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> However, this 'icons on the desktop' approach has been out of fashion since people started building X desktop environments that used the same general ideas as
by Sniffnoy 4y ago
> However, this 'icons on the desktop' approach has been out of fashion since people started building X desktop environments that used the same general ideas as macOS and Windows. Both of those have always used icons on the desktop for passive objects that had yet to be opened or activated, not active applications; active application windows were collected together in a taskbar.
Note that Windows only started doing this with the taskbar in Windows 95; prior to that, it did turn windows into icons when minimized.
- anyfoo 4y agoTrue. There were the "passive" icons the article means in Program Manager, but there were also the "active" icons you mean on the Windows desktop itself. They may be easy to overlook however, because the desktop was much less frequented before Windows 95, however. With the File Explorer and Program Manager being separate applications, there just wasn't much to do on the Desktop.
- pavlov 4y agoIndeed. In Windows versions 1-3, minimized window didn’t actually go away, they were still being asked to paint themselves. Raymond Chen explains: ” Under the old model, when a window was minimized, it displayed as an icon, the icon had a particular position on the screen, and the program drew the icon in response to paint messages. (Of course, most programs deferred to DefWindowProc which just drew the icon.) In other words, the window never went away; it just changed its appearance.” https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20041028-00/?p=37453 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20041028-00/?p=37...