Death to minimization
The fairly useless minimize widget gets top billing on most operating systems. Do any Mac users actually use this? Oh, I used to minimize back in the day, when I switched from Windows to Mac OS X 10.0, and the Genie effect made me giddy like a schoolgirl. Nowadays, though, if a window gets minimized on my machine, it was either by accident, or by a Windows user who sat down and is trying to find the web browser.
Supposedly, minimizing windows is for getting to the window behind those windows. Is minimizing ever really better than switching (⌘-Tab and ⌘-~), Hiding (⌘-H), closing (⌘-W and ⌘-Q), Spaces, and Exposé? Honestly? Or are you secretly trying to get to your Desktop?
Unless you’re a 90s Windows user who launches apps using shortcuts on your desktop, you should for the most part be leaving your desktop alone. Your desktop is not a destination. Some people, myself included, use their desktop as an inbox. That’s fine, and your file browser is a perfectly fine way to browse those files, rather than individually minimizing every application you have open, then bringing them back up later when you go back to work. On a Mac, you can’t even return to a minimized window using the keyboard!
Some people minimize windows because it’s so easy – one of the three prominent things you can do to a window. Close, minimize, and zoom. Windows Vista already did the right thing1 and made minimize and zoom buttons smaller than the close button. Maybe we’d be better off if the minimize button was replaced entirely with something more useful. How about opening a new window, some sort of docking functionality, or a tie-in to Exposé? In any case, I think the time has come to wean people off this tired user interface idea.
- I know, hell froze over. [↩]
Nov 18 2007
10:17 am
I minimize all the time.
There often occurs that I have a useful application running actively that I do not wish to have visible on my screen. This includes the likes of chat clients, email clients, et al.
In general, I minimize to avoid clutter. It perturbs me to see several windows piled around my screen, wasting space. In fact, on the machines I use I often also bind a key to “Full Screen”, a maximization level introduced by Firefox and now available to all Gnome applications. But even then, just knowing that there’s a window lurking in behind often causes me to seek it out and clean it away.
On Windows I minimize for another, sadder reason: application load times. I may have inactive, useless applications minimized for hours because I anticipate using them again soon and do not wish to wait the half minute for them to initialize themselves. This doesn’t seem to be a problem in Linux (is the caching better?) and, by way of design, is not a problem on Mac.
Now, we can come back full-circle to why I -hate- Macs. It’s not primarily because of the Cost, the dodgy OSS support, it’s because of the Window management. Why do they make proper, full, complete, screen-encompassing maximization hard and/or impossible?! What a -waste-.
This was especially angry-making on my 1024×768 PowerBook screen, and led to experimentation with PPC Linux, and eventual discarding of the machine altogether. It was less than two years old at the time.
Nov 18 2007
1:47 pm
I uee minimize a couple times per day… usually when working on web forms. Oh, and this was posted from the other thing you hate, an iPod touch. :-)
Nov 18 2007
3:01 pm
Ha! Related posts!
In Windows, some programs exhibit different behaviors when minimized. I know older versions of Office would manage their memory differently when minimized to make room for other programs. (Newer versions of Office don’t do this anymore.)
I occasionally hit the ol’ Start-D combination to minimize everything and get back to my desktop. Cramming all of my favourite destinations onto my “Start” bar is not the way I roll, and sometimes I like to put things that are ‘important’ on the Desktop so that I don’t forget them. (“Co-op Work Report!!.odf”)
Also, the limit to the number of windows I can really work with at one time is about 8. 8 tabs in Firefox, 8 files in the jEdit buffer, 8 programs open at once, 8 things operating visibly in the background (That taskbar near the clock.) Past that, context switching is just beyond my limited human capabilities. I’ll close the programs, not to free a minute amount of computer memory devoted to keeping it running, but to free the rather significant chunk of personal memory devoted to remembering why the hell I was using that program.
We are so tied to our computers that our mental model grows to reflect the capabilities of our operating systems, I think.
Nov 18 2007
8:32 pm
Though I would agree that minimization doesn’t require its own button, I would argue that it does have it’s place as a feature.
I use minimization to put a window out of my way. On my Mac this means taking it out of the alt-tab/alt-tilde order. On my desktop this means taking the window out of the window layer order.
Both of these things happen pretty regularly, such as that terminal window I just don’t want to close, but also don’t want to deal with right now. Or perhaps my PDF reader with that paper I am halfway through.
Nov 18 2007
9:56 pm
Dan: How can having a window behind your current window be a waste of space? Seeing your desktop is always more useless than seeing part of another application. It seems you like minimization because it’s too much cognitive load to see windows below your active one, but you also always work in a maximized-window state, so you wouldn’t see them anyway. On Mac at least, minimized windows are more clutter (in the Dock) than hidden windows. It seems that on a Mac you actually want hiding, rather than minimization.
Although we could debate full screen vs. fitting to content, that’s for another day.
Travis: I can see that – you know you want to come back to it in a few hours, so it stays in your Dock as a reminder. For me that almost always comes up in the form of a webpage, in which case I leave it as my leftmost tab in my web browser, but I can see the use for it in the case of a PDF you’re in mid-read. That said, I could see this as a good use for Spaces – having a “for later” Space.
Nov 19 2007
10:33 am
Allen: That small bit about windows-behind-active-windows was meant to convey the subjectivity of this issue. It just -bothers- me to know I have unused windows.
About layered windows, it’s not that it’s too much cognitive load to have layered windows, it’s that I perceive a window peeking out behind another as a -waste-. The space used to render that small, useless portion of the inactive window could be used for whatever it is I’m working on. Hence my preference for maximized-only state. (Which, in the form I use, also nukes the Title Bar and Minimize/Maximize/Close widgets).
I’m of the group that believes we never should have introduced layered-windows as the primary window management mode. It’s occasionally advantageous to display floating child windows, but I hardly believe it’s necessary in all or even most cases.
And on a Mac… Window management is just plain broken, for the reason I gave before and evidently for the reason you explain now. ;)
Nov 20 2007
12:02 am
I typically have two or three minimized windows on my dock. Since I have NO unopened applications on my dock and at most two folders, the minimized windows aren’t “clutter” they ARE my content. :-)
Nov 22 2007
11:27 pm
Allen: The problem with a “For Later” space is that it isn’t visible. You have to go and look for it. I used to use multiple desktops and I am not alone in forgetting that a desktop existed for days. I like the visible reminder because it makes it more likely that instead of finding new and interesting things to read, I’ll actually finish what I’ve already started.
P.S.: This whole prefixing thing is the reason nested comments are awesome. Paid for by the Nested Discussion Coalition
Nov 22 2007
11:50 pm
That makes sense – I often find todo lists are useless if they’re out of sight.
I would have prefixed this response to you, but the amount of typing would be more work than implementing a nested commenting system to manage sets of 5-10 comments.