Will Tabbed Windows Be the Next Big Thing?

kai_hiwatari writes "The recently released KDE SC 4.4 Beta 1 has introduced tabbed windows as a new feature. It is now possible to tab together windows from different applications. This looks like it will be a very good productivity tool. Like the tabbed browsers, this may well end up as a feature in all desktop environments in the years ahead."

Comments

Simply put

[nitio]

No.

Re:Simply put

[biryokumaru]

Dude, yes! We could put all our applications there as we're using them, possibly even group like ones together!

Only it wouldn't be tabs anymore, it'd be tasks, so we could call it... not the tab bar... I know! Let's call it the "Taskbar!"

Oh, wait...

Re:Simply put

[Interoperable]

It's an option. You can choose not to use it. It could be handy in some situations or appeal to particular users in which case you can use it. As long as it's stable and doesn't consume resources unduly, why wouldn't you want the option?

Re:Simply put

[chetbox]

On one hand, I agree: The average desktop user doesn't want to spend there time organising how they are going to achieve the task at hand. They just want to get on with it.

On the other hand, users such as many of those in the open source desktop world are likely to spend a little more time thinking about how they can improve their productivity through streamlining their interactions with the desktop manager and will at least give it a go.

Personally I think it will be an effective way to context switch ones interface between tasks.

Re:Simply put

[Daniel Dvorkin]

As long as it's stable and doesn't consume resources unduly, why wouldn't you want the option?

Because to a lot of people on /. (and everywhere else, to be sure) the way they do things is the One True Way, and anyone who disagrees with their way of doing things is clearly evil, insane, or a moron (possibly all three.) "My workflow is Good And Right; yours is Inferior And Must Be Destroyed. Users must not even have the option to follow your unclean way, lest they be tempted from the path of righteousness!" That kind of thing.

Re:Simply put

[negRo_slim]

You can have it all! Today! http://www.wintabber.com/

Re:Simply put

[Shin-LaC]

The point is that we want to group windows by task, not by application. Let's say I'm working on a web application, so I have a window showing the contents of the project folder, a text editor, and a browser to test the application. At the same time (where "same time" doesn't mean that I do two things at once, but that I share my time between several activities over a range of many days), I'm writing a C program, so I have another editor window (or maybe an IDE), another project folder, a terminal with man pages, more browser windows for documentation, and so on.

The Windows taskbar, in spite of its name, doesn't understand human tasks at all: instead, it would group all browsers together, all editors together, all terminals together, and so on. This is stupid and useless. With tabbed heterogeneous windows, instead, I would be able to group webpage-related windows together, and C-related windows together. It sounds like a very useful feature to me.

Re:Simply put

[crispytwo]

I use 'spaces' on the mac or multiple desktops on linux (windows has nothing useful) for the same thing now. Why would tabs be any different?

Re:Simply put

[RicktheBrick]

Yes1 I can just see it now. Porn staring Jo, Porn staring Ella, Porn with both Jo and Ella. It would greatly help my effeceintcy in watching porn.

Re:Simply put

[eiMichael]

And you want every tabbed window contained, not only the same size but only viewable one at a time?

Re:Simply put

[feder]

Yeah, but how does that make me look all cool and skeptical about everything that has the word 'tabs' in it? To hell with "very useful" - it's not street, bro', that's what I'm saying!

Re:Simply put

[KrimZon]

Yeah, plus spaces/workspaces offer the added benefit of being able to see multiple task-relevant windows at once. For example one to read from and the other to type into, or having multiple information displays at once.

What workspaces need though is the ability to create workspaces when you need them and destroy them when they're unneeded as opposed to having a fixed number of them, and possibly more refined or enhanced ways of identifying those spaces at a glance (without any further input needed).

Re:Simply put

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you're more interested in the semantic web.

Re:Simply put

[biryokumaru]

That was not meant to be anonymous. Any downmods, please downmod me, not the AC post.

Re:Simply put

[roguetrick]

Actually, it would be interesting if you take that into account and have one tab have a full screen version and another tab with a split screen of two things.

Re:Simply put

[Lord Byron II]

Even if it consumes only a small amount of hard disk space and a small amount of memory, multiply that by a 100 or so and you realize that installing every feature simply because you can is not a good idea. And you say it must be "stable", but you'd be hard pressed to find a piece of code that has never had a bugfix. More code is more opportunity for system stability bugs and security bugs.

Re:Simply put

[causality]

As long as it's stable and doesn't consume resources unduly, why wouldn't you want the option?

Because to a lot of people on /. (and everywhere else, to be sure) the way they do things is the One True Way, and anyone who disagrees with their way of doing things is clearly evil, insane, or a moron (possibly all three.) "My workflow is Good And Right; yours is Inferior And Must Be Destroyed. Users must not even have the option to follow your unclean way, lest they be tempted from the path of righteousness!" That kind of thing.

You might have meant that to be facetious (or maybe you didn't) but I have often noted the same. For most non-trivial things, there are matters of taste, preference, or opinion about which extremely informed experts can legitimately disagree. Yet there is often a great desire to make a pissing contest of these things. Some people have a very strong need to be right, and it's not good enough for them that they are "right"; someone else must also be "wrong". I believe this is rooted in some kind of personal insecurity. That is, they derive their personal security from trying to dominate or feel superior to others, rather than viewing personal security as something that comes from within. You really nailed it, however: the tendency is marked by an inability to disagree with someone on a matter of taste/preference/opinion without also portraying that person as stupid.

I suppose that behavior has some "success", if you want to call it that, among people who are either insecure themselves (and thus intimidated by the idea that someone might think they are stupid) or unfamiliar with argumentation. When used on such people, it must achieve the desired result of a sense of superiority at least some of the time, or else it would not be so commonly practiced. However, for anyone not fitting that description, such techniques immediately and unmistakably betray the weakness of the position of anyone who uses them. They can even make a position weak that otherwise would be factually or technically correct. Usually, they also reveal various personal shortcomings. This makes the use of such techniques a sure way to humiliate oneself when dealing with anyone who can see through them.

Re:Simply put

[unix1]

You could further subdivide them by having several groups of them within one virtual desktop. You wouldn't need to leave the desktop to access each group. I know I will be using it.

Re:Simply put

[Thinboy00]

It certainly isn't limited to /.; just look at the editor wars!

Re:Simply put

[Brian Gordon]

For the same reason that we have multiple windows per desktop instead of putting every window on its own desktop. Looking at things side-to-side and dragging and dropping are very important, and you can't do that with separate desktops. Fluxbox has had tabbed windows for eons, try that.

Re:Simply put

[SoonerSkeene]

I agree with everything you say, and I would like the behavior from a task-focused grouping approachin, but when working, I'd rather have these types of windows side-by-side (even using multiple monitors), not stacked on top of each other (z-order, that is) that causes me to have to switch. One way to impliment it in a way I'd like, would be to let me drag-and-tab windows together on an ad hoc basis: just as Google Chrome (browser, not the OS) does. If this was possible today with any app, I think it'd be a must-have.

Re:Simply put

[LordVader717]

I think the problem is that the Windows task bar just isn't very good. What made tabbed browsing so convenient was that you could load a web page with one click of the mouse while the last one was still open. Doing the same thing with new windows in the task bar is clumsy

Re:Simply put

[Shin-LaC]

Yes, that's the big downside of the tabbed window approach. Still, it's an experiment in the right direction, and it could be useful in many cases. I'd like to play with it.

Re:Simply put

[Shin-LaC]

I use Spaces too, but I can't say I love it. They just let me have a fixed number of nameless screens, and I have to keep track of what's on what screen, and enforce that separation whenever I open new things. And they don't integrate with the Dock at all.

Tabbed windows let you have a dynamically changing number of groups, labeled with the title of the frontmost windows in each (which should let you know the group's theme, although being able to name them explicitly might be even better), and I haven't seen how they integrate with the KDE taskbar, but they could do some interesting things in that area.

Re:Simply put

[Runaway1956]

"I use 'spaces' on the mac or multiple desktops on linux (windows has nothing useful) for the same thing now."

Ditto the above. I can't see how tabbed windows will improve my computing experience one whit. If anything, it's just one new gimmick that I have to learn to use the computer. Dammit, I like things the way I have them now, don't go changing things around, yet again.

Re:Simply put

[Runaway1956]

"What workspaces need though is the ability to create workspaces when you need them and destroy them when they're unneeded as opposed to having a fixed number of them,"

I'm using a Gnome desktop on Ubuntu Intrepid. I right click the desktop icon at the bottom right of the desktop, and I get a GUI menu in which I can do exactly that. It takes all of about 5 seconds.

As for identifying them, each desktop icon has an icon in it, identifying which application is maximized in it. I don't know if that meets your requirements, or if not, why not. You didn't mention what distro you use, or what desktop environment.

Re:Simply put

[amRadioHed]

Well sure, but what software is installing every feature possible just because they can? Typically features get installed because someone thinks they are useful. Now my WM uses a smaller percentage of my disk space than it did 5 years ago because disk space is so cheap. I think a small amount of disk space times a few hundred would go mostly unnoticed on today's hard disks. Of course there will be some users who can't spare that extra few megs, but KDE is probably not the best WM for them.

Memory is a somewhat more valuable resource, but if you aren't using the feature then it's code probably isn't going to spend much time in your resident memory so still it's not a big problem.

Re:Simply put

[Nested]

I use three desktops and bind Spaces to F1 and then Expose Show All Windows to F2. So a quick hit of F1 then F2 shows a complete overview of everything I'm working on. Love for the OS X.

Re:Simply put

[KibibyteBrain]

But Workspaces have been around for years and years and have never caught on. This model might offer greater usability. Also, it reduces two use modes to one, as people already use tabbed applications. It's worth experimenting with, at least.

Re:Simply put

[Anonymous Coward]

Another good example for similar behaviour is the Bikeshed: http://bikeshed.com/

Re:Simply put

[Rasperin]

I would like to make DMCA take down notice of this post for infringing the /. trademark on One True Way. If you don't cease and desist lots of angry /. nerds will debate the values of Copyrights and Trademarks till you are driven to insanity.

Re:Simply put

[jareth]

Wait, so you are talking adding something so that I need to think about how I want to organize the applications I have open? How would that be improving my productivity? Things improve my productivity if they reduce or eliminate the amount of thought or effort I have to put into a task. I'm not sure I see how this would do that any better than the Winblows Taskbar.

Re:Simply put

[Dude McDude]

If you go and double-check your collection you'll find that it's Jo and Nella

Re:Simply put

[ddegirmenci]

Rather the sementic web, maybe?

Re:Simply put

[DavidTC]

I always thought what they should do is just double-layer the task bar.

The bottom is groups, and ungrouped windows. But above it is another bar where you can drag windows and make a group. Perhaps you'd have to click a + and name it or something.

I mean, I just essentially described tabs, but at the bottom of the screen, not the top, where tabs usually are assumed to be. Instead, right next to the tab groups.

You might even want to let people put them under the existing bar, or flip the paradigm around and have a new group bar above the current bar. Because hitting the bottom of screen is easier than hitting a point that isn't the bottom. This would make it easier to switch between things in the current group, at the expense of changing between groups slower.

Re:Simply put

[BrokenHalo]

But Workspaces have been around for years and years and have never caught on.

On Windows, that might be because not many people went to any trouble to publicise or install them. Most Linux or *nix desktops have had workspaces by default for so long, they've become an integral and normal part of the way people work, and for most people they are now indispensible.

Re:Simply put

[Interoperable]

If it's turned off I would hope it has no memory footprint. What percentage of a TB drive will it consume? Stability is relative but it's probably more stable than wobbly-windows.

Your concerns are legitimate for a six year old laptop but most users are running Windows Vista/7 capable behemoths and would like to see some flexibility. There are many choices of desktop that do try to trim out anything that is not absolutely necessary but KDE isn't one of them. Nor should it be.

(I mean seriously, wobbly-windows and the desktop cube ship with a default KDE install and you're concerned about the possible performance impact of tabbed window managing?)

Re:Simply put

[Dr. Spork]

What? I always do this with Firefox. I have it set to open new windows instead of new tabs, and my window manager is what sorts out the "tabbing" - that's what it's for. Also, when I middle-click a link it opens a new window. I have absolutely no interest in Firefox or any other application taking over this window management task, and to me, that's exactly what the tab bar does. Luckily, it's easy to disable all tab use in Firefox.

Re:Simply put

[rantingkitten]

My problem is when my way of doing things is destroyed for no good reason. The Firefox "Awesomebar" is a decent example. Some people seem to like it and they should be able to use it. I, however, LOATHE that thing, but there is no way to just go back to the old (sane) behavior, even with various plugins and config trickery.

Re:Simply put

[mrbcs]

Bullshit. It's simply a matter of preference. I don't need 15 windows open at once. I have high speed and I can only read one page at a time. I personally think tabs are retarded and disable them immediately.

Same goes for "desktops". I might have four or five programs open to work on a website. I can see each program in the task bar. I don't need to try and keep track of four separate "desktops" I do one thing at a time.

Re:Simply put

[Eskarel]

Problem is, what you're talking about(grouping windows by task), and what they've done (allowing multiple windows to be tabbed within one main window) are two different things. Your idea is good, their idea is bad.

While you could emulate what you were talking about using this new technology, at least for certain tasks, by setting up a set of windows and putting a tab in each of them for each task, this would only work if you had multiple tasks with similar numbers of applications and windows.

