Excel Doc Title
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So, I opened up two Excel windows. I dragged two documents into them. Let's call them "Performance Appraisal 1.xls" and "Performance Appraisal 2.xls", because that's what they're called. Then I noticed my task bar. What's wrong with this picture?
When you mouse over, the popup description of one says ""Microsoft Excel - Performance Appraisal 1.xls", and the other says ""Performance Appraisal 2.xls". I'd love to know how you end up with code that comes up with different titles and different icons like that.
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Great, the picture doesn't work. Thanks, WTF-forum.
It was supposed to be this: http://i16.tinypic.com/68iastx.jpg
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It looks like a consequence of the way excel 2003 treats multiple windows as an MDI app.
What do people pay out gimp (i know I do) but not excel for essentially the same "feature"?
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@flukus said:
It looks like a consequence of the way excel 2003 treats multiple windows as an MDI app.
What do people pay out gimp (i know I do) but not excel for essentially the same "feature"?
GIMP is consistently MDI, Excel sometimes.
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@flukus said:
What do people pay out gimp (i know I do) but not excel for essentially the same "feature"?
The GIMP was made to be used in a true window manager, and MS Windows(tm) isn't one!
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@acne said:
@flukus said:
What do people pay out gimp (i know I do) but not excel for essentially the same "feature"?
The GIMP was made to be used in a true window manager, and MS Windows(tm) isn't one!
As a True Windows Guy (tm), I never could get quite the hang of gimp's window layout. (same applies to excel in this context). It looks like a good idea but it doesn't really seem to work well on windows. So I'm curious, how is it supposed to look on a "true" window manager?
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Excel's windowing is totally broken. And I absolutely hate it. But that's nothing new :)
@PSWorx said:
As a True Windows Guy (tm), I never could get quite the hang of gimp's window layout. (same applies to excel in this context). It looks like a good idea but it doesn't really seem to work well on windows. So I'm curious, how is it supposed to look on a "true" window manager?
Well, for me, I dedicate a full workspace to The GIMP. Then I spread out the windows across the full screen, organizing them the way I like, and leaving it there. I don't run any other programs on that workspace, since it just gets mixed up with The GIMP's windows.
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@PSWorx said:
@acne said:
@flukus said:
What do people pay out gimp (i know I do) but not excel for essentially the same "feature"?
The GIMP was made to be used in a true window manager, and MS Windows(tm) isn't one!
As a True Windows Guy (tm), I never could get quite the hang of gimp's window layout. (same applies to excel in this context). It looks like a good idea but it doesn't really seem to work well on windows. So I'm curious, how is it supposed to look on a "true" window manager?
It's supposed to act exactly like Photoshop on a Mac. Photoshop on Windows is of course all contained within one app. On the Mac, it's a true MDI, so lots of free-floating windows. However, they all still act as a single application. You can send Photoshop to the doc and all the windows go with it, Command-tabbing doesn't tab through Photoshop windows, just Photoshop itself.
That's what a "true" window manager does. Windows is just a painter.
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Word does the same thing. The first instance acts as the master instance, the rest are just floating windows within the first app. No WTF here, just a user who wants some attention and thought he finally had something to post.
And no, that's not the "technical speak" version. It's the lay version, which might be what's needed here.
and what's with the 1 second timeout on deletes?
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@unklegwar said:
Word does the same thing. The first instance acts as the master instance, the rest are just floating windows within the first app. No WTF here, just a user who wants some attention and thought he finally had something to post.
And no, that's not the "technical speak" version. It's the lay version, which might be what's needed here.
and what's with the 1 second timeout on deletes?
Word does it rather differently, though. You can actually close the new windows with the "X" and not have all your open stuff disappear. You can undo in one Word document without undoing changes in other Word documents. You can drag two word documents beside each other.
We've talked about all this before, though. Excel's windowing is awful. That's all there is, really.
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@JamesKilton said:
@PSWorx said:
@acne said:
@flukus said:
What do people pay out gimp (i know I do) but not excel for essentially the same "feature"?
The GIMP was made to be used in a true window manager, and MS Windows(tm) isn't one!
As a True Windows Guy (tm), I never could get quite the hang of gimp's window layout. (same applies to excel in this context). It looks like a good idea but it doesn't really seem to work well on windows. So I'm curious, how is it supposed to look on a "true" window manager?
