HIG: tabwidgets

[Ellen Reitmayr]

On Thursday, 9. March 2006 09:15, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> hi all..
>
> first, some broken link status:
>
> 	 http://openusability.org/projects/kde-hig/
project link points to the hig wiki now.


> there are 5 areas that probably need to be covered, please comment:
>
> 0. When to use tabs
> 1. Where to place tabs in a window
> 2. Standard Actions
> 3. Context menus
> 4. Mouse interaction
>
> When to use tabs: ???
>
> something should probably be said about frames in tab widgets. in Qt4 we
> have proper control over this, which we didn't in Qt3. huzzah!
aeh - what exactly does that mean? 


> Where to place tabs in a window: Where the common locus of attention is.
> This is usually the top of the window, except for command line and chat
> applications which tend to put new information at the bottom of the window
> and therefore keep the user's attention there. In such cases the tabs
> should appear at the bottom of the window.

do you know omniweb for macosx? there, tabs are in a drawer, left or right of 
the window. the good thing about it: the tabs provide a preview of the 
displayed web page, very much like the navigation bar in kpdf. even better: 
you can freely move the different tabs, detach and rejoin them via drag and 
drop, which facilitates the grouping of related pages.

this approach is not only useful for web/file browser, but also for kate and 
other apps where logical grouping of open document makes sense. however - 
vertical navigation bars consume a lot of space.


> Standard Actions:
> The following actions should be available if it makes sense within the
> workflow of the application. For instance, while it makes sense to offer
> "Duplicate Tab" in a web browser, it doesn't in a chat application.
>
> Action		Shortcut		Required
> -------		---------------	-----------
> New Tab		Ctrl+Shift+N	Yes
> Detach Tab	Ctrl+Shift+D	No
> Duplicate Tab			No
> Reload Tab	F5		No
> Next Tab		Ctrl+Left_Arrow	Yes
> Previous Tab	Ctrl+Right_Arrow	Yes

Move Tab right
Move Tab left 

(These should be menu equivalents to flexible drag and drop of tabs)


> we'll want to define what the standard names for these are (e.g.
> tab_duplicate) but we'll need to wait for the xmlgui replacement to get
> into svn to know exactly how that stuff will work.
>
> Context Menus: this should be a description of the context menu including
> spots for customization. for instance:
>
> New Tab
> Reload Tab
> Detach Tab
> Duplicate Tab
> -----
Move Tab right
Move Tab left
__
> Other Tabs
> ----
> Close Tabs
>
> a question here is what to put in Other Tabs. in konsole it's "Switch To
> Tab", in konversation it's "Switch To" and in konqueror it's "Other Tabs"
> which includes actions that apply to all other tabs.

-- 

Ellen Reitmayr
KDE Usability Project
usability.kde.org
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