The basic problem with this is that people want to be able to see more than one application at once, not hide more windows.

Re:Simply put

[zippthorne]

I think it's less cynical than that. Standardization means that you can count on a feature being present on a coworker's or friend's machine, and very likely also on your next machine. It means you're not tied down to the particular arcane setup that works just right for you and no one else.

I know I'm loathe to perform a customization on my own machines (and I carefully document any nonstandard settings so I can reproduce them in the event of a re-install or upgrade), precisely because I don't want to be tied to a specific machine or software version for anything. I still do a few, because of certain annoyances, but I try to keep it to a minimum so that computers remain a commodity for me.

But that kind of thinking does tend to lead to feature advocacy: if a feature doesn't get used, then it might disappear from future versions, or simply not be present in competitors software that has other features you want, so to protect features that work for you, there is some pressure to convince enough others that they really are the "right way to do things."

And a tongue in cheek critique of the sibling post, my way really is the right way. The one true way. Every other way is wrong. And that way can be summed up as follows: Never become dependent on any feature that is present in only one tool. Ok, I don't know if it's really the one true way, but it's a pretty useful bumper-sticker (or coffee mug...) nonetheless.

Re:Simply put

[digitalchinky]

One word big fella: Exposé - you don't need to keep track of anything.

Re:Simply put

[Toonol]

I clicked 'reply' just to add a ME TOO about the "awesomebar", but I'll get modded down if that's all I say.

So I'll continue. That sort of functionality should always have been optional... preferably, an add-on; if not, at least allow it to be switched back to the older, more rational, behavior. Taking away a choice is nuts, and Mozilla has made enough weird decisions like that lately that I'm thinking of jumping ship to another browser. It would have been unthinkably a year or two ago.

As long as 'tabbed windows' defaults to a behavior where a single tabbed window is just a normal window, handling the same way, I'm all for it; but if the feature in any way hurts people who don't WANT the feature, then it's a bad feature.

Re:Simply put

[geekprime]

Yes.

Re:Simply put

[mwvdlee]

Are you able to open/close an entire workspace in one go, while retaining the state and content?

Like most people, I often have multiple windows/applications opened while working on a single project and those are usually the same for that project. Start another project and I have to close all of them and open up a set of different applications and windows (possibly even the same applications but with different documents opened).

It'd be great if I didn't have to do all that every time I change the project I want to work on.

Re:Simply put

[EsbenMoseHansen]

What workspaces need though is the ability to create workspaces when you need them and destroy them when they're unneeded as opposed to having a fixed number of them, and possibly more refined or enhanced ways of identifying those spaces at a glance (without any further input needed).

You want activities is KDE, I think. They are a bit hidden, and not fully developed, but they offer the above.

Re:Simply put

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not about performance or stability. It's about security surface area and best practices. So long for dudes in the basement with leenoox being more sensible to security. As soon as it will be the year of the linux desktop, security issues will be in all places. eeeek =:-|

Re:Simply put

[st1d]

The point is, it's an option, and folks like yourself never have to use it. Besides, at least the KDE folks are doing more interesting things than changing color schemes and moving menu items around every release... :)

As for browser tabs, I find them pretty useful. Yes, I'm only doing a single thing at a given moment, but they allow me to scan a news site like Slashdot, clicking to open interesting articles in new tabs, then peruse through them at my leisure, without "losing my place" when the phone rings or there's another interruption.

The real benefit to apptabs will be the ability to open several programs as one, which will be tremendously useful to programmers, multimedia folks, and others who generally have a mess of programs open to do a single job, but switch projects repeatedly throughout the day, especially contractors, who need to keep things straight while they're working for, and interacting with, multiple clients.

One desktop icon opening everything I need for a project without having to script a custom startup icon or tweak those scripts as the project progresses? I like that! :)

Re:Simply put

[KrimZon]

At the moment I'm using Gnome on Ubuntu 9.04, and I make use of workspaces quite a lot. I like that implementation most out of everything I've tried so far. I tried making a script to automatically create and remove workspaces but it seemed a bit clunky (which I think was mostly down to my implementation - it polled the output of 'wmctrl -l'), so now I just have several by default.

Re:Simply put

[master_p]

The Windows taskbar, in spite of its name, doesn't understand human tasks at all: instead, it would group all browsers together, all editors together, all terminals together, and so on.

You can always move the task bar icons together using the mouse (pre-Vista, you can do it with TaskBar Shuffle).

Re:Simply put

[Tim C]

I think in most cases it's probably due to some deep-rooted insecurity; however you can't ignore the fact that some people are just dicks and enjoy arguing for the sake of it and pissing people off.

Re:Simply put

[pooh666]

gee MDI with different click thingies. We have come so far.

Re:Simply put

[yahwotqa]

Above post is a nice symptom of brokenness of /. moderation system. The system is meant to censor article content, so that I can browse at +1 without seeing idiotic stuff. Your request suggests the system is here to distribute karma (which is merely a side effect).

Re:Simply put

[bytesex]

I have to concur; spaces (at least in leopard) is quite poor: not only are they limited in number and anonymous; system-dialogs pop up 'somewhere', apps (like X windows apps) can only be had in one space unless you jump through hoops to get them onto others, key-toggling between apps isn't done on a space-by-space basis, if you command-squiggly between X-windows windows, then your space doesn't know that (so when you key toggle between spaces you end up on the one you just left, for example), the focused window of a space (for example of the finder window) is unpredictable when toggling, some apps jump to space when you toggle between them, some don't, etc, etc, etc.

Re:Simply put

[tehcyder]

Ditto the above. I can't see how tabbed windows will improve my computing experience one whit. If anything, it's just one new gimmick that I have to learn to use the computer. Dammit, I like things the way I have them now, don't go changing things around, yet again.

You forgot to say "now get off my lawn" at the end there.

Re:Simply put

[Anonymous Coward]

For most non-trivial things, there are matters of taste, preference, or opinion about which extremely informed experts can legitimately disagree. Yet there is often a great desire to make a pissing contest of these things.

Possibly affected by the idea that everything needs to look the same so users won't get confused so we can have the year of the linux desktop.

I've never got it. Complaints about what side the OK button should go? Why can't people read the button before clicking on it, which would solve the problem, but no, if it's not all the same, it's not usable apparently. Hence the need for the one true way.

Re:Simply put

[Anonymous Coward]

taskbar+multiple desktops, problem solved.

Re:Simply put

[Livius]

Wow. I suddenly understand genocidal dictators and/or ideologies much better.

Re:Simply put

[Burnhard]

I've been sat here at work, with my taskbar-based ALT_TABBED operating system wondering what the fuss is all about? Windows 7 task bar is pretty good. Tabbed apps would use up a little more of my screen real-estate than an auto-hidden taskbar does, so no, I don't think this feature is particularly grand. It works nicely in a browser though.

Re:Simply put

[pwfffff]

So when you see an interesting link in an article you're reading, what do you do? Click it and lose your place in the article? Keep reading and find three or four other interesting links on your way to the bottom, where you're then forced to remember the location of all the links (not to mention the fact that you wanted to click them)?

Why do you hate change so much?

Re:Simply put

[WillDraven]

This is pretty much what I was going to say. I would love it if I could close a workspace and save all its state (to DISK, not all of us are made of RAM -grumble-) and then open it later. Sort of like saving the state on a VM, except I don't need a whole damned OS for each project I'm working on.

Re:Simply put

[mrbcs]

Right click - open in new window. I've been doing this since Netscape 3.

Everybody hates change... it's part of our nature. I went to a conference once. The speaker said, "for the good of the seminar, I need all of your to change seats" Guess how many of 30 people changed? None.

Re:Simply put

[LordVader717]

That ends up basically the same except:

- you need 2 clicks instead of one
- you're missing out on useful shortcuts
- you can't move tabs around
- you don't have favicons

Re:Simply put

[dmbasso]

I have ten workspaces, configured to the shortcuts ctrl+KP_n. Best efficiency ever. I was somehow inspired by Blender3D's control of viewports.

Re:Simply put

[rovolo]

Letting the number of workspaces dynamically expand and contract would probably lead me to frustration. Currently I have 2 desktops that are static (web browsing and music) and 2 that are dynamic (for any two projects I'm working on at the moment). Whenever I want to look something up or change my music I know which space they're in, kind of like muscle memory. To use the desktop metaphor, I have a spacial picture of where things should go (i.e. soda is always in the same place.) Adding additional workspaces is just enough work that it isn't easy enough to accidentally do, and not hard enough to be adverse to doing. Frankly, I'm never working on more than two things at one time though. However, what would probably be the best would be the ability to save workspaces and then load them up again, much like OmniWeb and Opera allow you to do with browsing sessions.

Re:Simply put

[w0mprat]

Short version: Tabs are a taskbar at the top of the screen. Which IMHO is the superior place to place a application switcher/launcher, I reason thus:

All applications have their menu, toolbars and window buttons at the top of the windows, thats where you work to control the application, and above that the application window controls, and when you want to go a level above that to switch windows: Why is it then that application windows are switched by the bottom of the screen, almost universally? It's a almost unesscessary break in flow. Chromium is a good example of the tab paradigm working neatly.

But I don't think this is Next Big Thing (tm)...

Re:Simply put

[biryokumaru]

If only we could unlock the taskbar and move it to the top of the screen...

Re:Simply put

[KrimZon]

I did the scripts because I found that I always had one workspace empty - a blank desktop - so I made the script update things automatically so that there was always one empty desktop. However as you suspect I had trouble because previously I relied on the spatial layout of the workspaces. I used Ctrl-Alt-Left/Right to move through them in a horizontal row (because then they're not too small on a small panel).

I think dynamic workspace creation could work provided they remember their position or order. If there was a means of telling what task a workspace was then they could be sorted primarily by task type, and you'd choose the order of task-types somewhere. Ultimately a task type would begin from a set of program launchers and shortcuts to documents and folders.

Re:Simply put

[he-sk]

Full ack!

The problem with the application metaphor is that it allows the developer to force his workflow onto the user instead of allowing the user to choose a workflow that fits his needs.

Making the desktop task-centric instead of application- or document-centric is such an obvious usability improvement that I can't understand why it hasn't been done already.

Re:Simply put

[he-sk]

Spaces buys you nothing when many of your tasks use the same apps. I frequently use Eclipse, a shell, a browser and a MacVim window for many of my tasks. Sometimes I manually isolate windows onto one space per task, but it's cumbersome and doesn't really provide any task isolation.

Re:Simply put

[causality]

I think in most cases it's probably due to some deep-rooted insecurity; however you can't ignore the fact that some people are just dicks and enjoy arguing for the sake of it and pissing people off.

I agree, except I will add one thing. It's something I may not ever be able to prove but I definitely know it to be true. Some people do enjoy being dicks and do enjoy arguing for the hell of it just to piss people off. However, they were not born that way. If you want rigorous mathematical proof of that, I cannot give it to you. You'll have to look within for that and see for yourself that you were born a certain way, and all of your life a wide variety of negative influences wanted you to be another, inferior way. But whether you can personally accept that or not, I know deep down that this is the absolute truth.

Someone used this sort of bully behavior on them, probably at a young age. Being on the receiving end of it left them with an either-or choice: "I do this to others or I have this done to me." With this kind of thinking, it's dominate or be dominated, agitate others or be agitated by them. Growing up in a world like this robbed them of the realization that you can effectively deal with a bully and put him in his place without becoming like him. When people get broken like this, they come to think it's a normal, inevitable part of life. In fact it's none of those things; it's a systemic, societal lack of understanding.

So what?

[drijen]

Why is this a big deal?
Fluxbox (and probably something else before *box) had tab grouping windows long time ago.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

So has compiz. The only problem is that it doesn't remember which ones you've tabbed between sessions.

Re:So what?

[ultrabot]

Why is this a big deal?

Fluxbox (and probably something else before *box) had tab grouping windows long time ago.

It's a big deal because a mainstream WM is finally adding it; and people don't need to lose all the KDE goodness just to get this feature.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

The tiling window manager Ion also had tabs since ages:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_%28window_manager%29

Re:So what?

[mikael_j]

To my knowledge PWM had tabs before both Fluxbox and Ion (although I've heard scores of Fluxbox users who have claimed that Fluxbox was the first WM with tabs even though Fluxbox didn't even exist until some time after PWM was released (the other popular lightweight WM at the time was Blackbox and Fluxbox was, to many PWM users, basically just Blackbox with PWM's tabs)).

/Mikael

Re:So what?

[clang_jangle]

The tiling window manager Ion also had tabs since ages

Yes, I used ion3 for years before recently switching to xmonad. There's also dwm, awesome, scrotwm, and several others. A tiling wm is a no-brainer for anyone who wants to maximize productivity and screen real estate. I'm kind of surprised they're not de rigeur for coders and IT people in general. All the auto-everything features in KDE and Gnome are easy enough to script for anyone who wants them, without the DE bloat/sluggishness. Then again, some guy named Linus Torvalds uses a full-bloat DE so I guess one doesn't have to be a n00b to prefer them.

Re:So what?

[Jeremy Erwin]

Judging by the screenshot, Ion appeals to a specific type of eccentric.

Re:So what?

[clang_jangle]

Some of us just find constantly having to adjust the position and size of various app windows to be a tiresome distraction. Ion, xmonad, etc eliminate that factor and let us just focus on getting things done. Though I will admit to the possibility that maybe floating app windows just trigger my neuroses a lot more than nice, orderly tiled ones. :)

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

If by eccentric you mean having what appears to be plenty of information available for use as apposed to half the screen being that silly cat picture that is now your background, then I suppose you're correct.

