Hacker News Reader

Comment by calini | Hacker News Reader

My Synology NAS uses something like this for its navigation and even if it's initially strange, you instantly miss it when you access it from your phone, when the UI turns into this nested list which is not intuitive at all

View on HN

I personally hate this from Synology. While their apps are meaningful structured and look good, it is just a natural mismatch to put sub windows into a parent window. Anyone remembering multi sub window apps in the Microsoft office suite in the 90s/00s. Was also horrible without a browser/html involved.

This is definitely a taste thing

> Anyone remembering multi sub window apps in the Microsoft office suite in the 90s/00s

It was called MDI: <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Multiple-document...>

Yes, and from day one Opera (when it was still called Multitorg) used it to give us something like "tabbed browsing". I think that was in the mid-1990s ;)

StarOffice (precursor to LibreOffice) used to take this one step further and replicated the taskbar and start menu inside the application window: https://winworldpc.com/product/staroffice/5x

Yeah, same. I have a synology NAS and the desktop-of-windows-in-a-window aspect of it just seems archaic to me. I have a browser with tabs, thanks. If I really need two things going, I'll open two tabs or two browser windows.

I also like the Synology UI. It is helpful to see multiple apps at the same time and is especially useful when moving files around to have two or more file browser windows open.

> It is helpful to see multiple apps at the same time

Without their desktop thing, this would just be "open link in new tab" for the apps you want open at the same time.

Spatial file navigation & manipulation might be the one reasonable reason for the fake desktop.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com