Sad again about how single window applications are the norm. So much screen real estate wasted and so much multitasking limited just cause the app decided it should handle tabs / views and only let you load a single window.
@skryking That's one thing I appreciate about most web apps. At least I can open them in another window. Sadly something like Element seems to keep a bunch of state in the render thread and only allows one instance at a time which I think is bonkers for a chat app.
@mauve I've been playing with the mastodon api and thinking about writing my own client. I haven't done much desktop development so not really sure where to go with that. Is there a decent cross os library for gui development that would allow multiple window development? I pick up languages relatively fast so that's not a huge issue.
@skryking Every time I look at cross platform GUI toolkits I get sad. Seems that Electron / Tauri are the most accessivle cross platform with their web stuff, followed by QT with decent reach but complex SDK setup.
@mauve tauri says it will do multiwindow, I'll give it a tinker.
@mauve Have you ever used an application that *requires* two monitors to be used effectively? :P
@mauve Nuke surpasses multiple windows in that you actually need multiple monitors to be able to use it comfortably. It CAN be used with one, but there just isn't a good way of configuring the windows to actually comp properly. Every VFX studio will give their compositors at least two monitors, and it's great! ...Until you need to show somebody how to do something on a laptop one day... And then it SUCKS A LOT.
@mauve Even Blender isn't this bad to work in with only one screen usually because, unlike in 2D, the 3D viewport can be rendered at the whole width of the screen allowing you to still see things which are presumably useful. Nuke is especially punishing though, and while its interface is amazingly modular (and works GREAT with two monitors) I think it's a double edged sword and also quite limiting sometimes. It's like the other extreme of your window thoughts :P
@hank Yeah I think my main discomfort ks with apps assuming they can own my entire screen. I prefer giving them little corners to live in or stack on each other. Mobile breakpoints are sk handy for increasing data density for example
@mauve Sometimes they're denser... Other apps actually manage to make use of the extra real-estate they are provided and show more! I think good desktop UI got kinda lost with "mobile first" design.
The above is my phillosophy that I hope to eventually extend to Browsertrix and the rest of Webrecorder's tools. I'm sure there's room for improvement while crawling for example, you could pop out the crawl queue / exclusions to a new window and we could expand the crawler viewers?
@mauve I'll continue to note though that the average person isn't a window manager wizard and would probably get lost if expected to wrangle windows the way some folks seem unable to wrangle their tabs 🙃
@mauve yeah this annoys me very much with desktop mastodon apps. I want to spread columns on multiple screens without having a column getting split in the middle.