Jerry Balzano gjbalzano@ucsd.edu wrote:
Not that I'd presume to know what that is at my stage of (Squeak) development, but it occurred to me as I was browsing around through various classes and instances and methods that the Squeak System Browser lacks a feature that we take for granted on all our web browsers and that most of us would be lost without -- a "back" button!
I dunno -- I don't sit in single browsers all that much. I mostly navigate by opening new windows, and so going back is very easy. This seems to be the model that Squeak's browsers support best.
To contrast, Celeste doesn't allow this, and I get frustrated by it. I can't for example, easily go find the last message I wrote on this topic to the Squeak list, because I'd have to take off 3 filters, put in 2-3 more, and then (here's the problem) put *back* the original 3 filters off the top of my head.
Overall, Multiple-Windows seems like a safer default. If you use Multiple Windows and are wrong, then the user must close a few extra windows. If you use Single Window and are wrong, then users might decide not to do certain queries at all, because they don't want to trash their current viewing context.
Window-per-context could be viewed as late-binding the browsing strategy. :)
-Lex