Is there still a place for MDI? [closed]

Answer 1

One advantage I can see for MDI occurs if a lot of screen real estate is going to be used for stuff that's shared among many windows. It may be more logical to have such material at the top or side of the enclosing window than to have it repeated in each SDI window, or have it appear in a window entirely separate from the SDI windows. For example, a chat program might have a status pane and a control pane. Having those be somewhat tied visually tied to the chat windows might be better than having them as standalone windows.

Answer 2

Note that the examples you used (MS Office and Adobe applications) are big programs and have lots of features. Users will be dealing with that program, and only that program for much of the program's lifetime.

Newer versions of MS Office (2007) and Adobe Photoshop (CS4) use multiple windows and tabs, respectively.

Note that with Windows 7, MDI's will probably lose popularity even more because of the extra power of tabs given by Microsoft's API's (although you needn't strictly use tabs -- MDI windows could work, but would be more confusing for the user than usual).

Answer 3

It appears that multiple top-level windows is the way to go. As for whether there should be one global app instance or one per document is up to you I think. It's not visible to the user.

Answer 4

Only one benefit for MDI:

Programs that use large amounts of resources, such as Adobe Photoshop, often have an MDI due to the prohibitive cost of running more than one instance at a time.

But you shouldn't develop programs that drain huge amounts of resources to start with.

Answer 5

I agree with slavy13 (old-MDI = bad, new-MDI = much better). But don't use programs like Microsoft Excel as your model. Ick! You get one window on your desktop, regardless of how many spreadsheets you have open (which may or may not be your preference.) But you get one taskbar icon for each and every document you have open. And your Alt+Tab window similarly has one icon for each document you have open. Plus, there is an additional icon in there just for "Excel" which takes you to whichever document happens to be "current". So yeah, do your MDI like Mozilla. Or at least give your users the option of switching to the cleaner style.

To more succinctly answer your question, I feel the answer is yes, MDI is still appropriate in some instances. But, in all things, moderation is the key.

Answer 6

The main advantage of MDI is when you want to keep track of two or more windows at the same time, and those windows need to be grouped together. For example, there's a running process in one window, but you need to work on another window, MDI would be the most ideal.