It's supposed to act exactly like Photoshop on a Mac. Photoshop on Windows is of course all contained within one app. On the Mac, it's a true MDI, so lots of free-floating windows. However, they all still act as a single application. You can send Photoshop to the doc and all the windows go with it, Command-tabbing doesn't tab through Photoshop windows, just Photoshop itself.
That's what a "true" window manager does. Windows is just a painter.
Mac Photohop isn't MDI, it's exactly the opposite! It's SDI. The most basic difference is:
MDI: Every window is contained within a larger window/workspace; use ctrl-tab to get around them. Tab bars are always MDI.
SDI: Every window is a top-level window, individually accessible with alt-tab, but quitting the app will close them all at once.
Then you have the freaky hybrids like Office, and web browsers that can swing either way. You can make Windows Photoshop a little less MDI by folding down the workspace, so photos open outside it, but it's still not SDI. At the time Photoshop was ported, MDI was still the dominant Windows document paradigm, so this made sense, but since Windows 95 Microsoft has has pushed hard for a more mac-style SDI way. Unfortunately, both systems have annoying downsides, and neither camp has really invested much energy into coming up with something better. (Although Expose helps relieve them a lot on the mac side.)Of course, running PS in an emulation layer means the whole kit and caboodle gets minimized into the dock at once, which might make it look like MDI, but it's just a lack of virtualization integration. Native PS versions can always minimize one photo to the dock at once.
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@PSWorx said:
@acne said:
The GIMP was made to be used in a true window manager, and MS Windows(tm) isn't one!
As a True Windows Guy (tm), I never could get quite the hang of gimp's window layout. (same applies to excel in this context). It looks like a good idea but it doesn't really seem to work well on windows. So I'm curious, how is it supposed to look on a "true" window manager?
It's meant to look however you want it to. That's the whole point of a window manager: policy decisions like window ordering, minimisation behaviour, MDI vs SDI, etc, are all left up to the window manager to decide. The result is that all correctly implemented applications behave the same way for you, and they behave differently for the guy on the next desk who prefers things different. The window manager decides which windows to paint and where to paint them, and is entirely responsible for decorating windows (title bars, borders with size handles, etc). There are many, many choices of window manager working in all kinds of strange ways, some of which are even designed to be user-programmable for arbitrarily complex behaviour.
Windows doesn't have a window manager at all (each application makes these decisions on its own), so they hard-coded some behaviour that simulated photoshop.
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@unklegwar said:
Word does the same thing.
@unklegwar said:
No WTF here
I didn't realise the former implied the latter.
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At the time Photoshop was ported, MDI was still the dominant Windows document paradigm, so this made sense, but since Windows 95 Microsoft has has pushed hard for a more mac-style SDI way. Unfortunately, both systems have annoying downsides,
There are no downsides to having my document windows contained within the main application window, as per Photoshop/Win.
I can see the benefits of 1-click document selection, but any serious computing session will have a couple applications open each with a set of documents that can grow fast in numbers. Photoshop with 4 images. Text editor with 5 scripts.Browser with 6 tabs. I do not want to have all of that junk in my taskbar all the time.
I do think that for these office-applications that I rarely use, S/MDI as Word does it is perfectly okay. But Photoshop SDI is not as useful.lots of free-floating windows.
More chaos! Yay!
You may have noticed that Adobe CS3 favoured the more organized docked palettes instead of the fucking unsuable mess people tend to create with free palettes.
Look, a layers palette! Right in the middle of my damn screen!
There's no point in having an interface offer that kind of freedom.Word does it rather differently, though. You can actually close the new windows with the "X" and not have all your open stuff disappear. You can undo in one Word document without undoing changes in other Word documents. You can drag two word documents beside each other. We've talked about all this before, though. Excel's windowing is awful. That's all there is, really.
Indeed. I was so surprised when closing one taskbar button window also closed all of Excel. Howcome it's different from Word?Word does the same thing.
Word does it subtly different, and gets it right.I dedicate a full workspace to The GIMP. I don't run any other programs on that workspace, since it just gets mixed up with The GIMP's windows.
Translation:
"I have to put GIMP on a separate workspace otherwise its window system interferes with my other activities."
If GIMP did not consist of al sorts of floating stuff, the extra workspace would not be needed.
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@dhromed said:
I was so surprised when closing one taskbar button window also closed all of Excel. Howcome it's different from Word?
Excel and Word both predate Office. Excel is comprised of huge amounts of legacy code from way back then, and calling it a part of Office is like painting a landrover red and calling it a ferrari. It really doesn't have anything in common with the rest of the applications, except a few things bolted on top of them all in recent years.