Re:So what?

[sznupi]

It's not the same.

This news thing wants to be able to group different applications in tabs of one window.

Re:So what?

[Jeremy Erwin]

I was referring to the almost total absence of graphics.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

how much more mainstream than the default WM for Ubuntu do you need?

Re:So what?

[Jeremy Erwin]

There are indeed tasks that seem to require keeping ten xterms open, but wouldn't be a bit easier if they were labeled with more context than xterm(int)? Even pwd would help. (I debug some packages, and the package descriptions reside in one directory, the build trees are in yet another, and I usually invoke the build scripts from yet another xterm.)

(Here Expose shows its limitations-- you can't pick out a miniature xterm from sight alone.)

Re:So what?

[clang_jangle]

That's one reason I prefer Terminal(also called xfce4-terminal) over the barebones xterm.

Re:So what?

[Vyse of Arcadia]

Yeah, but you don't have to use KWin to use the rest of KDE. Once upon a time I used Windowmaker as a WM and KDE as a DE and it was pretty nice. I lost very little KDE goodness.

Re:So what?

[Rewind]

The newest Expose also puts a label below the window to resolve that issue.

Re:So what?

[Jeremy Erwin]

No. It doesn't. It displays two terminals, each labeled "Terminal --bash". The options are "Active Process name, tty name, shell command name, settings name, dimensions, and command key".

Now, maybe I'm missing something, but would nice if the title could be set with the flexibility of bash's PS1.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm...yes, that's pretty eccentric.

Especially when:

1. xterm(n) does *not* appear to be plenty of information.
2. This is astonishing information overload, bypassing all thoughts of design.

I mean, look at that. The main portion is wikipedia. Except with almost no formatting and no images, a fixed-width font -- basically minimizing ease-of-reading for the sake of information density. And it's not like he needs information density here -- he's not using this as a reference to some other window. Not unless he's holding a pen and paper and writing down answers to some school assignment he has, considering the subject matter.

The columns don't line up on the media player portion, and there's no space after truncated song names.

Re:So what?

[Blakey Rat]

Well, it was the "next big thing" in 1994 when BeOS added the feature, it's probably not the "next big thing" now. Now it's the "where were you guys when BeOS needed the income?"-big thing.

Re:So what?

[amRadioHed]

I don't typically resize my windows very much. They are the size I want them to be and I don't usually change it. I don't find the idea of the WM automatically changing Window sizes on me very appealing, which is why I've never really tried to use a tiling WM.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Compiz had tabbed windows before KWin, too, what's your point?

Re:So what?

[Rewind]

You can name the terms whatever you want and set them to keep that. I just threw this together in a sec.

works on mine by default even

Though at this point in time I am starting to think you and I are talking about different versions of Expose. ION option or something? Forgive me if I went offtopic there.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fluxbox had tabbed windows - no one knows about it
KDE gets tabbed windows - no one cares about it
Apple puts tabbed windows in OSX - tabbed windows are stupid
Microsoft puts tabbed windows in Windows - greatest idea ever

Re:So what?

[agrif]

I don't know about you, but I would call compiz a mainstream window manager nowadays. And yes, compiz has had this for a while.

Re:So what?

[Jeremy Erwin]

I know that. However, it would be more efficient if the "working directory" could be dynamically updated when I (or a script) used the "cd" command.

The titles of finder windows show the working directories, why not the titles of terminal windows?

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

agreed!!!!

Re:So what?

[bnjf]

http://www.modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/pwm.html

Re:So what?

[nemo]

yes.

As a very early adopter of PWM (cos I fell in love with tabbing at the window level), I can tell you that PWM was the first with tabs. (I have april2001 screenshots of PWM!)

PWM was abandoned as a development dead end (in favour of ION by the same author) before fluxbox forked off blackbox and added tabs. It was too blackbox like for my style, so I stayed with PWM.

PekWM I eventually switched to for improved tabbed goodness, and these days run GNOME. But I do miss windowmanager level tabs.

huzzah for development. :)

Re:So what?

[honkycat]

Yeah, but try explaining that to a non-technical user. Good luck getting past the definition of a window manager.... getting it into the default install is a crucial step to making it "real" in the sense that non-gurus actually use it.

Re:So what?

[LaissezFaire]

Hopefully it will drive a little more to quick keyboard shortcuts. I used ion3, and my favorite feature was going quickly from screen to screen with ALT+1, ALT+2, etc. The Opera browser uses similar quick-shortcuts with 1 to move left a tab, 2 to move right a tab. Fast.

Now, the documentation to set up ion3 was rough, but for a work computer I liked it a lot.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

xterm(n) does *not* appear to be plenty of information.

That's just xterm, there are certainly other terminal emulators which have dynamic labels in their titlebars. Of course not everyone needs that, some people just remember everything they need to remember.

This is astonishing information overload, bypassing all thoughts of design.

"Design" is a highly subjective concept, so your assertion fails.

I mean, look at that. The main portion is wikipedia. Except with almost no formatting and no images, a fixed-width font -- basically minimizing ease-of-reading for the sake of information density. And it's not like he needs information density here -- he's not using this as a reference to some other window. Not unless he's holding a pen and paper and writing down answers to some school assignment he has, considering the subject matter.

You're complaining about the config of the non-graphical browser, looks like probably links or elinks. Obviously, firefox or whatever will also run just fine in ion.

The columns don't line up on the media player portion, and there's no space after truncated song names.

Now you're complaining about moc, a console-based media player.

Conclusion: you are not knowledgeable enough to know the difference between a window manager and the unrelated apps one may run in it. This discussion is clearly over your head.

Lesson: a picture may be worth a thousand words, but it won't do as a substitute for hands-on experimentation or even proper reading.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

No news here. Prior to calling them 'tabbed windows' we used to call it a 'taskbar'.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't find the idea of the WM automatically changing Window sizes on me very appealing, which is why I've never really tried to use a tiling WM.

Apparently you don't really know what a tiling window manager does. It does not "automatically change window sizes", by default it makes all windows the same size. Most have a means to configure exceptions for apps like the gimp (i.e. apps that break all rules of logic and sanity by using several irregularly sized windows for a single instance, in violation of ICCCM standards).

Re:So what?

[Bert64]

Wasn't BeOS capable of this too?

Re:So what?

[quantum bit]

I know that. However, it would be more efficient if the "working directory" could be dynamically updated when I (or a script) used the "cd" command.

I don't use a Mac regularly, so I don't know if its terminal handles the right escape codes, I'd be shocked if it didn't. Plain stock xterm has been doing this pretty much forever.

The sequence is ^[]0;string^G
(where ^[ is Escape and ^G is the bell character)
You can use that in your PS1 variable to automatically update the title every time you get a prompt. Or, depending on your shell, you can get fancy with it.

Here's some magic from my .zshrc file:

function title() {
        a=${(V)1//\%/\%\%}
        a=$(print -Pn "%40<...<$a" | tr -d "\n")
        case $TERM in
        screen)
                print -Pn "\e]0;$a @ $2\a"
                print -Pn "\ek$a\e\\" ;;
        xterm*|rxvt)
                print -Pn "\e]0;$a @ $2\a" ;;
        esac
}

case $TERM in
        screen|xterm*|rxvt)
                function precmd() {
                        title "zsh" "%m(%55<...<%~)"
                }

                function preexec() {
                        title "$1" "%m(%35<...<%~)"
                } ;;
esac

A little complicated, but it keeps my xterm title set to "command @ hostname(dir)". The %55() is just zsh magic to abbreviate where necessary.

If I'm in a screen session, it also updates the name of the screen window ("tab") to the command.

Here's an excerpt from my .screenrc that keeps things rolling when I change active windows inside of screen:

termcapinfo xterm* 'hs:ts=\E]0;:fs=\007:ds=\E]0;\007'
defhstatus "screen ^E (^Et) | $USER@^EH"

Re:So what?

[K8Fan]

I don't believe it was through the entire OS but GoBe Productive, an office application, was built in that way. Shift from the word processor to the spreadsheet using tabs. It was ported to Windows and is still for sale.

Re:So what?

[Jeremy Erwin]

Thanks! I'll have to try it.

Re:So what?

[Requiem18th]

Not really arguing you but it reminds me when a blogger questioned Canonical's decision to purge the GIMP from the default install because it was confusing to the average Ubuntu user; his reply "Hello? I'm the average Ubuntu user!"

He is right, I have pushed for Ubuntu a lot, even handed out shiny free CDs from ship it and offering free support, I have has users drop Ubuntu for the flimsier reasons. One dropped it because pidgin doesn't support "winks", one because Open Office didn't run an VB/Excel based game.

So until Ubuntu has 110% windows compatibility I wouldn't bother catering to the less technical users.

Re:So what?

[TheLink]

I've proposed: "Direct Selection of "active" tasks with key combos"

http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/DesignersPlayground/KeyboardShortcuts

Which to me will work faster and be faster to set up.

With my proposal, you can arbitrarily foreground/raise any of the N windows you've mapped just by pressing say winkey+N, AND very importantly, you can change those mappings very quickly.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this a big deal?

Fluxbox (and probably something else before *box) had tab grouping windows long time ago.

It's a big deal because a mainstream WM is finally adding it; and people don't need to lose all the KDE goodness just to get this feature.

I thought loosing all the KDE/Gnome/Whatever "goodness" *was* a feature.

Re:So what?

[EsbenMoseHansen]

There are indeed tasks that seem to require keeping ten xterms open, but wouldn't be a bit easier if they were labeled with more context than xterm(int)? Even pwd would help. (I debug some packages, and the package descriptions reside in one directory, the build trees are in yet another, and I usually invoke the build scripts from yet another xterm.)

(Here Expose shows its limitations-- you can't pick out a miniature xterm from sight alone.)

You might want to check out KDE's konsole. From memory, it uses host, current directory and/or user to identify each tab, as well as the window title. Pretty need.

Re:So what?

[Cederic]

Back when I was mudding a lot, a WM that would auto-arrange three muds (in xterms), two to three command lines (in xterms) and Angband (in an xterm) would've been ideal.

These days I wouldn't want to tile though - especially if I'm programming.

The code needs as much screen space as possible. To the extent that frankly everything else can be hidden. If I'm using an IDE, then it has panes with useful information/abilities in them, that aid the programming, so they can stay, but they're still tiny relative to the code. That said, on something like my laptop, I don't need the code window to be 1920 pixels wide, so I can put other windows to the side. I do still want it 1200 pixels tall though (less the usual fluff of window borders, menu bars, scroll bars, etc - but I don't let those take up much screen real estate either).

Command lines, web browser, email clients.. all hidden in the background or on another monitor.

For non-programming uses, word processors work best for me at around half screen width. Web browsers do too - full screen and I'm looking left to right too often; I use a large screen fairly close, I have to explicitly look at different regions of the screen. However, something like Visio needs to be full screen - you can't draw diagrams in a small window.

So I still don't want to tile, I want different applications to have different window sizes.

Would tabbed applications work? On a netbook, where the small screen size effectively forces everything full-screen, probably. On a 1920x1200 screen, possibly. I could have my usual text editor and my word processor in one window, tabbed, my main and secondary command lines in another window, tabbed, my spreadsheets/drawing tools/presentation tools in another window (full screen), tabbed. I guess I'm saying I'd have to be able to group windows together by both the position and width on screen that I tend to use them.

Instinctively I'm against the idea, but I was also against tabbed web browsing until I tried it and now I'm completely hooked..

Re:So what?

[HateBreeder]

Forget about the non-gurus...
even gurus don't have the will to tinker about their settings for days on end just to get something trivial working.

We want to it to work already so that we could get around to doing our OWN work.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does someone have to explain this to a non-technical user? Does their entire audience have to be non-technical?

Try explaining the importance of wobbly windows to a technical user, and see how far you get.

Re:So what?

[awwaiid]

Either your sarcastic-meter is wrong, or I agree with you completely!

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the same.

This news thing wants to be able to group different applications in tabs of one window.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Tabworks" anyone?

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes!

I used to love Tabworks that came with my Compaq/Win 3.1.

There is a difference between a tabbed desktop and having multiple virtual desktops. I've tried the virt. desktop and don't like it.
A tabbed environment might be nice though.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

A linux guru will. If you won't, you're not a linux guru.

Re:So what?

[honkycat]

Good point... once upon a time I enjoyed installing and tweaking for its own sake. Now I have kids to play with, work to do, and a whole lot of more important things than trying to find the perfect window manager... Especially for something that *might* prove to be a useful interaction paradigm, I'm a lot less likely to play around with it than I used to be.

And to the AC who responded to you: you're not thinking about a guru, you're thinking about a guru who has no deadlines or responsibilities.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to use ion a while back, but it became painful when you wanted to watch a video or do something full screen without disrupting your layout.

There are now some hybrid window managers out there that let you switch back and forth, like xmonad: http://xmonad.wordpress.com/2009/12/06/bluetile-branch-merged-into-xmonad/
Haven't had a chance to try it yet

Yes

[Ark42]

Really, what's the point of having windows not Maximized. As far as I can tell, you'd be better off with the taskbar in windows being like tabs, and being able to drag tabs together to form split pane views for side-by-side work. I hate having to manually drag the edges of windows, and I hate when they are not fullscreen (or minimized). Yes I know about "Tile Windows Horizontally" but it just makes extra fluff for the borders of each window compared to a tabbed/paned view. Pretty much a big failure on OS X that their Maximize doesn't even always make a window full screen.

