[kde-quality] Re: window tabbing (especially kdevelop)

[Robert Knight]

>>Where you're ONLY clue is the favicon.  Of course, if you have 50 tabs open
from the _same site_, the icons are useless.  You have to hover over each
one to figure out which is which.

How about showing thumbnails in an icon list at the left of the screen
in a similar fashion to presentation applications (PowerPoint,
OpenOffice etc.)  In terms of visual cues, websites are distinctive
like presentation slides, so I think this would be better than simply
trying to find a way to show more text links (which is essentially
what tabs are), or fit extra visual cues into a very small space. 
Multiple rows might help (although this would need some though to
avoid the kind of multi-row nightmares seen in Sucky-GUI sites), but
the user still has to read the tabs and decipher the text to pick the
page if it does not have a distinctive favicon.

When the user has a lot of pages open, an accelerator could be pressed
to make the thumnail view fill the window (and the same accelerator
would hide the view).

- Robert.

On 19/08/05, Bill Kendrick <nbs at sonic.net> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 10:27:22AM +0200, Nicolas Ternisien wrote:
> > Something quite simple will be to implement a system like the GMail
> > one in an horizontal layout.
> >
> > A screenshot is available here :
> >
> > http://annivernet.free.fr/stuff/divers/kdetabbar-gmail.png
> >
> > Only some tabs becomes available if the user clicks on it. The other
> > one are "minimized" like GMail do.
> >
> > When the mouse hovers the tabbar, each title is displayed (in a
> > tooltip for example),
> 
> Guh, that's no better than what we have now, which is:
> 
>   ([]..)([]..)([]..)([]..)(<)(>)
> 
> Where you're ONLY clue is the favicon.  Of course, if you have 50 tabs open
> from the _same site_, the icons are useless.  You have to hover over each
> one to figure out which is which.
> 
> Another issue that comes up is that many sites do crap like this in the
> title:
> 
>   Blah blah site: Page foo
>   Blah blah site: Page bar
>   Blah blah site: Contact us!
> 
> So the best you get, in some cases, is:
> 
>   ([]Bl..)([]Bl..)([]Bl..)(<)(>)
> 
> 
> Along with better physical orientation of these tabs (e.g., having
> multiple rows), it might be helpful to make the tabs themselves more
> intelligent.
> 
> I kinda like the idea of the Mac OS X Dock style zoom-in, but AGAIN,
> that depends on the user floating their mouse all over the place just
> to find something.  If we have the opportunity to _show_ them the
> information before they start fiddling with the mosue, that's a MUCH
> better solution.
> 
> Honestly (and I've never used Gmail before), the screenshot you showed
> looks more like a browser rendering glitch than a 'feature'! 8^o
> 
>    _______________________________________________
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>   /_______________________________________________\
>   /_______________________________________________\
>   / Joseph Garvin ...                   ..06:29.. |
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>   \_______________________________________________/
> 
> 
> Those empty little curves at the top provide no information and, as you
> described them, force the user to go point at them.  (They're pretty small,
> too, so I can see someone getting quite frustrated with them... especially
> if they have difficulty using a mouse or other pointing device.)
> 
> -bill!
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