I dedicate a full workspace to The GIMP. I don't run any other programs on that workspace, since it just gets mixed up with The GIMP's windows.
Translation:
"I have to put GIMP on a separate workspace otherwise its window system interferes with my other activities."If the user did not use a window manager that preferred workspaces to MDI-like window collections, then there wouldn't be an extra workspace. It's all a question of what approach you use to manage windows - you can think of a workspace as a kind of MDI-like parent window that is permanently glued to the sides of the screen, rather than being resizeable (except that you can move windows from other applications into it as well, if you want to).
If GIMP did not consist of al sorts of floating stuff, the extra workspace would not be needed.
That's much like saying that you wouldn't need to carry your change around in a wallet if you carried it around in a box instead - true, but not particularly insightful.
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@asuffield said:
That's much like saying that you wouldn't need to carry your change around in a wallet if you carried it around in a box instead - true, but not particularly insightful.
Noooo, that's like saying that you wouldn't need to keep a huge pocketfull of quarters if the corner store accepted coins worth more than $0.25.
The problem with building an app that has a million floating toolbars is that it's a pain in the ass to manage under Windows, because you can't place them anywhere logical with less than several dozen mouse clicks. Even then you can't push it to one side of the screen if you want to compare it with something without having to repeat the entire process. Plus, since you move windows pixel-by-pixel, you'll almost always end up with bands of "empty space" between windows, through which your (probably) colorful desktop will show through and distract the hell out of you. And telling me to set my desktop image to something plain, just so I can use GIMP, is a stupid argument.
So you have to use 40 coins to pay for your $10 hat, instead of using a single $10 bill - it still works, but it's way more difficult and harder to manage.
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@Albatross said:
The problem with building an app that has a million floating toolbars is that it's a pain in the ass to manage under Windows, because you can't place them anywhere logical with less than several dozen mouse clicks. Even then you can't push it to one side of the screen if you want to compare it with something without having to repeat the entire process. Plus, since you move windows pixel-by-pixel, you'll almost always end up with bands of "empty space" between windows, through which your (probably) colorful desktop will show through and distract the hell out of you.
You seem to be missing the point. Gimp was never designed to run on Windows. Windows lacks the features necessary to make it work well - nobody here appears to be disputing that.
Nothing that you describe here is a problem with a decent window manager. (Magnetic window edges and window groups and/or workspaces handle everything you've mentioned)
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@unklegwar said:
Word does the same thing. The first instance acts as the master instance, the rest are just floating windows within the first app.
Now please explain that to your grandma. Non-technical users typically don't care about the internals of the applications they use.
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I've been using GIMP on linux, and frankly, it's a pain. Having one application take up an entire workspace in order to work comfortably is a bad design decision in my opinion.
Of course on Windows, GIMP is neither stable nor cooperating with the windowing environment. It's sad since it's such a nice tool when it works.
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@asuffield said:
You seem to be missing the point. Gimp was never designed to run on Windows. Windows lacks the features necessary to make it work well - nobody here appears to be disputing that.
Actually, it's the GTK+ Windows port that's missing a few features that would make GIMP behave nicer on Windows (although some of these have been addressed in recent versions).Of course on Windows, GIMP is neither stable nor cooperating with the windowing environment. It's sad since it's such a nice tool when it works.
I haven't had any stability problems with GIMP in a long time (except with a few development versions that had known crashers on all systems). If you can consistently reproduce a crash, please, report it in bugzilla.
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@dhromed said:
I dedicate a full workspace to The GIMP. I don't run any other programs on that workspace, since it just gets mixed up with The GIMP's windows.
Translation:
"I have to put GIMP on a separate workspace otherwise its window system interferes with my other activities."
If GIMP did not consist of al sorts of floating stuff, the extra workspace would not be needed.To be fair, I do that with all applications. Firefox, Gaim, Thunderbird, etc. all have their own individual workspaces where I always run them in full-screen mode. I can't be bothered with that overlapping windows nonsense. But that's exactly the way I like things to work, so I'm not complaining.
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@ender said:
If you can consistently reproduce a crash, please, report it in bugzilla.
Ah, bugzilla! because Joe User has the patience to go through another sign-up process and keep track of another login just so he can do something of no immediate benefit to himself. And I'm the goddamn Batman.
