John Gruber:
The other thing I remember from the initial Aqua demo was the crazy purple button in the top-right corner of each window. Clicking it would put you in a new “single-window mode,” where you could only see one window at a time. The fact that that feature never saw the light of day is proof that it’s possible to talk Steve Jobs out of a bad idea – that purple button had “Jobs” written all over it.
Interviewer:
Was single-window mode such a bad idea? Moved from the purple button to the confines of System Preferences, wouldn’t it be useful for beginners or refugees from the Windows world?
John Gruber:
It might be a good idea for some entirely new system, but I think it was incompatible with the existing Mac UI paradigm. The Mac UI was, and is, meant to revolve around multiple windows. If you’re only going to show one window at a time, what’s the use of even calling it a “window”? Just take up the whole screen.
TiVo, for example, effectively is a computer with a single-window UI paradigm. But it’s screen-based, not window-based. In the same way that it didn’t make sense for Apple to add a single-window mode to Mac OS X, it wouldn’t make sense for TiVo to add a new multiple-windows mode.
As for beginners and Windows refugees, I don’t think they need protection or shielding from the true Mac UI. What would – and does – help them is when the regular UI is consistent, obvious, and intuitive.
