Re: Generic Objects

On Fri, 14 Jan 2005, Hubert Figuiere wrote:

> Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 21:45:41 -0500
> From: Hubert Figuiere <hfiguiere@teaser.fr>
> To: Francis James Franklin <postmaster@alinameridon.plus.com>
> Cc: AbiWord Developers <abiword-dev@abisource.com>
> Subject: Re: Generic Objects
>
>
> On Sat, 2005-01-15 at 00:51 +0000, Francis James Franklin wrote:
> > I really hate when one application appears in another. (Maybe that's
> > just me.) Is that really what we want?
>
> Same. I don't really like that. But aparently some people do. We can
> still start without and have infrastructures about that.

Sure we can. ;)

UI merging is almost universally a disaster.

I cannot think of a case when UI merging has worked well. Embedding
toolbars and menus within an existing application gets very cluttered very
fast, and tends only to provide a very awkward restrictive interface. It
smacks of trying to cram too much functionality into one application
rather than trying to do one thing one, and it works out just as well to
open up a seperate application window. Moving things around and
dynamically reconfiguring the user interface is confusing for users.

This all seems a bit far off though. It seems to be in the nature of
these high level embedding systems to be horribly overengineered because
proprietary software developers cannot get along at the library level or
follow standards to make applications play well together and so end up
needing to embed whole applications inside of one another.

- Alan H.
Received on Sat Jan 15 14:07:49 2005