Window mismanagement page 2

The first myth of window management is that it exists…

Window managers should pop up menus on the screen at their origin, not half-way across the screen:

(Although I imagine that Windows has just given up hope with Explorer, like a mother and her incurable son)

Window managers should be supportive and understanding. For example, permitting programs to open sub-windows:

The consequence of not allowing that is that you can drag the parent around the screen leaving the child window behind:

Another example, showing a menu in lili_Pad implemented as a window, and what happens if you drag the parent window around:

(I blame that one on FAKEbasic being incapable of just about anything useful and badly implementing the rest)

Window managers are meant to be stable and in charge:

And able to keep track of their windows responsibly. For example, in the picture below, Mac OS cannot tell whether ShadowIRC is meant to be there or not:

Sadly, I forget what the cause of that was. It was to do with using General Controls to hide the desktop, and some method of hiding ShadowIRC would tell it it was hidden but leave the windows behind. I cannot reproduce it any more.

The final picture is what happens if a program crashes in the middle of switching monitor depth in Mac OS 9: the depth does change but the screen is not redrawn.

This seems to happen just about every time I switch depth now, which is a pain in the backside because the Horizon emulator only starts in 8-bit depth. Worse, the ATI video accelerator crashes during the process leaving you with unaccelerated video which is rather slow.