Dangerous Dave's Dlog

I often find myself losing the object windows into the background. In GM for Windows, they are contained within the window. Each window is actually within the GM window. I guess this can be likened to panels.

Now as many of you probably don't know, Mac's have a rather different approach to windows than Windows does. This is mostly hidden from the user, except one part. In Windows, a window represents an application. Close window, close application. Many of you switchers would have noticed that when you got to Mac OS X, after you closed the window the little light was still glowing under the Dock icon, showing the application was still open. Huh? You say? This is because in Mac OS X a window represents a document, not an application.

Think of it like this: You have MS Word open, and there is a big X in the top right corner that will close Word. There is a smaller X in the same region that will just close the open document. Clicking the close button in Mac OS X is like clicking the smaller X, closing the document but not the application. There are all sorts of reasons for thing, ranging from consistency to ease of use (ease of use for someone just learning computers, not for someone who's used Windows for 20 years), but that's outside the scope of this post. But after using it for a year, I wouldn't want it changed.

Now GM for Mac could go in three directions:

1. Leave it as it is: Most likely.

2. Use Panels: Least Likely

3. Manage windows, to make them appear inside the main GM window.


3 Would make veteran Mac users cringe. The window system was set up this way for a reason.

1 Is really awful. You can't open one object, open another, and compare. When you open the second object, since you clicked in the main GM window it hides the first objects window behind the main one, and shows the second one. You have to manually bring the other one back.

2 Panels will likely be the most difficult to implement, but their use means the panels will always be above the main window, but aren't limited to the area covered by it. When you run expose, it would show the GM project instead of each resource properties window seperatly. This setup should also make it easier to open multiple projects at once, in seperate windows. Because Mac programs are supposed to work like this, you can't run the application twice. That means we are currently limited to one project opened at once, it appears (I made two copies of Game Maker so I can have two open). No other application I have found has this problem.

One thing I love about Macs is how most developers stive for system wide consistency, and it would be great if YoYo Games did the same. Knowing almost none of the technical aspects of acheiving it, I would like to suggest panels as a possible option. Failing that, a system that works like I have described would be great. As a minimum, at least don't let the object windows hide behind the main window.

-Dave