Re:Yes

[lukas84]

You need to get a bigger screen.

Re:Yes

[ZERO1ZERO]

The point of the windows is that you can drag stuff between them, you can't do this efficiently if they are maximised. And view two or more thing at once together. Manually dragging the edges of windows can suck, but in 'traditional' setups, you use the lower right corner (which is a big target) to adjust the size and the title bar (which is a big target) to adjust the position. Most Linux WMs also have ALT shortcut which makes large percentages of the windows 'hot' for adjustment.

Taking it a step further, (or back depending on POV) the original Mac WIMP implementation has a metphor of 'the desktop' and each window represents a _document_ or a physical _thing_. Desks are generally large enough to handle more than one bit of paper for example, and usually once document doesn't take up the whole desk.

Re:Yes

[Colonel Korn]

Really, what's the point of having windows not Maximized. As far as I can tell, you'd be better off with the taskbar in windows being like tabs, and being able to drag tabs together to form split pane views for side-by-side work. I hate having to manually drag the edges of windows, and I hate when they are not fullscreen (or minimized). Yes I know about "Tile Windows Horizontally" but it just makes extra fluff for the borders of each window compared to a tabbed/paned view. Pretty much a big failure on OS X that their Maximize doesn't even always make a window full screen.

It sounds like you just want Windows 7.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because you are too fucking stupid to be able to deal with more than one thing at a time shouldn't mean everyone else has to endure computers designed for the dumbest of the dumb.

So I guess maximized only, no alternative mode, with be coming soon to a future GNOME desktop.

Re:Yes

[pyster]

It's safe to assume you are not a power user. Afew terminal sessions, a ticketing system, some chat windows, some proprietary device software, misc documentation, a browser (with dozens of tabs)... It's nice to tab together windows into groups that compliment other groups so you have open the windows you need for a single task (say two terminal sessions, a dacs, and maybe a text area for your mop...

Re:Yes

[Shin-LaC]

You might as well ask what's the point of having windows. The concept never really caught on in Windows, in spite of its name, but it's very useful to be able to have many things on screen at once, especially when none of them requires a full screen anyway.

Take this web page: if you have a large widescreen monitor and you maximize the browser, you get a silly layout, with very long text lines that make reading harder. Many websites work around this problem by using a fixed width layout, but then you just end up with two large empty areas on the sides of the actual webpages; or, worse yet, they may be filled with animated advertisements. A better solution is to make the browser window only as wide as it needs to be, so you can use the leftover space to keep an eye on other things, such as your email or an IM conversation. If you have a large monitor, you can even open two web pages side by side.

Re:Yes

[mikael_j]

I've always regarded the popularity of the whole "all windows maximised all the time" way of using a computer as a relic from the days when those using MS Windows normally ran it at 640x480 or 800x600, meanwhile the UNIX and Mac users generally drove their monitors at much higher resolutions (1280x1024 @ 72Hz was a pretty common *nix setup in the days of 640x480 @ 60Hz with Windows) and thus became used to running their windows as windows as opposed to "walls" (yes, that's meant to be a bit of mockery).

/Mikael (Who has never been able to stand dealing with a setup where all apps are maximised, guess which camp I'm in)

Re:Yes

[Jeremy Erwin]

I take it that you don't have a 30 inch wide screen monitor.
A excessively wide page is hard to read.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Furthermore, you can click a taskbar button, ctrl-right-click another taskbar button and select for example the menuitem that displays the windows side-by-side. Very handy, if you want to compare two documents, or if you want to display SDK info on the left and your code on the right, and so on. You can show multiple code windows on screen. Or a graph and a database table. Or dragging files from A to B. Or keeping half-an-eye on something while doing something else. GP would start to miss non-maximised windows pretty quickly, I'd wager.
Back on topic, I switched to Chrome (actually, to a clone, but whatever) a while ago and even though it is in many ways the best browser I've ever had, I wish I could turn off the tabs. Almost nothing works right. I see why it is practical to have buttons for other browser windows on the largely unused titlebar of a maximised window, okay. But the browser windows don't appear on the taskbar, nor in the alt-tab order. On the whole, it was a lot more user friendly when I didn't have tabs. Of course, Chrome's good points make me stay, but I still wish I could turn off tabs. Which means that at least for me, the KDE functionality wouldn't be particularly useful. And, judging by the screenshot, it shares at least one flaw with Chrome: you can't use the "deep" top-right corner to close just one window, without closing all of the windows in a tab-group. A feature which may not be useful to everyone shouldn't get in the way when you don't use it.
B.t.w., site is unreachable, coral cache still works: http://digitizor.com.nyud.net/2009/12/07/is-tabbed-windows-going-to-be-the-next-big-thing/

Re:Yes

[Awptimus Prime]

I went to the trouble of logging in to say this and saw your post. I agree. Windows already allows a side-by-side window dragging that is very useful on a widescreen display and two documents.

The root of the window 'tabbing' issue is already addressed in Win7, too, but with a more visual versions of tabs on the new task bar. hover/click the icon and get a list of windows a particular application has spawned. You can make it look a little different, but the idea has already been done.

Honestly, I think it is time for KDE to do what they did long ago when they copied the Win95 interface. That made Linux feel better for noobs, thus a redesign with Aero in mind would do the same for a newer generation of noobs. I know, it's not fun for the fanbois, but it makes less 'leet' interface that would allow business users to have an easier time adapting.

 

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the point of windows is that you can show more than one thing on the screen at once. In the event that this is not immediately necessary, unmaximized windows are just a waste of space.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=11hxdgl&s=4&hid=2&tag=ubuntu+maximus

Thank you.

Re:Yes

[Ark42]

I think most people are missing what I said here. You don't give up the ability to have two windows side by side if you can't size windows arbitrarily. You would drag the tabs into different workspaces which would create a divider bar, letting you have as many things side by side, tiled, or whatever. You just give up the extra cruft like window frames and borders. Each app gets a tab, and multiple tabs can be visible at any given time.

Re:Yes

[Ark42]

No, only 22" widescreen, but you obviously missed the point about dragging the tabs to create panes, or workspaces, where by you still get to see 2, 3, or however many windows side by side or tiled in a grid. You just lose the cruft around the window frames and the ability to see 3 pixels of the desktop between your windows because you didn't drag them exactly to be side by side.

Re:Yes

[Jeremy Erwin]

I've found that many applications which purport to support many different windowing schemes only support one well.

Re:Yes

[DreadPiratePizz]

If you option click the green button on the window in OS X, it will make it fullscreen, much like your maximize feature in Windows.

Re:Yes

[Hatta]

Really, what's the point of having windows not Maximized

The human eye tracks text better when it's in small columns, not
wide rectangles. So anything that reflows text based on window
size (e.g. web browsers) need to be a reasonable width. (fixed
width web design is not a solution as that breaks small resolution
devices).

Also, it's common to be reading from one window, and writing into
another. Instead of switching back and forth, I can tile them.

Re:Yes

[MathiasRav]

Manually dragging the edges of windows can suck, but in 'traditional' setups, you use the lower right corner (which is a big target) to adjust the size and the title bar (which is a big target) to adjust the position. Most Linux WMs also have ALT shortcut which makes large percentages of the windows 'hot' for adjustment.

In my experience, corners and title bars are still generally small enough that hunting and pecking is required - I can never casually slide my cursor to the target and immediately begin resizing/moving - that only happens with alt+left mouse button (drag) or alt+middle mouse button (resize).

It's a shame Windows doesn't have this kind of functionality built-in. I don't know about Mac, but since my switch from Windows XP to Ubuntu, alt+clicking to move/resize, along with workspaces and Compiz' Grid plugin to move and resize windows to fit an imagined grid, has been the main efficiency booster for me.

I'm not saying every ordinary user should have this kind of configuring work forced on them, it's just a really good reason for *me* to make the switch.

(And of course, a proper command line and an OS with an extensive "built-in" software catalog (Debian's/Ubuntu's apt repositories) that's free and that doesn't suck have also been compelling reasons.)

Re:Yes

[Zhiroc]

Something I've always liked about the "old" X windows model that I dislike about Windows (and I think Mac as well), is the assumption that the application with the focus should be the one that is in front of all others. There are a lot of times when I'd like to type into one app, say a text editor, while viewing something else, like a browser loaded with a documentation page, where I want to see the whole browser while I type, even if that means just seeing a few lines of what I'm typing.

I know that GNOME allows a focus-follows-mouse mode, but it is partly incomplete as clicking in the window with the focus brings that window to the front. If anyone knows how to disable that, I'd appreciate it.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes i like having small windows like IMs or a terminal above maximized windows that i'm reading with window focus following mouse but not bringing the focused window to the top. That way i can see multiple windows and type/scroll in them too. And before someone asks, yes i find this more comfortable than a tiling wm.

Re:Yes

[ccady]

The point is that I often want to view something from one window and use that information in another unrelated window. Copy/paste of 25 different items, or mental manipulation of results on one screen as input to another. Tabs don't work for that scenario -- I need both windows on the screen(s) at the same time.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

(Score:-1, Stupid)
Maybe you need to get out of mom's basement. In the real world, we don't always own all the equipment we have to use. Not to mention laptops...

Re:Yes

[MathiasRav]

Compiz has a 'raise on click' config option which can be disabled. I'm not sure of the internal representation, but it is in General Options of ccsm. Be sure to set a keyboard shortcut to 'Raise window' - though if you don't, alt-tab or clicking the window list will do.

I'm not sure if a similar option is available in Metacity or whatever else you happen to be using, although it would seem likely.

If you do look into compiz or are using it, you might want to also look at disabling click to focus (making way for the focus-follows-mouse mode you mentioned) and the Opacify plugin (under Accessibility*), which will make windows in front of the window you're hovering over partly transparent. I use this to great effect.

* ...As if not being able to see through windows is a disability.

Re:Yes

[mdwh2]

At the moment, full-screen-only-tabs don't offer that functionality. Surely by the time you add the complexity of the UI to allow for all the possible split pane and multiple viewing of various tabs, you're going to be back at the current windowed situation anyway.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I use maximus, every and all windows are always maximized. Never had a problem with drag-dropping stuff.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Try maximising to full screen with a large enough screen and you'll see what a futile manoeuvre it is.

Re:Yes

[BlindSpot]

Back in the old (3.x) days of Windows it was much more common to have actual windows. Then MDI came along and limited you to moving docs within the space of the parent window, so the only thing was to maximize the Window if you wanted to compare docs. Then toolbar and menu bloat came along so if your window wasn't maximized you couldn't see half the commands. So now I think it's probably more habit than anything else.

Also I disagree with you. I find Slashdot and most other pages (as well as any app with lots of text like a word processor or IDE) much easier to read in a full window. More text on screen means it's easier to visually scan back to something if needed. Plus the problem with sizing your web browser is every page is designed for a different size. Even if a page is well-designed and doesn't assume a fixed width, there is still a certain width that each page needs to be to be reasonably readable, and that varies. Constantly resizing and repositioning a window is infuriating. True when it's maximized there is wasted space but at least the page will be readable.

Besides, damnit, I paid for dual wide-screen monitors and I'm not afraid to use them!

Re:Yes

[ZERO1ZERO]

PowerToys for Windows has this option which works mostly quite well, but there are some programs that don't respect it and will raise on focus, which can be a major problem if you are trying to reach a dialog in the middle of the screen and it keeps getting covered when you move the mouse towards it.

Re:Yes

[Qu4Z]

Fully agreed.
I always set up my KDE to act in this way (or at least I did on my old 3.5 installs. Haven't delved into 4 deeply enough yet to find that particular feature).

Slightly off-topic: Another thing that really bugs me is that under Windows, scrolling applies to the window with focus, and, even worse, the widget with focus. So I'll hover over a folder-view at the right, and scroll, and it'll scroll my text box. ;_;

Re:Yes

[Qu4Z]

The entire point of this tabbing interface is that you can group your windows/documents how you like. The new Win7 window grouping functionality is (although I admit I haven't used it extensively and may be wrong) really just a prettification of the old XP-style grouping. The point here is that you can group your windows by task. Honestly... grouping windows by application is pretty useless for separating multiple concurrent tasks, which is the issue being addressed here.

Re:Yes

[pizzach]

• Make biased comments based on window managers designs from lack of experience with others (check)
• Have you experience reflect the majority of people (check)
• Under estimate the power of "zoom to fit"

Maximize is a one size fits all tool, but it doesn't make it the best tool for the job. Zoom to fit will maximize as appropriate to content size anyway. Because of lack of "zoom to fit", most window managers are absolute CRAP for managing maximized windows.

Re:Yes

[Shin-LaC]

Typographers know that overlong lines make reading harder from over five centuries of experience printing books. User interface specialists confirm it. If you like 400-character lines, maybe you're special, or maybe you simply don't know any better.
I mean no offense, but your other remark suggests the latter: I have been browsing with a non-maximized window for years, and I can assure you that there is no "constant resizing and repositioning". You can just keep your windows at slightly over 1000 pixels wide, and it works fine for all websites.
When you do decide to adjust things a bit (perhaps to make more room for keeping another another window visible), dragging the corner of the window (I use a Mac) is no more work than clicking on a tab or on a button in the taskbar, actions you do thousands of times a day without complaining. You're just adding maybe five clicks a day to those thousands.

OTOH, you make some good points about the history of Windows.

