Slashdot Mirror
Google "Office" Released
pumpknhd writes "Looks like Google has finally integrated Writely and spreadsheets into Google "Docs & Spreadsheets". Writely.com now redirects to this new location. The design has also changed to match the look of other Google services." The more "applications" I try forcing into a tabbed web MDI model under a Mac, the more clumsy it gets. They aren't in my Dock, they can't be apple-tabbed through. Issues like this really frustrate me as I find myself wanting to use more web2.0 ajaxy fancy pants programs.
My big 3 questions:
1. How do I easily upload and organize all my locally saved Word and Excel files?
2. How do I maintain a local copy of all my changes and new files?
3. How safe should I feel about uploading files with sensitive personal info?
Answer these questions, Google, and I'm on board. And, I suspect many other people will be too.
When 10.5 Leopard comes out (or using available widget authoring tools possibly) you should be able to create a Dashboard widget that could serve as home for your "Goffice" app, or any other AJAX app that works in Safari.
Firefox's JS advancementas and SQL engine are features requested by Google for their web application platform.
Late 2007, Vista adoption is still beginning to happen, WGA eats at Microsoft share of OS. People looking for alternatives.
Google buys Ubuntu and rebrands it as a powerfull "plug and play" web platform that interfaces with Google apps and Firefox. Google Box is born.
Google buys Mozilla. Firefox keeps it's brand and keep on expanding its web platform features in FF 3.0 and 4.0 as it adds 3D and OpenGL acceleration.
Late 2009: Microsoft share is dropping quickly at the same time increasing their revenue as pirates are slpit between those paying up, and those going for Google Box.
Late 2011, Google purchases Adobe and makes Flash and a light version of PDF part of their web platform. Google announced mobile web platform: Google Boxmobile.
Windows share has dropped below 50%. This allows Microsoft to innovate and integrate applications in their OS without threats from antitrust and anti-monopoly lawsuits. Spectacularly, with nearly half the share it had before, Microsoft's revenue is higher than ever. Microsoft releases Windows Vienna, amazing advancement in the world of desktop OS and computer-interface technologies.
Microsoft positions Windows Vienna as the desktop os for power users, business users and IT professionals, and phases out Vista and XP.
Google Box positions itself as the casual computer platform for people looking for entertainment, photo management, word/spreadsheet functionality, light games etc.
The problem is that the whole concept of tabbed windows isn't well integrated into the rest of the Mac UI philosophy. Frankly it's not much better in Windows.
... but I think we're getting close to needing an update.
If you have a bunch of stacked browser windows, everything works peachy on OS X, just like you described. Cmd-Tab cycles through applications, and then Cmd-` goes through the windows. This is because the OS is designed with the idea of a "window" as its most basic unit. Each window is owned by an application and has one task going on in it. This has been the way of things since the MultiFinder in MacOS 6
Unfortunately, since tabs are part of the application and not really handled by the OS, there's no universal command for cycling through them. In some applications (e.g. Adium), you use Command-[left/right arrow]; in other applications (Firefox) it's different. I don't even know if there's a hotkey for cycling through tabs in Safari -- I hope there is, but that I just haven't found it yet.
At any rate, I think tabs are something where the application developers and users latched onto a useful feature, which the operating system UI designers never really counted on.
What needs to happen is that the OS' windowing system itself needs to implement tabbing, instead of leaving it to each application to do differently. Think of the neat stuff you could do -- any window could become a tab in any other window, maybe by just dragging one window's title bar into another. So you could have a Finder tab going inside of a Safari "window," or vice versa. Want to break a tab off into a separate window? You could do that, too. Individual tabs could be independently reduced to the Dock, and expanded back up into their parent windows, or their own, or into different windows.
But the point is that rather than leaving tabbing up to each application to do a little differently, Apple needs to step in and provide a guideline as to what the best practice is, and make it easy to implement universally.
IMO, rather than having the "window" being the base unit of UI design, the tab needs to become that. Today's "window" needs to become a looser concept -- call it a "frame." A frame is just a variable-size, resizable object that holds tabs; if it only has one tab in it, then the tab itself isn't shown and it looks like a window does today. The frame isn't owned by any application; applications instead create tabs in frames. So if an application instance crashes, all of its tabs would close, but any other tabs in the same frame would be unaffected. The menu bar would change contexts as the user switched from one tab to another, rather from one frame/window to another as it does now.
Tabs are a really useful invention, and frankly I think the concept should be broadened. Word processing and many other activities could each benefit from tabbing, and the user would get a coherent and cohesive interface for manipulating and working with tabs, that would save them time and confusion over the current situation. That it would make web applications vastly easier to use would be a very positive side-effect.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."