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These are called palettes and have always worked that way
Authored by: VRic on Jul 19, '05 11:47:52AM

This hasn't changed since long before Mac OS X, maybe even from the very beginning. What changed is the amount of inconsistencies in Apple's own products.

Palettes are not windows (unless you consider them in the technical/unix way, in which case even menus are windows). They hide when their parent application isn't frontmost because they're supposedly useless then (at least they should, otherwise the developer shouldn't have used palettes) and they don't respond to windows' closing kb shortcut because they don't belong to the windows layering, which makes a "close front window" shortcut irrelevant to them since none is frontmost (technically they are of course layered, but there's no way to tell which of 2 palettes is in front unless they happen to overlap).

These were proper, consistent and well thought-through innovations: otherwise either there would be no way to pull a document window to the front in Photoshop or it would then mask the palettes, you couldn't close the document without tedious shifting or you'd have to first close palettes even though you'll want them next time, etc. Other environments lacked palettes, and they were a mess.

This doesn't mean there aren't any inconsistencies, because controls are used by developers like they want and developers don't always know what they're doing. Old mac users constantly spot errors showing that current Apple developers know so little of the work of their predecessors that they don't understand much of the Mac UI past the most obvious ideas that casual users can grasp.

This probably contributed to them adding to the confusion by making palettes so similar to windows (one didn't mistake palettes for "mini windows" when the 2 kinds sported very different title bar patterns and were used consistently, before OSX).



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