Two weeks later: KDE 3.4 Control Center UI Review

[Anders Lund]

On Sunday 27 February 2005 13:07, Clarence Dang wrote:
> See attachment.  I can't quickly tell which tab is which without text.  
> Tooltips are too slow and clumsy.

That screenshot simply proves me right: the tabs metaphor does not work for 
the amount of tabs.

You have at least 12 tabs, and if you display the caption in each, you'd 
easily have 4 rows of tabs allready, even with a resonable cropping (given a 
widow width < 1025px with readable font size). So each time you'd click a 
tab, the rows would alter their positions and you wouldn't know where to look 
for a  specific tab. The more tabs and the more switching the worse, making 
the idea of a multilevel tabbar self-contradictive -- a navigation tool that 
makes navigating hard and frustrating :S

And even with the window size that I tend to use ( ~1000x800px) 4 or more rows 
of tabs would eat up a considerable part of my window, and that in a much 
more annoying way than a sidebar (imo, that is probably subjective).

A sidebar of course have rich opportunities for displaying state information.

As for keeping the user up to date with browser tasks, that is why 
applications have statusbars - the statusbar could temporarily show 'URL 
bla://bla finished loading'.

-anders
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