Re:Yes

[pizzach]

I would mod you up if I had mod points. The concept is just complicated enough in small design details for Windows to not usually understand. The old Windows spacial design was absolutely HORRIBLE for Windows Explorer. Outside of the old Mac OS's I have never seen a good implementation of it in my opinion.

Re:Yes

[Shin-LaC]

Oh, you mean tiled, non-overlapping windows, like on Windows 1.0? We've been there, and it sucks in practice.

Re:Yes

[Jesus_666]

Even worse: Windows doesn't allow much interaction with Windows that don't currently have the focus. On OS X I often scroll in a windows that doesn't have focus (such as scrolling a manual page in my browser while XCode is in the foreground); Windows assumes that just because I didn't click into the browser window I can't possibly want to scroll it. Well, or you have to enable scrolling without focus and I haven't managed to locate the setting.

Granted, though, not every OS X app supports scrolling without focus. Then again, Thunderbird is the only one I know that doesn't.

Re:Yes

[WgT2]

I really like your 'drag tabs together to form split pane views' idea - it sounds like a new feature of Windows 7 - at least from one of the commercials currently out for it. (I personally can barely stand Windows.).

X11, which I guess your are not using, helps with sizing up windows when you need to see both at the same time with the ability to middle-click on the maximize button to only vertically maximize the window and to right-click on it to horizontally maximize.

Re:Yes

[commodoresloat]

the original Mac WIMP implementation

a.k.a. the "WIMPlementation"

Re:Yes

[noidentity]

Pretty much a big failure on OS X that their Maximize doesn't even always make a window full screen.

It's not supposed to fill the screen; it's merely supposed to expand the window so that all the content is visible, if possible.

Re:Yes

[Provocateur]

Yo dawg I heard you wanted to disable GNOME...

But seriously now, there might be a 'Clicking on a window always raises it' paired with 'Switching focus raises window' but I make sure to UNcheck the first one. If e16 and e17 have that (and e16 used to come with GNOME) then GNOME probably has that somewhere. Then its just a matter of combining those focus options to suit the way you work. Gosh I really hope they've retained that, what if that was the last straw that caused Linus to switch to KDE...j/k

Re:Yes

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

Mac gets this right too. I particularly how when I drag something onto an app on the Dock, I get an exposé view with all of the documents for that application. I used to think the drag/drop was unwieldy when I primarily used Windows and Linux. Then when I switched to Mac, I've come to realize that metaphor isn't flawed, only the implementation.

Re:Yes

[Blakey Rat]

Pretty much a big failure on OS X that their Maximize doesn't even always make a window full screen.

OS X doesn't have Maximize. It has Zoom. It's only had Zoom since version 1.0 in 1984.

Apple's never implemented Maximize, and they've never pretended, even for a second, that Zoom is the same thing as Maximize. So the failure is you, I'm afraid.

Re:Yes

[amRadioHed]

What's the point of having all windows maximized? Half the time you just have a bunch of white space. If I'm editing a text file with <120 columns of text, do I really need a 600 column wide window for it?

Re:Yes

[icebraining]

Isn't that what workspaces are for? In some WMs you can even add more dynamically with a key combo.

Re:Yes

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

You need to get a bigger screen.

The above comment was posted in demonstration of the Prime Rule of Requirements Deflection: tell the user that they want something other than what they ask for.

Re:Yes

[Stratoukos]

I just thought you made my day with this tip, but I tried it in several application and it didn't work. Did you mean to write something else?

Re:Yes

[FlyingBishop]

There are a lot of reasons to have windows not maximized. Even with a tiling window manager, there are always situations where you want to have windows overlapping so you can see one bit of dynamically updating stuff in one window, and be working on stuff in another window, and maybe have a third open.

Windows should start maximized by default, but there are a variety of good use cases.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

What if the grandparent poster needs to do a lot of work on a portable laptop?

Companies like Apple and Asus are not selling netbooks and small laptops because people who buy them want to look cool and smug. Well, not only because of that anyway.

Re:Yes

[grouchomarxist]

Really? That doesn't work for Safari (on Mac OS X).

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

And modern typographers know that you don't measure text in pixels but in points or other physical units ;-)

Re:Yes

[Velex]

split pane views for side-by-side work

Bah. It's called Ion. I used it for about a year once. It's a very good WM.

Now get off my lawn. All of you. Git.

Re:Yes

[PitaBred]

I personally use an extension to put the tabs at the side of the browser instead of up top. Makes much better use of widescreen monitor space, gives you more vertical reading room and uses that otherwise useless space for something.

Re:Yes

[pizzach]

Mac OS X has exceptions for specific apps. They generally tend to try to make default behavior for the button make the most sense on a per-application basis. http://www.tuaw.com/2009/09/18/tuaw-tip-option-clicking-the-green-button/

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Durrr... Apple is King... Well, maybe they should have maximize. Cause I like it, and so do others... and it's one of the things I hate most about my Mac Book Pro. Some windows will take the full width and height of the screen when hitting the zoom button, and others will not.

And what's up with no fullscreen in Firefox on OS X. HIG is retarded, when it gets in the way of getting things done...

Or, yet another example... I can't tab through the large part of forms in OS X on Firefox... because, well I guess Apple says I can't... So it must be the right way! durrr....

Please, can we just -sometimes- think for ourselves here? And what's up with Safari ditching HIG? It's because they had to, or Safari would be less used than it already is.

Re:Yes

[theurge14]

One window maximized = MS-DOS.

OS X only maximizes the window to accommodate the content, nothing more. Gray space covering the desktop is not very useful.

Re:Yes

[karmatic]

Really, what's the point of having windows not Maximized.

Often, there is a limit to how much useful information a given window can convey.

Consider web pages - they tend to have one of two approaches: fixed width, in which you end up with large amounts of blank space, or variable width, in which case a large screen makes most paragraphs 1-3 lines.

I have Steam running. It has two windows running. One is a game list, with columns. Game name, status, update, score, developer. No matter how big the window is, it will not convey any more information. Bigger is not better. The other window is the "update news" page. It's a fixed width web page. I can make it as big as I want, but I just get a bigger border.

I'm running Skype, IRC, and Firefox. In fact, I deliberately shrunk the FF window because I hate it when /. comments are all one line tall.

The "ideal size" for a window very much depends on what is in it. If I am not playing a game, or doing high-resolution graphics manipulation, I do not want my windows maximized. In fact, I find Windows 7's habit of automatically trying to Fullscreen any window I put near the top of the screen highly annoying. Unless you disable it, it makes efficient use of screen real estate hard.

Re:Yes

[moosesocks]

Same reason why newspapers and magazines print in columns. Unfortunately, proper columns still aren't a part of the CSS specification, meaning that it'll be several years before we see them in the wild on the web.

A draft specification has languished within the w3c for 8 or so years. Firefox and webkit both offer their own proprietary implementations that should be vaguely compatible with the draft specification.

IE doesn't offer support for anything of this sort. (In fact, Microsoft's own documentation offers a surprisingly handy reference to the many bits of CSS that IE chooses to ignore)

Re:Yes

[kimvette]

. . . and going back to the roots of crappy GUI design, the gnu folks are taking Gimp's interface and dumbing it down by giving it an MDI window - which is taking not just a single step backward, but gigantic leaps backward.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone else posted in this thread that CMD+"Zoom" maximises. I don't use a Mac so I can't confirm, but HTH.

Re:Yes

[hitmark]

in my experience, drag and drop is badly hit or miss.

i much prefer key combos for cut/copy and paste...

Re:Yes

[hitmark]

the problem there is that if one is used to photoshop on windows, one expect MDI, but if one come from mac, one expect the tradition gimp behavior. Cant please everyone, especially when one have a gnome hig that proclaims interfaces as "bad, m'kay"...

Re:Yes

[Hadlock]

regarding your first paragraph, i wholly agree. I've been playing around with ubuntu netbook remix (unr) which essentially has tabbed windows that are always maximized. copying files using the GUI has been a complete pain in the ass but fortunately you can force non-maximized for this purpose. rebuilding my alsa drivers so that my hp mini would have a functional mic (For skype) requires a lot of copying and pasting between firefox and the terminal, which is easier when both windows aren't maximized.
 
maximized windows are great for resolutions 1280 and lower, but really most apps don't need to be larger than 8.5" wide (standard letter/a4 size). Maybe a better idea would be to split the display up virtually, create a center display, 8.5-12" wide, with two smaller virtual windows on either side, so you have three sets of tabs.
 
Either way, running 100% maximized 100$% of the time is somewhat inconvenient. There's a lot of work to be done in the netbook gui field, and I doubt a lot of that will be applicable for the more or less standard 22" 1680x1050 displays being deployed these days.

Re:Yes

[StuartHankins]

Fullscreen in FireFox on OSX (at least on 10.4) is in the "view" menu. It's the next-to-last entry (at least for me).

Re:Yes

[rantingkitten]

What's the point of having them maximised? In most applications that just produces tons of useless dead space. Right now, my browser covers about half of the total screen real-estate, but behind it I can see IRC, IM windows, and watch something compile in another terminal. If anything happens in any of those windows I'll know about it immediately.

I don't need to view any of these things side-by-side and to do so would just be absurd, since I don't need them in my face all the time. Instead I can just glance around and see if anything's happening.

Why would I want IRC or Pidgin windows maximised? Why would I want a terminal running a music player maximised? Why would I want a word processor maximised -- so I can have extra large grey dead areas around the area where I'm typing?

I actually cannot think of any situation where maximising a window makes any sense.

Re:Yes

[grouchomarxist]

In this case the current Safari implementation isn't the right one. When you maximize it should fit the width of the current monitor, but it is currently only fitting the height.

Also, this option click thing is not very useful. I use a number of command (option etc.) key combos, but I didn't know about this one. It doesn't make sense to hide these features, they should be available to users generally through a menu item. It is entirely possible that the Safari team wasn't aware of it either, which would explain the current implementation.

Re:Yes

[marsu_k]

Yes, this also annoys me very much, as I have to use Windows at work; strangely though, this seems to be application specific. For example, Notepad++ doesn't "steal" mouse wheel events but will pass them to the window which has the mouse cursor, while still retaining keyboard focus. The person who tells how to make this the default behavior in every app wins two internets.

Re:Yes

[Carewolf]

I guess using KDE would be too easy?

Open "Window Behavior" and disable "Click raises active window".

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course so was the original post: "what's the point of having windows not Maximized...".

I use a small Thinkpad with a small-ish external screen so everything is maximized, but I work with designers who have insane amounts of screen area: Maximizing a text document on those monster screens would be stupid.

Re:Yes

[randomsearch]

> Really, what's the point of having windows not Maximized

If you have a nice large monitor, there are lots of uses for non-maximised windows. For example, editing the source of a Latex document whilst displaying the output PDF at the same time.

I didn't have a large monitor until earlier this year - and when I got it, I suddenly realised how important window management features like tiling can be, and how few features GNOME has that I need to organise them properly.

RS

Re:Yes

[worf_mo]

If you want to enable this behaviour in Gnome, launch gconf-editor, navigate to /apps/metacity/general and disable the setting "raise on click". I also prefer this.

Re:Yes

[koiransuklaa]

Exactly. This is just re-inventing workspaces as far as I can see. I think what we're seeing is a failure to make workspaces easily understandable and usable to the "average user". I don't see adding an additional layer of complexity helping much: Now I can have:

Workspace 1

• Window 1
  • Application 1
    • Application tab 1

I'm not adding the other workspaces/windows/applications/tabs, I think that already shows how complex this is -- three levels of organization for open documents?

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Use KatMouse: http://ehiti.de/katmouse/

This is functionality that should be in Windows right from the start... not as an "optional" add-on that must be found online in the form of a program to be used... I can no longer use Windows without it. You would think that after all these years, and with all the useful functionality they've been adding to Win7 (Aero Snap, Shake, Peak, etc.), that this *would* be one of their improvements... but apparently not, hell, it's not even an option. Just amazing, all the market share they have, you'd think *someone* who has experience with other, "competing" systems would have brought some tried and true window manager techniques to their attention.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I know that GNOME allows a focus-follows-mouse mode, but it is partly incomplete as clicking in the window with the focus brings that window to the front.

Are you talking raise-on-left-click or raise-on-middle-click? I can understand the former, but the latter does not happen with some of the other WMs (e.g., on the xfce4 that I use now, and I believe icewm that I've used previously).

Re:Yes

[Lord Pillage]

I was playing around with my compiz settings the other days and I notice that something I changed manage to enable this effect. The focused window was not brought to the front unless you clicked on the title bar. I think after a restart it was gone though, which is a shame because I was thinking the exact same thing as you. Either way, if it can happen through some glitch / weird setting combination, it shouldn't be that hard to actually implement.

Re:Yes

[clickety6]

Really, what's the point of having windows not Maximized.

Some of us can multi-task...

Re:Yes

[gbutler69]

Typographers know that overlong lines make reading harder from over five centuries of experience printing books.

This is a myth and has been proven false in multiple studies.It is absolute bunk. Please stop spreading this stupid rumor.

Re:Yes

[marsu_k]

Thank you so much sir! You win two, no three, internets!

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Metacity: Left click on title bar, "Always on Top" checkbox.

Re:Yes

[KnownIssues]

That's why Microsoft added the Gadget Bar. To fill up space that could not be taken up sufficiently by the application. It's a great way to make those annoyingly wide monitors feel more like your good ol' friendly standard monitor!

