RFC: Only place one "add tab" item in the Context View toolbar

[Thomas Pf.]

> On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 9:00 AM, Nikolaj Hald Nielsen
> 
> <nhnfreespirit at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I have been thinking some more, and I wonder if it would make sense to
> > remove the "settings" button completely.
> >
> > The main point of this was, as far as I could tell, to hide all the
> > "+" buttons as they take up a lot of space. If we instead just keep
> > the single "+" button visible at all times, have the close buttons
> > appear on hover and always allow dragging, I think that would simplify
> > things even more as we would get a way from having 2 "states"
> 
> Yep, that's definitely an interesting thought, to get rid of the
> config mode entirely. Sven had a similar idea that also did away with
> modes.
> 
> I think we should explore such modeless concepts, though maybe in a
> later release (2.2.2), to make the changes less radical between
> releases. We could improve it step by step.
> 
Interestingly, I had the exact same Idea when reading this thread. So ++ from 
me. And I'd even suggest another step toward consistency with other apps 
(although this might be better suited for 2.3 since it is a bigger visual 
change): 
Why not make the applets actually look and feel like tabs? Although they are 
not the same as browser tabs in that they are permanent, they still do pretty 
much the same: Switch to a different "view". Since they currently are not 
really that pretty (especially in dark color themes since they are the only 
element which stays light blue), it might make sense to adapt their look to 
the standard KDE4 tab look. That way users can transfer what they have learned 
from other tabs. They might even be moved to the top, but I don't think they 
would have to.
If you don't like the look of tabs e.g. in Konqueror, you might use the look 
of the "tabs" on the left from previous Amarok versions (although the active 
tab would need to be connected to the content visually to make it actually 
look like a tab).
Maybe I'll make one or several mockups tomorrow to explore how this might 
look.
Btw: What happened to the idea to have an icon for each applet? There were 
some quite nice icon suggestions flying around in this mailing list once. Has 
this been dropped? Having an icon would help when there are too many applets 
to display names.
Regards,
Thomas