right: what Front and Center does is at odds with my view of multitasking and would be a hindrance to my use of the Mac. And then I spent the next week using my Macs and thinking more about how I use them. I read the release articles by Lee Fyock and John Siracusa and the initial posts 1 by John Gruber, Jason Snell, Stephen Hackett, Ryan Christoffel, and others. When I heard about Front and Center, my first thought was “Why would anyone want their windows to behave that way?” But I didn’t write a post about it right away, because maybe my snap judgment was wrong. Next post Previous post Multitasking, windows, and the Mac
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