I leave everything running. I have a dozen spaces filled with assortments of windows for different tasks. It’s a real pain because some apps (such as the browser) have windows open on all of the spaces and macOS really doesn’t like it when you have the same application in multiple different spaces. Clicking a link in an email is such a roll of the dice (as to which space I’ll end up in and which browser window will receive the new tab) that I don’t bother clicking and test copy paste the link where I want it to open.
It’s especially bad when I need to restart the browser because then all the windows get collected into one space again. Also annoying that relaunching the browser reopens all those windows in the first place.
I like the idea of this app for launching a collection of apps together but the application is the wrong level of granularity. I don’t want all of my browser windows at once. I want just one of them along with the windows of other applications that match that task.
I bet there’s some combination of tools I could cobble together and customize to achieve this but I don’t want to work that hard at it. I really should be able to just open up a new space, open up and arrange all the windows I want to work with on tasks for that space, and then press save and give it a name.
Then I should be able to close that space and reopen it by name any time I like, with all of the windows exactly as I left them, regardless of whether or not any of those applications are open on other spaces.
I think this is the dream, but we're paddling upstream here as the OS itself is app-centric and apps are mostly document-centric.
Xerox Star & Smalltalk had the task-centric approach and Alan Kay @alankay has said that Steve Jobs/Apple missed that aspect in their takeaway from their visit: "(they) missed a few things about the GUI. For example, that it had unlimited and persistent “desktops” which could be used to sustain work/projects over time without having to tear down and build up, and without stovepiped apps, etc."
Crossing the streams (see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41217330>, and I know msephton has), task-centric UI seems to me to have traditionally been accomplished on Unix-like platforms through directories (often task/project-related), and Makefiles, which can combine a set of related operations across a large number of tools in a single context.
Neither of these are, of course, user-friendly for the vast majority of people. But they do afford some thoughts, concepts, and mechanisms which might be used in task-oriented UI design.
The Lisa was doc-centric so Apple definitely didn't miss that aspect. They abandoned it because harddrives were expensive and needed a cheaper base system running single apps off floppy.
> Also annoying that relaunching the browser reopens all those windows in the first place.
This is the browser's decision, not macOS's, though. At least for Firefox, you can turn it off ("Open previous windows and tabs" in General > Startup).
I don’t want to lose all those windows and tabs though.
I guess what I really want isn’t possible without either ugly hacks or a total rearchitect of the operating system: the elimination of the “stovepipe” applications paradigm.
Applications should not own their windows, the operating system should. In practice this would mean an application is not a program you invoke by clicking on it. Instead it should be a library you install that tells the operating system how to read, display, edit, and write certain kinds of documents or document-like resources (such as web pages).
Then it would be easy for the operating system to offer unlimited persistent desktops that need to only remember which resources are open and a bit of metadata controlling the appearance of each window (position, shape, size, view setting).
I dunno—I see the appeal of what you say, but, on the other hand, the closer the OS comes to locking in different things that an app might want to do, the more we risk the iOS set-up where you can use any browser you want, as long as it's WebKit. That is, one unified paradigm is great, as long as you like that paradigm!
I guess one can image a "skinnable" OS, where the OS enforces, say, one approach to window management on all apps, but there are options for what the One True Window Management strategy is. I'm sure I'm describing something in Linux, but I'm a Mac user and so not used to such freedom.
Agreed. It’s weird because the basic app+window UX in macOS (in which an app can be running with no windows open) implies the task based behavior that Stapler is trying to support.
Fair. It sounds like earlier tech went further than the macOS UX.
It’s a shame we don’t have better task support. macOS has been slowly shidting further towards app-centric workfkows. I suppose this is in line with app stores, web apps and mobile OSs being the more common computer interfaces now. It’s disappointing, in my opinion.
We've left so many great and useful things behind in the name of "progress". I encourage you to try old systems, even just for as long as it takes to type a document, edit an image, or manage some windows, organise some files, to see how they all did things and what each brought to the desktop.
It’s especially bad when I need to restart the browser because then all the windows get collected into one space again. Also annoying that relaunching the browser reopens all those windows in the first place.
I like the idea of this app for launching a collection of apps together but the application is the wrong level of granularity. I don’t want all of my browser windows at once. I want just one of them along with the windows of other applications that match that task.
I bet there’s some combination of tools I could cobble together and customize to achieve this but I don’t want to work that hard at it. I really should be able to just open up a new space, open up and arrange all the windows I want to work with on tasks for that space, and then press save and give it a name.
Then I should be able to close that space and reopen it by name any time I like, with all of the windows exactly as I left them, regardless of whether or not any of those applications are open on other spaces.