[ajb]

"We must now Single-click "Select" on that icon to actually bring the application to the forefront and activate it. I don't know what that's all about, but that's how it works."

What that was about was that all gui apps on riscos only ran one process, no matter how many files you had open. These machines had very little memory, so managing it was very important - there was actually a system panel you could open (I forget it's name) where you could drag sliders to change how much various things were allowed to allocate.

The downside, of course, was that if some app crashed, it would take out every file you had open with it. But then, it didn't really have very good isolation, so often a crashing app would take down the whole OS.

[ChristopherDrum]

Author here. That still doesn't get at my confusion over the UX. It wouldn't change any of the memory management issues to have a double-click on an app icon jump straight into the application. That user intent seems pretty clear to me, so the extra step could have been automated away. Maybe RISC OS users just had a different way of working?

[Kim_Bruning]

They distinguish between running the application and opening a document or view. Not all applications want or need to have a document or view (onto a document or otherwise) open at all times. Some of the demo programs actually demonstrate this. Eg, iirc !maestro can keep playing with window open or closed.

Mac OS X has a variant. There's a little dot below the icons that indicate that the program is currently active in ram versus just visible in the dock.

Ps: wrt the demo programs. Did you notice you can eg. 'Save' files from !Edit and !Paint directly into !Draw (and IIRC also back into itself) ?

[Kim_Bruning]

pps

Note that RISC OS had to contend with running off floppy disks too. So you might start one application off one floppy disk, and the next off another, and you'd have them both in ram, but neither had any data in them yet, because that might come of a third floppy disk.

That's at least one concrete scenario where "application loaded" need not be the same thing as "having data open in a window".

It's been a while though. I just know they were extremely consistent in keeping the distinction between "application loaded" on one hand and opening a window on the other (or taking over the screen, in games) . This does help with your mental model of where your RAM is going, since you have a limited amount of it. Closing applications might free up ram you need for something, but now you might need to juggle floppies again. And so it went.

ppps

Also, windows (and some of mac os) seems to confuse opening a file with opening an application. It's not the same thing. An application can have 0, 1, or infinity files open in memory at any one time. "Why the heck does eg ms windows always open nonsensical empty windows when there's nothing to show?" I'm not sure it's a hill I'd die on today, but I used to have Opinions on this! "The window is not the application, an application can have lots of windows!" (Ha, you're reminding me of old rants back from decades ago ;-) )

[ChristopherDrum]

I think the part I keep forgetting is the "Menu" mouse button. In the RISC OS case, having the application icon in the Icon Bar is, effectively, like having the application "foreground and running." A "Menu"-click on the icon parallels having, say, a MacOS 7.5 application running with its menu visible at the top of the screen. The Mac puts it more "in your face" but either way the ability to open the application menu and start a new document is essentially equivalent in both cases.

[Kim_Bruning]

I'm reminded of the utility !Menon that I used to keep track of all my important files across many floppies, once upon a time. No window at all IIRC. Just drag and drop, and the Menu button.

[Symbiote]

If you double clicked on a file it would load the associated application and open the file.

The only reason I can think of is to not disrupt the user's flow by opening a window on top of the Filer windows. Maybe they intend to open multiple applications to use together.

There was a carefully written programmer's guide for UX. That might have an explanation.