>> This is as opposed to old Gnome 2 and other desktops where you have at least two different places to go (task bar or menu/shortcut) depending on what you want and whether the app is already open.
>People are used to this. It's how most computer UIs work.
Some people are. Many really aren't. My parents usually end up with three or four copies of Thunderbird running after a typical session on their desktop, because they keep launching a new instance rather than clicking on the running instance in the Window list.
Unifying the launching and activation of tasks is one thing that Apple really got right in OS X (though I'm sure they weren't the first to think of doing so, I think it's reasonable to say that they popularised it, now that it has been adopted by Windows 7 and even GNOME 3).
Posted May 4, 2012 17:22 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
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The same is true of both my parents and my sister.
This is *not* an obvious thing for anyone who doesn't use a computer regularly (probably because, in most other fields, creating new whatevers is not possible, so they assume that they are always reusing, even when they are not.)
Xfce 4.10 released
Posted May 5, 2012 20:17 UTC (Sat) by robbe (guest, #16131)
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> Unifying the launching and activation of tasks [...]
I first saw this in Nextstep, which is, of course, an OS X progenitor.
Xfce 4.10 released
Posted May 6, 2012 1:23 UTC (Sun) by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
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I think that where Unity really fails is in requiring different buttons for starting the first and subsequent instances. The middle click thing is really not discoverable.