Earlier this month John Siracusa co-wrote and released Front and Center. Its sole purpose is to make windows in modern macOS¹ behave more like they did in classic Mac OS (System 1 to Mac OS 9). In his announcement of Front and Center, John succinctly describes the difference:

In classic, when you click on a window that belongs to an application that’s not currently active, all the windows that belong to that application come to the front. In Mac OS X (and macOS), only the window that you click comes to the front.

As an old Mac curmudgeon who’s also picky about window behavior, I was immediately onboard with John’s new app. That said, I don’t think that being picky about window behavior is limited to old Mac curmudgeons. Windowing is so fundamental to user experience that I would wager most people who use desktops regularly have some opinion about it, even if they don’t know it yet. Have you ever seen someone who’s only experienced Windows try to use a Mac or vice versa? I have. They don’t like it, in part because seemingly minor windowing differences disrupt their user flow.

I am using the term “user flow” to simply mean the ability to navigate an application or (even better) a platform without having to interrupt a given train of thought in order to figure out some bit of UX. For example, desktop users who’ve become accustomed to basic keyboard shortcuts don’t have to stop their current thinking in order to figure out copy and paste. It just comes naturally. The particulars of how and when windows come into the foreground play a major role in how individuals develop their own user flows over years of use. In John’s case:

By the time Mac OS X was first released in 2001, I had been using what would eventually be known as “classic” Mac OS for seventeen years. These were seventeen formative years for me, from the ages of 9 to 26. The user interface of classic Mac OS was as ingrained in me as Star Wars or any other cultural institution.

While there is no denying John released Front and Center to satisfy his own decades old habits, I suspect its audience is bigger than the relatively few people who imprinted on a platform that’s been dead for almost 18 years. Ignore its nostalgic trimmings for a moment and think about the one thing Front and Center does — it brings forward all windows of an application when one is clicked. In doing so it may make modern macOS behave more like classic Mac OS, but it also makes single-document interfaces² behave more like multiple-document interfaces.

Multiple-document interfaces are ubiquitous in modern desktop computing. Most IDEs, image editors, and even browsers use or default to some form of a multiple-document interface. Anyone who spends a great deal of their time using these multiple-document interfaces has also become accustomed to clicking any part an application to get all of its windows. Front and Center, while designed to work like classic Mac OS, also makes single-document interfaces behave more consistently with their multiple-document interface brethren (and does so without the downside of having some massive parent window obscuring the rest of the desktop.)

John Siracusa may have released Front and Center for old school Mac curmudgeons like me, but I think this application will also feel right at home with those who have never used (or are even aware of) classic Mac OS.