Multiple Window Strategies

The multiple window strategy evolved at Xerox Prc with the 8010 star system and the Samlltalk programming system. On a sufficiently large and high enough reolution screen windows permit the user the multiple views that make a task easier.

Individual Window design

Window components include

• Titles, this can be highlit to show the active window.
• Borders or frames
• Scroll bars. One imporvement one might hope for here is the addition of place holders to enable a return to a previously visited part of the document.

• Opened, care should be taken with the placement and size of a window when it is first opened.
• Sized,
• Moved
• Moved forward or backward in the stack of visible windows
• Activated
• Closed.

Multiple Window Design

Options for Multiple Windows

• Split displays
• Tiling, either space filling or not
• Overlapping;
• Stacks (usually with tabs on the edges)
• Zooming;
• Cascades

Coordination of Multiple Tasks by Windows

• Synchronized scrolling, may be appropriate for some linked documents. For example one window might display names and another data on the named persons
• Heirachical browsing, here one window shows a heirarchy and another the contents of the selected member of the heirarchy. The File manager in windows, OS/2 etc. is an example of this.
• Two dimensional browsing, detail maps would be an example. xdvi supports a neat version of this with a cross psitioned by the mouse that when the mouse is clicked become a magnifying glass.
• Direct Selection, causing a window to pop up.
• Dependent window opening. eg when browsing the source code of a program the code for called functions might appear in a close by window.