Reporting bugs should be as quick and straightforward as possible if you want people to bother, and bugzilla doesn't succed on either count. Offtopic, I know, but that's one piece of software that consistently gets up my nose.
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@rbowes said:
@dhromed said:
I dedicate a full workspace to The GIMP. I don't run any other programs on that workspace, since it just gets mixed up with The GIMP's windows.
Translation:
"I have to put GIMP on a separate workspace otherwise its window system interferes with my other activities."
If GIMP did not consist of al sorts of floating stuff, the extra workspace would not be needed.To be fair, I do that with all applications. Firefox, Gaim, Thunderbird, etc. all have their own individual workspaces where I always run them in full-screen mode. I can't be bothered with that overlapping windows nonsense. But that's exactly the way I like things to work, so I'm not complaining.
You realise windows don't overlap if they're maximized, right?
What you describe is equivalent to having all those maximised apps on 1 workspace, switching via taskbar buttons. All you did is add workspaces in between.
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@dhromed said:
You realise windows don't overlap if they're maximized, right?
What you describe is equivalent to having all those maximised apps on 1 workspace, switching via taskbar buttons. All you did is add workspaces in between.
You're right, in some cases. But when a program uses more than one window (Gaim, Gimp, Firefox, Thunderbird.. everything, I suppose), it's nice to arrange them the way I like without other applications interfering. I don't like maximizing windows, either, I like having room at the edges; don't ask me why. Finally, I like finding my applications in predictable places, quickly. If I want Firefox, I press alt-4. If I want Thunderbird, it's alt-2. Those are my reasons for liking my window manager, I'm sure it's not the same for everybody. But that's the magic of window managers! :)
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@asuffield said:
@Albatross said:
The problem with building an app that has a million floating toolbars is that it's a pain in the ass to manage under Windows, because you can't place them anywhere logical with less than several dozen mouse clicks. Even then you can't push it to one side of the screen if you want to compare it with something without having to repeat the entire process. Plus, since you move windows pixel-by-pixel, you'll almost always end up with bands of "empty space" between windows, through which your (probably) colorful desktop will show through and distract the hell out of you.
You seem to be missing the point. Gimp was never designed to run on Windows. Windows lacks the features necessary to make it work well - nobody here appears to be disputing that.
Nothing that you describe here is a problem with a decent window manager. (Magnetic window edges and window groups and/or workspaces handle everything you've mentioned)
Um, hello?
"No, sir, the problem is not that I'm driving on the wrong lane. The problem is that everyone else in this country drives on the wrong lane."
If on *nix you use window managers to implement GUIs, that's nice. It's propably a much better approach than the windows one too. But it doesn't change anything on the fact that the Gimp windows port is a windows application. And if you make an application for windows, you have to play by the rules of windows, not *nix. Which means "integrate them into the look and feel of windows".Granted, you propably shouldn't blame Gimp in this case but rather GTK for windows. If so many *nix ports uses it as the underlying window manager that would be a perfect opportunity IMO to make them all follow windows GUI conventions at once, maybe even include the XP common controls. Instead GTK opted to implement their own standard dialogs, buttons, lists, text boxes, all of them behaving between slightly and completely different to standard components.
I may be a little biased but many *nix ports look to me as if their designers had a really arrogant attitude: "What do you want? It looks well on my system. We already had the infinite grace to port our app to your toy system so now don't be so bold and demand that it should LOOK like that too..."
I personally just find it annoying.
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@PSWorx said:
I may be a little biased but many *nix ports look to me as if their designers had a really arrogant attitude: "What do you want? It looks well on my system. We already had the infinite grace to port our app to your toy system so now don't be so bold and demand that it should LOOK like that too..."
Would you rather have no port of gimp to Windows? Because that's pretty much the choice: no port, or this port. Working around the limitations of Windows would entail rewriting a large amount of code, and nobody has a good reason to bother.
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GIMP developers don't really want to include any platform-specific code in their software (and they also refuse to distribute any binaries at all), so the fact that GIMP happens to work on Windows is almost an accident. As for GTK+ implementing it's own widgets, it would be pretty much impossible to make seamless ports of GTK+ software to Windows if it tried to use the system-provided components. It doesn't really matter though, since with the latest version, the MS Windows Engine for GTK+ comes really close to native Windows look, and when compared to some other popular graphic packages on Windows (Paint Shop Pro, Corel PhotoPaint), GIMP isn't any more different from "standard" Windows than those programs are (except for the Open/Save dialog boxes).