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

In KDE, you can do that with a specific window like:
  Window Menu -> Advanced -> Keep Above Others
or
ALT+F3, v, a

You still have to fuss with focus a little, but it is nice for popping up 1 app above all others ( e.g. knotes )

Re:Yes

[tehcyder]

you can use the leftover space to keep an eye on other things, such as your email or an IM conversation.

But you can't actually read two different web pages, answer an email and conduct an IM conversation simultaneously. You can flick between them at whatever speed you like, but you're only doing one thing at a time.

Re:Yes

[tehcyder]

You can just keep your windows at slightly over 1000 pixels wide, and it works fine for all websites.

My monitor resolution is only 1280 pixels wide so there's not much spare either side to provide much advantage if it's not maximised...

A lot of people don't have 1920+ pixel monitors.

Re:Yes

[clone53421]

Now that I have a larger screen, I almost always keep windows non-maximized. When I had a smaller screen, I kept them maximized.

The benefit of not having windows maximized: You can have 2 windows open at once, mostly overlapping but with key areas visible for drag-and-drop targeting. You can similarly hit the edges of the desktop with drag-and-drop, particularly the Recycle Bin. (I use the desktop to accumulate drag-and-drop stuff, then periodically sort through the items it has accumulated, putting them into their respective locations in the My Documents hierarchy. (Firefox is also set to download files to the desktop.)

Re:Yes

[clone53421]

Just get a tool that allows you to set the always-on-top property of any window.

Some of them can set the opacity, too.

E.g. Ghost-It.

Re:Yes

[Luke has no name]

Windows 7 handles this pretty well by being able to drag the title bar of a window to the edge of the screen to resize it automatically. Drag it to the left, and the browser will fill the left side of the screen.

And I didn't RTFA, but 'tabbed windows' sounds like 'workspaces' or 'alt-tab'.

Re:Yes

[LWATCDR]

What I would like is if some windows would start to scale the data. For some windows it just doesn't make sense to scroll the window at all.
It would probably be difficult to do and not be confusing but I know that there are times when I would find it very useful.
BTW I really hate most fixed width sites. It just makes me crazy.

Re:Yes

[greed]

OS X apps that use the system widget set should all support scrolling without focus. The Firefox and Thunderbird at 2.0 were a bit of a roll-your-own thing in some areas. This was visible in a jarring discontinuity in UI conventions. Like scrolling, and how selection and arrow + qualifier keys behave in text boxes, and so on.

Another little-known MacOS no-focus-interaction thing is, Cmd-Drag moves a window without activating it. Handy for making part of another app visible without affecting your current window (and its selections or edit state, especially during Finder rename).

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I use click to focus, because focus-follows-mouse makes me sick. Anyway, at any of both cases, GNOME comes with "Always on top" option at the window menu (window icon or right button on window title).

Re:Yes

[hurikhan77]

Yeah, having focus and "window in front" not being the same is very useful (but usually totally confusing to Windoze users sometimes using my desktop *hehe*).

Re:Yes

[clone53421]

Maximize is a one size fits all tool

That’s actually one of the things I like about Windows 7 (and it’s grown on me, a little). There are a whole variety of ways to maximize a window.

By double-clicking on the resizable border, the window immediately expands to fill the screen in that dimension. The other dimension is unchanged. With a wide-screen display, it is handy to be able to quickly make the most of my vertical space without expanding a single window to fill the absurdly wide (for any single thing except a wide-screen video) display.

You can also use the Windows key + left/right arrow key to dock the window to the left or right side of the screen.

Of course, the old maximize functionality is still there, for the cases where you actually want a single window to take up your entire display.

Re:Yes

[Jesus_666]

Well yeah, but Firefox has adopted Cocoa with version 3.0, that's one big release back. The question is why Thunderbird hasn't yet followed suit. (I also actually like what Firefox does for three-finger scrolling; it's pretty amazing to see Firefox as one of the first non-Apple apps that actually make use of multitouch.)

Re:Yes

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Yeah, I've got both setups. A netbook in which I view everything maximized, and an 18" laptop where I only maximize apps that need it (IDEs, etc).

The win7 auto-docking is great for that, but I do wish I could do without wasted window decoration and titlebar space.

Re:Yes

[MrNiceguy_KS]

Even worse: Windows doesn't allow much interaction with Windows that don't currently have the focus. On OS X I often scroll in a windows that doesn't have focus (such as scrolling a manual page in my browser while XCode is in the foreground); Windows assumes that just because I didn't click into the browser window I can't possibly want to scroll it. Well, or you have to enable scrolling without focus and I haven't managed to locate the setting.

As far as I've found, scrolling without focus can't be done out-of-the-box with Windows. However, the Scrollpoint drivers that come installed with nearly every laptop, and come bundled with a lot of mice will allow this.

In addition to scrolling where you're pointing, I love how Linux, (or at least, Ubuntu Gnome, as I haven't worked with much else,) will let you move any window, even if it's not the active window. I hate trying to move a dialog box so I can look at my document, only to get dinged at because there's a sub-dialog box open.

Re:Yes

[clone53421]

True. Another “feature” that I somewhat dislike is the way Win7 prevents me from putting the top of the titlebar off the top edge of the screen. I often did that on previous versions of Windows to give myself a few extra pixels of screen real estate.

I also wish you could get rid of the huge folder tree view on the left side of the Windows Explorer interface, but at least you can slide that all the way off the left side of the screen so that you can drag-and-drop files into the folder itself on the far left edge of the screen.

Re:Yes

[BlindSpot]

If you like 400-character lines, maybe you're special, or maybe you simply don't know any better.

Actually it's the exact opposite: I used to use a non-maximized browser window exclusively, and the constant resizing was the exact problem I ran into. I even got a handy add-on for Firefox that allows quick resizing to predefined window sizes, but eventually just found that running maximized was on the whole far less frustrating.

One possible explanation is that the time I started really heavily using the web was right around when the "standard" monitor resolution (finally) began to migrate from 640x480 up towards (eventually) 1024x768, where webpage target sizes were all over the map for quite some time. There's probably a lot less variance now. (Though as widescreen monitors gain usage that may start to change again...)

I really do prefer the long lines though. I have no doubt you're right that most people don't, but some people can just cope with certain visual things more easily I guess. As another example, I've seen a number of people over the years who flat out prefer their screen font sizes to be unusually small.

That all being said, in the interest of keeping an open mind I tried browsing some of my regular sites in a window (of roughly 1024x768) and admittedly didn't mind it. The only place it was a problem was, ironically, on the Slashdot main page! The Slashboxes take up too much width relative to the stories. On the comments pages it's fine though.

Re:Yes

[jedwidz]

I'll go a step further and say that drag-and-drop is a misfeature. It's sometimes OK as sugaring, but it should never be the only way to perform a given function.

A big issue is that you lose the use of the mouse button while you're dragging. That makes it painful to navigate between or within windows to find the drop target. Especially if you're using a touchpad.

Another issue is obscurity - it's often not obvious what elements of the UI are draggable, and what their possible drop targets are. Even the best implementations don't tell you about possible drop targets in windows you don't have open, or what drag sources are available for a selected target.

Case in point - a 'handy' feature in Windows XP is that you can get the path to a file by dragging and dropping from Explorer into the 'Run...' dialog. Now try that with Explorer maximized, I dare you...

(hint: mid-drag, use a keyboard shortcut to open or expose the dialog)

Re:Yes

[drosboro]

In what app? It certainly doesn't in Safari. I couldn't get option-click to do anything different than the regular click in any of the apps I currently have open.

Re:Yes

[clone53421]

[citation needed]

Re:Yes

[badkarmadayaccount]

Parse error: Unexpected VCS identifier.

This is just the dumbest thing I have ever heard.

[RocketRabbit]

Tabbed browsing makes sense. You have one application, a web browser, with multiple pages, taking up less screen space. It's tabbed so you don't have to click on a bunch of minimized windows or use Expose or whatever shiny workalike the Gnome / KDE bunch has now to find what you want, and so you aren't cluttering up the desktop with a hundred web browser windows.

However, there is something to be said for separating out the different applications and simply clicking the icon or what have you, to switch between them. In fact, isn't that what Windows has had for about 15 years now? Sure, the application tab bar goes on the bottom the screen by default, and is called the "Start Menu" but it is essentially, exactly what is proposed here.

The problem is that you end up filling up the bar, and then having to collapse the bar in one of several ways, all of which are annoying.

Expose, or whatever the Gnome / KDE equivalent is, is so much handier.

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that doesn't matter!

Fluxbox grouped windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fluxbox lets you do something that looks similar (screenshot with weird theme here... some programs I use run both an xterm and a separate GUI, so I can use the feature to keep the two windows together.

Re:Fluxbox grouped windows?

[onefriedrice]

Fluxbox lets you do something that looks similar (screenshot with weird theme here... some programs I use run both an xterm and a separate GUI, so I can use the feature to keep the two windows together.

Yeah, it's nice. I've been doing it so long in flux that I forgot that more commonplace window managers don't have it, and that it might be considered an interesting idea worthy of a front-page Slashdot article. Well, we don't really have to wonder about the usefulness of such a feature since it's been available so long: it is useful. I don't think it's "the next big thing" since I doubt casual computer users would take advantage of it, but it's a godsend for power users who never restart their machines and always have a gazillion windows open. After workspaces, it's the most important feature for effective window management IMO--even better than Expose-style task-switching.

Nothing New

[suricatta]

We've already got the task bar, which pretty much works like tabs. Plus with the task bar you get the novel thing of being able to place multiple windows side by side, whereas with tabs and mdi interfaces in general this ability seems to be generally limited and/or removed lately (unless you open a new window of course, but this renders tabs useless)

How is this a novel step forward?

Re:Nothing New

[Dumnezeu]

How is this a novel step forward?

But it's so cool! When someone calls in for support, I could say "let me go to the other computer; now let me switch to my work tab; now let me switch to my browsers tab; now let me switch to the customer support tab; oops, sorry, i accidentally opened my porn tab."

Re:Nothing New

[Anonymous Coward]

You already said browser tab, you're being redundant.

Re:Nothing New

[gbjbaanb]

its novel in terms of usability. The taskbar is down the bottom, far away from whatever it is you're working on. Like tabbed browsing, you could have opened multiple instances of your browser and switched between sites using the taskbar, but it was awkward. So they moved them to tabs, really near your addressbar and suddenly it was a lot easier to use multiple sessions.

Same with windows, even though we've had tabbed windows for years (MDI apps anyone?), the taskbar is a 'last choice' for swapping between related apps. Tabbed windows (eg filesystem windows), or command shells, etc make a heap of sense - just like the browser.

Re:Nothing New

[dbcad7]

I was thinking the same thing... I like tabbed apps.. Browsers, text editors.. etc.. and it makes sense... I would love to have tabbed browsing at work, as most of the apps I use are web based, but for some reason we are still stuck with IE 6.. In my case tabbed apps would work as a work around for our refusal to change browsers.. but then we are not talking XP here.. but KDE... I guess what I am saying, is that I can see where it might be useful in some situations, but for the most part the functionality is as you say done on the taskbar.. the minority of users who will benefit from this, makes it hardly worth it.. But if it is optional, then I say go for it.

Re:Nothing New

[larry bagina]

when I move my mouse to the top or bottom of the screen, I don't need to worry about precision. I can't overshoot. It's an infinitely big target. A tab bar in the window? not so much. You need to move your mouse slower and fiddle around more to hit it. In other words, Fitt's Law.

Re:Nothing New

[ClubStew]

Drag the Windows task bar to the top of the screen where you claim your mouse usually is. So now what't the point? The GP post asks the right question: how does this boost productivity if I can't place Windows side by side (and in Windows 7 this is even easier by dragging one window to one edge of the screen, and another to the other edge of the screen)?

Re:Nothing New

[gbjbaanb]

It might not be in the article, but the snap-to-side feature Windows 7 proudly boasts of is present in KDE 4.4 as well. As well as the ability to combine windows into a single tabbed window (like firefox).

So how does it help productivity? Ask a Firefox (or IE) user whether tabbed browsing has helped their productivity, or if its just a gimmick. I can see the same productivity benefits from tabbed explorer windows, or shell prompts that browsers have. I wouldn't have to play "find the right explorer" window anymore from a set of similar yellow icons, as there'd only be one - and then find which directory you want in the tabs immediately.

task bar

[shird]

How's this any different to the existing task bar, which shows a button/tab for each application? Move it up to the top if you want to.

If every app becomes tabbed by the OS, then they are basically re-writing the taskbar.

I think the key feature they are omitting in this article is the ability to *group* apps into different tabbed windows. So that the task bar is used to select the group of apps, then the tab to select the individual app.

Re:task bar

[FrankieBaby1986]

I think the key feature they are omitting in this article is the ability to *group* apps into different tabbed windows. So that the task bar is used to select the group of apps, then the tab to select the individual app.

So you mean like workspaces/virtual desktops?

Chrome OS anyone?

[Pharmboy]

Isn't that pretty much a given feature of Chrome OS?

Window tabs are already here

[Mystery00]

Window tabs are already here!

They're in the taskbar.

Re:Window tabs are already here

[bmo]

That's what Windows users always said about Opera and Mozilla tabs.

The Microsoft put tabs in IE7 and 8.

WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW?

--
BMO

Re:Window tabs are already here

[Anonymous Coward]

Your username is at the top of your post, no need to repeat it.

