brian will . net

Portals: window management for those who hate window management (mockups in Javascript)

Jeff Atwood discusses the way Mac OS X windows don’t really have ‘maximize’ buttons, and he comes to the right conclusion: better to have overly large windows than to make users futz with the dimensions of their windows. He says:

…Apple’s method of forcing users to deal with more windows by preventing maximization is not good user interface design. It is fundamentally and deeply flawed. Users don’t want to deal with the mental overhead of juggling multiple windows, and I can’t blame them: neither do I. Designers should be coming up with alternative user interfaces that minimize windowing, instead of forcing enforcing arbitrary window size limits on the user for their own good.

As it happens, minimizing the hassle of windows—both main application menus and pop-up dialogues—is the major design goal of my desktop UI design, which I’m calling ‘Portals’. Back in this post in March, I promised to present the Portals design, but I never quite finished the mockup demos in Javascript. Still, there’s enough there to convey the biggest ideas. Eventually I’ll fill in the notes and the rest of these demos and perhaps also finish the screencast about Portals which I started.

The mockups come with lots of (rambling) notes, but one thing they oddly fail to make clear is that Portals has no desktop, i.e. no flat empty surface on which to dump icons and files.