Why do you like/dislike consolidated windows?

[musicman691]

After several weeks of working without the CW I can say for me it's been nirvana. I only see what I want to see without a bunch of distracting tabs and sidebars. Created a couple of window sets and am working as quickly and efficiently as I need to to keep my clients happy and that's the real thing right? Keep the clients happy.

[Shooshie]

Oh, I’m not dissatisfied, really… I’m just saying I want to love the CW, but despite continuing experimentation I’ve never found a way of making it work as well as rapidly switching between individual windows with hotkeys. Mission Control is a great suggestion; I’ve never found it to be terribly useful in my workflow (I can TAB and tilde through things faster than I can locate them in miniature), but I’m always up for trying.

Just to be clear, and you may already realize this, but going window to window in Mission Control is instant, without any intermediary search in miniature. That's only for setup. When I work in Spaces, what I'm doing is working in views that I'm constantly customizing. I want to return to those views, exactly as I left them, without having to reposition things yet again. Spaces is the ONLY way of working that makes this possible, and it responds to window hot-keys, or mission control keyboard commands, or Magic Trackpad swipes. There's nothing more flexible or fast. Spaces is a way of working in views. "Views" are your currently customized window arrangements, always changing while you work. Spaces enables you to return, instantly, to where you left things in any view.

As I mentioned, part of the problem for me is that MOTU has decided that some forms of information are only appropriate for the vertically-oriented sidebars, and some only for the horizontally-oriented “main body” sections, and it seems like there’s always a lot of wasted space on the screen when I devote, say, a minuscule soundbites list to an entire sidebar, or a mixing board with only a few elements on it to an entire horizontal section. Even if I have only the control panel, the tracks window and the mixing board docked, I can’t see the full height of those latter two elements and wind up having to scroll them up and down. For me it’s just quicker to stab the key commands to flip between a full-height tracks window and mixing board. I do love the compacted control panel option, and how I can remove all of the irrelevant buttons from it… I use hotkeys way more than the mouse. As DP continues its journey, I’d love to see the option to dock more elaborate arrangements of elements in either the sidebars or main body to my whim.

Also, the CW has never quite integrated with Mac OS’s fullscreen options in what I consider to be an intuitive way. Undocked windows will not always appear after hitting their hotkeys when the CW is in fullscreen mode. So far my favorite setup has been having the tracks window docked in the CW with the compact control panel, and then having the CW maximized to cover my screen, but not actually in fullscreen mode, then hopping around to several other undocked windows with key commands. That way my other windows can be appropriately sized… and located… onscreen (I hate it when the mixing board opens in the CW and it’s all off to the left, rather than centered, for example). It’s just what works for me.

All that said, I’m not at all unhappy with the options available to me. I’m always looking for a better mousetrap, but I love that there are so many possibilities. I love obsessively refining my templates (seriously). I don’t really use window sets, because I’m typically only focusing on one window at a time, but I love the feature; it’s brilliant. I love that when I reopen a window with hotkeys, it’s automatically and properly sized, and right where I last left it onscreen. One thing I always tell people is so great about DP is how customizable it is to your own workflow, way more than any other app… DAW or otherwise… that I can think of. Believe me, after spending some time hopping around the windows in Reason it’s always a relief to come back to DP’s flexible setup!

I use the CW mainly to handle all the little sidebar windows that I might want to have open. Some are incredibly helpful, but I don't like to manage them. CW does that nicely. As for the middle panel, I generally use that for the Tracks Overview. I can show that at a pretty good height, and in all but my orchestral transcriptions, it's satisfactory for the full project. If any windows share the middle panel with the Tracks Overview, they are usually the Sequence Editor and/or Meters.

But those details don't matter. My workflow goes like this:
1) I need flexibility in which I'm always changing the window arrangement, so Window Sets won't work. They always take you back to the arrangement before you started changing things. You get so many window sets that you can't remember them all. (Believe me, I've used Window Sets to the point of absurdity)
2) I need full-screen editor windows that always return to where I left them, or to the current cursor position, but I don't want to close out or hide any windows while doing that. That leaves me one option:
3) Spaces. Mission Control. Each editor window gets its own virtual monitor. The open plugins, as a group, get their own virtual monitor (unless I want some of them juxtaposed near edit windows, or whatever). Wherever I leave things, they stay. I don't ever have to move a window except for my own reasons (usually putting things side-by-side for comparison, or a string of plugins that I'm altering all together, and I need to be able to see all of them at once, in a group)

I can move windows around quickly, so I'm not really worried about opening and closing or moving them. What I want is for VIEWS to remain the where I leave them. When I spend time organizing a screen, I want it to stay. I don't want to make a new window set for every last possible way of organizing a screen. But putting them in specific places takes time that I don't want to repeat while working in that chunk or project. As my views (screens, virtual monitors, spaces, whatever you want to call them) evolve, I want to be switching views, not necessarily windows. Mission Control gives me the ability to do that, and no other way of working does. Period.

If I leave a pair of windows lined up together, or if I've arranged for five VSL interfaces (a string section, for example) to share a screen so that I can see the essential moving parts of all of them, I don't want to touch that again. Window sets can't do that. Well, technically they CAN, but you'd spend all your time making new window sets and trying to remember what you called them. I used to have cheat sheets for window sets before Apple invented Spaces.

Going only from window to window, even using hot keys, is a VERY limited way of working. Spaces is not. Spaces makes it possible to use those same hot keys, without alteration, to return to views you have set up with multiple windows, plugins, magnifications, scrolling, and everything exactly where you last put them. You don't have to set it up again when you open another window.

The only drawback is that you have to set these up every time you open a project. Some windows require set up when you open another chunk. Some don't. But Mission Control even made this easier: using the Mission Control interface to place your windows in their virtual spaces has a huge advantage: when they are dropped in their space, they retain their position on the screen. Yes, you still have to move them TO that space, but once they are there, they are in the position where you last saved them. That's most of the work, already done for you.

It takes me about 1 second per window to "deal" them out to their respective spaces. But it takes quite a long time to position windows into a "view." Spaces cuts out that positioning part, since they are already saved the way I left them. If you are like me, and you like to work in views that you can return to without having to set them up again, Spaces is the only way you can do that. Oh... and you can have windows from other apps in those views, too: say, MIDI Monitor, or Sibelius in the background. The entire space is always there, just a click away.

I find it odd that more people don't use this. As one who has used DP for about 30 years, and who has tried about every possible way of working, I can tell you that nothing is as fast as working in Spaces. I think people just aren't accustomed to working in views — they do the single-window hot-keys, and don't realize they could be using multiple windows customized for every project, every situation, which they can return to without repositioning, if they use Spaces. The CW is a great organizer, but it's just not big enough for multiple edit windows, plugins, and the zillion possibilities that arise as you are working. As a part of Spaces, however, it serves a very important purpose of keeping the smaller windows organized and updated for the current chunk.

I've said it redundantly, ad-absurdum, in hopes of catching anyone's imagination and making them realize what a huge leap it can be to use Spaces. When I read the debates about the Consolidated Windows and window sets, etc., I usually just shake my head and go on to the next thread. Those debates have no meaning for someone who works in views, always customized for the moment, always returnable. This is just a very advanced way of working, very fast, very efficiently, and yet it's often extremely difficult to get people to try it and stick to it long enough to see its advantages.

Shooshie