Re:Window tabs are already here

[im_thatoneguy]

But it makes sense because most websites are the same size. If I want to switch Apps I use the taskbar. If I want to switch PAGES then I use tabs.

I can't see any reason why I would want Photoshop and Google Chrome to share tabs. I would just lose Photoshop and have to go through all my open windows to figure out where I "hid" Photoshop.

Re:Window tabs are already here

[Anonymous Coward]

Working on Chrome OS?

alternative window managers

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK this feature already exists in some weird-ass window managers like ion or ratpoison.

Fluxbox

[eratosthene]

Um, hasn't Fluxbox had this for years? It's one of the reasons I love Fluxbox so much.

Re:Fluxbox

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah I was about to say this. Fluxbox is amazing and natively has supported tabs long before firefox.

Re:Fluxbox

[mikael_j]

Yes, and PWM had it nine years ago, hardly newsworthy that KDE finally gets a feature that's been around for almost a decade.

/Mikael

Give every "window" a "taskbar"?

[hapalibashi]

No thanks.

I hope that's is not the case

[El Lobo]

It seems these days it's cool and hip to support tabs. I mean, in the 90s, a MDI application was the big thing. Everyone and their cats supported MDI until people began to realize that MDI was , after all not a so brigh idea. Then came the tabs... Tabs everywhere, Notepad++, opera, Mozilla, and hell, when IE came with tab I was wondering where the hell i was going to do whene every big browser was using the damned tabs... Thankfully I found a relativelly obcure extension to disable tabs (Untab) which works with some bugs and problems, but hey, it works...

It seems it will take a couple of years for people to understand once more that simplicity is always best, and cluttering more and more things under an interface is juts... well.. so 2000s...

Re:I hope that's is not the case

[peragrin]

well for some thins tabs work great. i wish word, excel, and abi word had tabs to switch between active documents. Tabs in browsers makes lots of sense if you have more than 2 windows open at the same time.

a task bar to switch between tasks, a tab bar to switch between documents with the tasks.

Re:I hope that's is not the case

[AuMatar]

You do realize that firefox has an option to open links and the like in a new window or a new tab, right? So if you don't like tabs in browsing, don't use them.

Personally, I couldn't go back to untabbed browsing- I typically have 4 or 5 links open, and its nice to be able to quickly see what I have and click on a new one without having to go through the taskbar which probably has 3 or 4 more apps open at the moment.

Re:I hope that's is not the case

[Hatta]

Do you really think it's simpler to manage 12 open browser windows than one window and 12 tabs? What is your reasoning there?

Re:I hope that's is not the case

[mdwh2]

What's so bad about MDI? It means an application's windows are grouped together. And tabs are MDI anyway, although some browsers like Firefox use their own custom method to implement them (which also loses features, as you can't resize them anymore or view them side by side).

Yes, there are other ways than MDI - e.g., screens/workspaces. But the more recent trend on Windows to simply have every window in existence to be a main application window, thus littering the taskbar and having no hierarchy, is nonsense.

So what is it you are proposing?

I can already tab between my various programs

[Anonymous Coward]

Alt+Tab

Re:I can already tab between my various programs

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

I can already tab between my various programs

Ah, so you don't use tabs in FireFox then?

Re:I can already tab between my various programs

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I don't. A lot of time I am trying to put together a system design in my head while evaluating the different pieces from competitors. Being able to see them side by side is how I do my work.

Tabbed browsing assuming that the person can only do one thing at a time and everything is mutually exclusive. Sorry guys it is not for some of us that evolved beyond 1980's.

Re:I can already tab between my various programs

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Being able to see them side by side is how I do my work.

Tabs don't prevent this.

Tabbed browsing assuming that the person can only do one thing at a time and everything is mutually exclusive.

Anything is 'bad' if taken to exclusive extremes. Seriously, I could easily give you the opposite example and how that's broken for that context.

You'd probably enjoy Opera. Great mix of both options.

Re:I can already tab between my various programs

[clone53421]

Being able to see them side by side is how I do my work.

Tabbed browsing assuming that the person can only do one thing at a time and everything is mutually exclusive.

So... pull a tab out and it will form its own window. It is not difficult. I do it all the time.

Usually when I want to “forget” about a certain page for a while (because it’s doing something or other) and I don’t want it taking up space in my tab bar in Firefox. So I have a separate, minimized, Firefox window containing those sort of tabs. Since my taskbar auto-hides, it’s out of sight, out of mind, out of the way. Until I need it again...

Um, this is very last year.

[pyster]

Idk man, I've been using wintabber for well over a year. It's great for poorly written apps that want to open hundreds of windows. (ATT's OOS ticketing system for example). Tabbing has some nice advantages.

Not sure

[WiiVault]

I was under the impression that in OS X maximize sized the window to the content. For instance if the thing is small it will not expand the window and fill it up with whitespace. Seems a bit smarter to me than having an overly large window. Of course if the content spans past the dimensions of the monitor then it will go full screen to try and fit as much possible in.

Re:Not sure

[Firehed]

Indeed - and for this reason, it's a "zoom" button rather than "maximize" (which is just being pedantic, but I figured it's worth pointing out). Anyways, when I first switched over to the Mac platform that drove me insane. After a couple of weeks I got used to the change, and after a couple more weeks found it far more useful than having a single window fill the screen. Since windows aren't taking more space than they need, it allows me to either have more windows visible (on a large monitor, anyways) or have at least some of the other apps I'm working with partly exposed so I can click to them more easily.

Of course, there are some situations where I want maximized windows for distraction-free work, but that's pretty limited in nature (reading or writing, in the English not code sense) and many of the apps that are very text-heavy have the zoom button do a typical maximize for that precise reason.

And still, if it bothers you that tremendously, you can always drag the window to the full screen size.

Re:Not sure

[Ark42]

You know what's better than "zoom" and having to move several zoomed windows side by side and not overlap them too much? A tabbed and paned interface with drag bars between each workspace where you can add or remove panes by dragging tabs into new or existing areas, and a button to zoom, or autosize, the pane to content. Who needs to see random strips of the desktop between each open window? Who needs to waste all this space on the borders of the windows?

Re:Not sure

[Stormwatch]

The original goal of this design was to give you access to the desktop at any time. Select from a piece of text and drag it to the desktop, that creates a text clipping. From an image editor, you get an image clipping. Drag an image from a browser, you save the image. Drag a link, that creates a web location file. Then you can store those or drag them into other documents or other applications. So subtle, detailed, flexible.

You know... when you look back at the old Mac interface, and see how much on OSX is still the same, how it all makes sense, how original it all was back then, and how they simply got it right the first time -- you can't help but feel tremendous respect for the original Mac team.

Re:Not sure

[Thinboy00]

And still, if it bothers you that tremendously, you can always drag the window to the full screen size.

But dragging it to full screen size doesn't placate my OCD because it is/could be a few pixels off!

Re:Not sure

[IntlHarvester]

Only problem with your theory is that none of that worked on the original Macintosh. It was a single tasking OS, and the desktop was inaccessible while running an app. And "clippings" didn't appear until System 7.something.

The original intent was probably to enable window switching within an application.

Also I've noticed that a lot of Mac blowhards on this site love to frame these things in terms of the "original Mac" or "since 1984", when it is clear they probably have never used anything under MacOS 8.

Re:Not sure

[commodoresloat]

That's exactly my understanding of the way this should work, and OS X generally does it quite well IMHO. It does fail pretty bad in some applications though, notably MS Office apps. But the GP view is 180 degrees from my ideal user experience; the way Windows handles maximization of windows is one of the bigger reasons I have always preferred MacOS. I *like* being able to see other windows behind where I am when I'm working in multiple programs (which is almost always). I can't stand opening up a 2 paragraph document and having it take over the entire screen. And, frankly, I don't think tabbing the entire user experience will improve this at all.

Remember, MacOS X did exactly the right thing with tabbed browsing. It was a concept *explicitly* ruled out in their human interface guidelines, but after they saw what was happening with Mozilla, they made a decision to chuck the HIGs for Safari and create the most lickable tabbed browsing experience they could. The guidelines adapted without being swept completely in another direction -- tabbed browsing is available when it makes good sense for it to be available, but it doesn't dominate the user experience. Hopefully OS X will show similar restraint if tabbed windows do in fact "become the next big thing."

Re:Not sure

[Stormwatch]

Ah, true... my first Mac ran System 7. :P

Re:Not sure

[pizzach]

You forget you also lose space because you can't overlap windows. You can't win, mwah ah ha. In my opinion, a setup where the window doesn't move forward automatically when clicked and has sloppy focus is the best. The flexibility is phenomenal.

Re:Not sure

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, when Apple says tabs are bad, they are bad, and when Apple says tabs are good they are good. And you got almost immediately moderated up to 5 for sucking Steve Jobs' dick in public. And people wonder why slashdot has become a technological "have not" site.

Re:Not sure

[commodoresloat]

For fuck's sake, you need to re-read my post. I explained exactly why this decision was a good one. I do not believe tabs are inherently good or bad. They are helpful or unhelpful in particular contexts. This has nothing to do with Steve Jobs or any of his body parts. Tabs are wonderful in my web browser. But I am grateful not to deal with them in my word processor, my terminal, or my email program. And I think it was a good decision on Apple's part to change its HIGs in the face of new evidence that suggested those HIGs had become outdated.

Do you really believe that even a mildly positive statement about a single technical decision made by a company is the same thing as fellating the CEO?

Re:Not sure

[SuperMog2002]

I recently learned that, in some applications, you can command click the zoom button to make the window zoom to full screen regardless of content. This is great for applications such as MacVim. In that app, sometimes I know a window will be dedicated to a particular document, so sizing to to fit that document makes sense. Windows I'm using to code, however, almost invariably get split in to three or four viewports by the time I'm done, so I can use every pixel I can get. In that case, full screen makes the most sense, even if it wastes space at the moment.

Re:Not sure

[Anonymous Coward]

non-sequitur much? Parent comment was specifically about OS X. I've noticed a lot of the anti-mac blowhards on this site like to frame these things in terms of "it didn't work in 1984, so it must still suck"

Re:Not sure

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a Mac back in 1984. It was totally revolutionary, much more so than the iphone by the way.

with the hardware it had (128k of ram, etc ...) you may be right that it was not multitask, but really, who cared???

The Mac at that time was great compared to the other machines available then. Do you realize that you could copy and paste between applications?

Today's Macs are great compared to the other machines available today.

I also love and use Linux and Silicon Graphics machines, for other reasons.

Re:Not sure

[Warbothong]

I was under the impression that in OS X maximize sized the window to the content. For instance if the thing is small it will not expand the window and fill it up with whitespace. Seems a bit smarter to me than having an overly large window. Of course if the content spans past the dimensions of the monitor then it will go full screen to try and fit as much possible in.

Erm... Exactly what size is the window contents? To me that's a completely circular argument: The content of a window is the stuff in the window. Therefore the size of the content is the size of the window.

How "big", exactly, is a PDF? How "big" is a Web page? How "big" is a text document? Computer displays can scale anything to any size and I would say only those authouring/checking a pixel-based format would be better off with a 1:1 mapping between image colour rectangles and screen colour rectangles. Every other format is either vector/procedurally generated (fonts, icons, etc.) and thus should be drawn to suit your window, rather than your window being resized to whatever arbitrary scale the software decided to render at.

As a simple example I use Ctrl +/Ctrl - in my browser (Firefox) and IDE (Geany) all of the time.

Re:Not sure

[dp3n3tr8]

I too have found it relatively easy to adapt to the OS X way of maximising windows. However I can not understand why the only method of resizing windows under OS X is via the bottom right window corner. There have been many occasions when I have gone from a dual screen setup to a single screen view on my laptop and have been left unable to resize the window because the resize control is no longer within the screen area. @$^% I hate that.

Re:Not sure

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you not read the original comment?

He said:

You know... when you look back at the old Mac interface, and see how much on OSX is still the same, how it all makes sense, how original it all was back then, and how they simply got it right the first time -- you can't help but feel tremendous respect for the original Mac team.

Even the original poster came back and said "Ah, true... my first Mac ran System 7."

Re:Not sure

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with this is usability. In usability the best places for users to reach are the edges of the screen because they're infidently deep. When I switched to a mac it was a pain in the ass because I had to click on all the little buttons scattered in application windows behind my current focus. I'm not sure what the compromise is here. Maybe we can have a 'taskbar' on one edge that holds shortcuts to currently running applications AND their child windows?

Re:Not sure

[Anonymous Coward]

Your statements were not "mildly" positive. You specifically said that Apple rejected tabs until they un-rejected them, and like a good Mactard you praised them for BOTH positions. If Apple were tomorrow to decide that tabs in every application was going to be the standard, you would probably go on about how that was the greatest thing that no one would ever have thought of since Apple invented Unix. Hence the impression of you being a Jobs'sucker. You even used the word "lickable" when talking about a GUI. Christ.

Re:Not sure

[keytoe]

Only problem with your theory is that none of that worked on the original Macintosh. It was a single tasking OS, and the desktop was inaccessible while running an app. And "clippings" didn't appear until System 7.something.

The original intent was probably to enable window switching within an application.

Also I've noticed that a lot of Mac blowhards on this site love to frame these things in terms of the "original Mac" or "since 1984", when it is clear they probably have never used anything under MacOS 8.

MultiFinder was added in system 5 and allowed application level cooperative multi-tasking. While not quite 1984 (Wikipedia says 1987), it's still a damned long time ago.

Re:Not sure

[gEvil (beta)]

Of course, there are some situations where I want maximized windows for distraction-free work, but that's pretty limited in nature (reading or writing, in the English not code sense) and many of the apps that are very text-heavy have the zoom button do a typical maximize for that precise reason.

And for the ones that don't, option-clicking the green/zoom button generally does the job.

Re:Not sure

[commodoresloat]

LOL. Relax and have a drink, dude; you're losing it. I have been critical of other things Apple has done, but I think Apple made the right decision in this case, and I explained why. All you can do is anonymously sputter and call me names. And yeah I used the word "lickable" because I was making fun of Apple's attention to such details, even as I was saying positive things about it. But you're not really interested in any of the arguments, are you? You're just interested in separating the fanboys from the "I-hate-user-friendliness" douchebags. Congratulations, you've outed me as a fanboy! Now pardon me while I go buy a turtleneck and some knee pads.

Re:Not sure

[rovolo]

I agree with you, having used macs while growing up (System 7) so bear with me when I say that

OS 9 totally let you tab windows (look in the bottom right)

(Not quite the same thing I know, but that cosmetic similarity would be enough for some people to claim ownership.)

Re:Not sure

[IntlHarvester]

Yeah, sorry you got modded down, because your core point about a drag-n-drop-based "spatial" classic Mac environment is essentially correct.

My only complaint was that you can't argue 'original intent' when it took them 10 years to implement the actual functionality.

Re:Not sure

[IntlHarvester]

OK. Lets say it is 1987 and you have soldered extra RAM into your Mac Plus and turned on multifinder. Except, you still have to wait 5 years before you can drag something between different programs because there's no software support.

Doesn't matter if it was a long time ago, if the argument is "got it right the first time", you don't have a decade of wiggle room. The point was actually more "got it right eventually".

Close...

[DeadDecoy]

Actually, what I think would be interesting would be to have the option to consolidate a number of open windows/applications into one tabbed collection or not. I find when I'm working with many open documents applications with many open windows get consolidated into a single list item in the task bar. This can be annoying if I need to toggle through multiple text files.

For example, I do a bit of programming using python and idle (when I'm too lazy to open up a full-blown ide). I'll usually have 2-5 code windows up and a console window or two. Along with these python windows, I'll have a browser for navigating code apis open along with two or three file navigators. At this point, the code windows will collapse and I'll have to go through two clicks, instead of one to navigate between them. I tend to switch through code files more often, so the amount of extra navigation adds up.

It would be kinda cool and unique if they explored this. Currently, *nix's workspace framework helps manage this situation very well. But alternative tools for organization would be nice. One suggestion would be to add a right-click feature to group and ungroup applications into a tabbed interface.

I can't see the point of this whatsoever

[minderaser]

Not when *nix for eons has had multiple desktops to divide up your work projects et al. For me, I keep my browser on one (albeit in tabs), comm on another (email, IM, etc), terms on another, and have another just for random programs I don't use all that often (GIMP, PDF Viewer, etc).

How can tabbing windows of different apps be any better than just alt-tab switching them?

Taskbar?

[aldld]

So, is this just a new taskbar?

Gimmick

[Nom du Keyboard]

Sounds like a gimmick to me.

That being said, I think in the end we're going to have tabbed windows because the future is more likely to be running in a light-weight web-browser interface to the Cloud on any device you can imagine, rather than a resource-heavy hardware-dependent Windows or OS-X environment. How long it will take to get there is the only question.

The improvement we need in this area (are you listening Firefox people) is a way to group tabs the way I can group layers in Photoshop so that I can deal with the whole group (collapse, expand, move) together.

Re:Gimmick

[Anonymous Coward]

Your prayers to the frogs of Mozilla are answered thusly: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890

Re:Gimmick

[turing_m]

in the end we're going to have tabbed windows because the future is more likely to be running in a light-weight web-browser interface to the Cloud on any device you can imagine, rather than a resource-heavy hardware-dependent Windows or OS-X environment.

In the future how many operating systems or applications are going to be considered resources-heavy compared to the hardware of the day? These days the browser is probably the most resource intensive app I run regularly. As hardware improves, the apps should become less resouce intensive in general.

And also, it is oft repeated but still true that people like to own their applications and data, even if their backup practices aren't usually as routine as those of a data center.

Re:Gimmick

[Anonymous Coward]

don't mind him he is just another 'cloud computing' fanboi. After the yahoo spying story from earlier on I can't understand how anyone would buy into this browser-based nonsense

Re:Gimmick

[vlm]

That being said, I think in the end we're going to have tabbed windows because

GUI designers need to justify their existence, so the GUI must expand. Of course this means the "content" shrinks.

The good news, is we'll all have 40 inch ultra high res monitors.

The bad news, is just like cable tv news channels or "modern" desktop environments, those displays will be framed to death until "your content" is about the size of a postcard and "their content" fills the rest of the 40 inch screen.

Re:Gimmick

[kabrakan]

The improvement we need in this area (are you listening Firefox people) is a way to group tabs the way I can group layers in Photoshop so that I can deal with the whole group (collapse, expand, move) together.

There's been plugins like this forever, e.g. 'Tree Style Tab'. I can't use a browser without it, though a lot can be done to make this plugin and its cousins better.

Re:Gimmick

[tepples]

In the future how many operating systems or applications are going to be considered resources-heavy compared to the hardware of the day?

How far in the future? In the near future, I see applications running on underpowered netbooks, phones, and PDAs.

Re:Gimmick

[nwmcsween]

I agree with the distributed part but not the web browser based interface, I believe things will be headed towards what inferno or even better microsoft's midori where the compiler is verified and there is no kernel (single address space) and architectures simply need a rewritten VM. It should also be simple to distributed tasks imagine doing a long high cpu usage calculation the VM/OS could simply and automatically distribute it no matter what OS it is distributed to. Old bad unix ideas need to die.

Re:Gimmick

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever heard of the FF extension "tree style tabs"?

Can't live without it... but joe user can't live with it

Re:Gimmick

[Anonymous Coward]

The improvement we need in this area (are you listening Firefox people) is a way to group tabs the way I can group layers in Photoshop so that I can deal with the whole group (collapse, expand, move) together.

How is this purpose not served by another Firefox window?

Re:Gimmick

[FrankieBaby1986]

The improvement we need in this area (are you listening Firefox people) is a way to group tabs the way I can group layers in Photoshop so that I can deal with the whole group (collapse, expand, move) together.

Perhaps not *quite* what you want, but try Tree Style Tabs.
I find them incredibly useful, especially when browsing slashdot.

Re:Gimmick

[Menkhaf]

Thanks for posting the link. On a 24" widescreen (16:10) LCD, it's so much better to have the tabs organized vertically.

Re:Gimmick

[Anonymous Coward]

the future is more likely to be running in a light-weight web-browser interface to the Cloud

Oh, God... You can take your future and shove it.

Don't confuse Google's pale attempts at an entry in the notebook market for some sort of trend which is "the future".

Re:Gimmick

[clone53421]

Exactly what I was going to say. That’s what I do quite often.

When I want another “group” of tabs (usually tabs that I’m not doing anything with, for the time being), they reside in their own window, minimized, where they are out of my way until I call them back up when I want them.

Fluxbox

[aLEczapKA]

Wow.. Fluxbox had it like 5 years ago.

/. running out of topics...

[metageek]

OTOH I whish the KDE guys stopped "innovating" so much and put some stability on this thing. I'm close to migrating to XFCE

Re:This is just the dumbest thing I have ever hear

[Colonel Korn]

Tabbed browsing makes sense. You have one application, a web browser, with multiple pages, taking up less screen space. It's tabbed so you don't have to click on a bunch of minimized windows or use Expose or whatever shiny workalike the Gnome / KDE bunch has now to find what you want, and so you aren't cluttering up the desktop with a hundred web browser windows.

However, there is something to be said for separating out the different applications and simply clicking the icon or what have you, to switch between them. In fact, isn't that what Windows has had for about 15 years now? Sure, the application tab bar goes on the bottom the screen by default, and is called the "Start Menu" but it is essentially, exactly what is proposed here.

The problem is that you end up filling up the bar, and then having to collapse the bar in one of several ways, all of which are annoying.

Expose, or whatever the Gnome / KDE equivalent is, is so much handier.

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that doesn't matter!

Switcher is a Windows version of Expose which offers great customization. If you want to combine the best of OSX and Windows, you absolutely need Switcher. I find myself using the taskbar 2/3 of the time, but there are definitely times when the wonderful Expose-like behavior is the most efficient way to switch between windows. Map it to a 4th or 5th mouse button.

Correct level

[bvankuik]

Giving up modpoints for this: this is an awesome feature. Basically this will do what the Google Chrome browser does, except now at the correct level.Like managing window size and position, it seems to me the tabbing of windows should be done at the Window Manager level. Currently, each app tries to solve this separately. That is a waste of resources.

Re:Correct level

[Barny]

Agree, they could take it a step further by having a limited set of functions a window tabbed with another could share/use, for instance:

Recently opened document.
"Insert into ...." effectively a one click copy and past directly to the curser/field on the other app

An interesting thing is the Eve-Online game interface has had this for a long long time, you can dock multiple windows together and then tab between them, even pull them apart again.

Re:Correct level

[dantum_sh]

It seems an excellent feature and hopefully others will follow with adding it to their OS's. Having things like expose is great when you managing windows but it would really help just having windows you are working with grouped and easy to see. My hope is they implement an easy drag and drop group and maybe preset and restore group options so you don't need to create the group each time from scratch.

Ew, no

[Anonymous Coward]

I was vehemently opposed to tabbed-browsing back in the day, because back then the don't-open-a-window-features weren't as strongly implemented, so you would inevitably end up with multiple browser windows open and not know where your tab was. That got better as webmasters got smarter and browsers became configurable to never open a new window no matter what. However, an application window? We already have a way to manage that -- the taskbar (funny because the same argument I used against tabbed-browsing ...). All that will happen is that end up with a few windows open, each with a couple of tabs and next thing you don't know where your program is (I also said that about tabbed browsing...). So in the end it isn't more convenient or efficient because you'll be spending half your time looking for the window you left the program you want in (I said that about tabbed browsing too).

Hmm, maybe I'm wrong...

Re:Ew, no

[mdwh2]

That's a browser issue, not a webmaster fault. Why on earth should a webmaster know whether your system is running "windows" or "tabs" or whatever else, especially considering the wide range of browsers and operating systems out there?

A "window" is a broad general concept - if a browser runs with single windows in one main window (tabs, MDI, whatever you want to call it), then the obvious choice would be that "open this link in a new window" is interpreted as opening a new tab/internal window/whatever. If it doesn't, your browser is broken.

Oh, FFS ...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

When I clicked on this story, I knew there would countless comments saying, "We've already got this, it's called the taskbar" or words to that effect.

It's not the same thing. With windows containing tabs for multiple applications and/or documents, you don't have one taskbar; you have as many "taskbars" as you have windows open. This isn't necessarily something you'd want to do all the time, but I can certainly see how it would be useful in some situations. If I'm working on multiple code files, and for each of those files I have two or three browser windows open containing references for the specific file (a common enough occurrence in my field, which is bioinformatics; it's considered good form to put references to the appropriate journal articles in the code comments) then it would be very nice to be able to group the code and the browser windows in this way -- i.e., instead of a few code tabs in one window and a bunch of reference tabs in another window, for each chunk of code there would be associated references. If I could save those multi-tabbed windows and open them back up the same way the next time I got back to work on the project, so much the better.

Re:Oh, FFS ...

[vlm]

It's not the same thing. With windows containing tabs for multiple applications and/or documents, you don't have one taskbar; you have as many "taskbars" as you have windows open. This isn't necessarily something you'd want to do all the time, but I can certainly see how it would be useful in some situations. If I'm working on multiple code files, and for each of those files I have two or three browser windows open containing references for the specific file

KDE "kpager" the desktop switcher and right click configure KDE panel - uncheck "Show windows from all desktops"

Or it sounds like you're describing emacs?

Or it sounds like you're describing a development IDE?

Re:Oh, FFS ...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

No, that's not what I'm talking about. (Since I'm on OS X, I don't know about kpager, so take this FWIW.) What I have right now is

Window 1: BBEdit tab 1, tab 2, tab 3
Window 2: Seamonkey tab 1, tab 2, ...
Window 3: Safari tab 1, tab 2 ...

What I'd like to have, or at least be able to have, is:

Window 1: BBEdit file 1, associated Seamonkey tab(s), associated Safari tab(s)
Window 2: BBEdit file 2, associated Seamonkey tab(s), associated Safari tab(s)
Window 3: BBEdit file 3, associated Seamonkey tab(s), associated Safari tab(s)

Note that I'm not saying I'd work this way all the time; most of the time, I'd probably keep tabs grouped with their own apps. But having the option to move tabs around from window to window, without regard to application, would be really useful sometimes.

Re:Oh, FFS ...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right, it's not the same thing.

How about "We've already got this, it's called CompizConfig Settings Manager -> Group and Tab Windows" ?

Re:Oh, FFS ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you care about a feature in kde at all then? this is far too "complicated" for the mac design team.
The best way to split up tasks is by desktop (even windows offers desktops as an addon): one desktop per task,
Each destkop can contain whatever you want in whatver layout you want
Important windows can be shown in multiple desktops simultaneously
The only thing that would make desktop better at this is if the WM created and removed them on demand.

Re:Oh, FFS ...

[Locutus]

I tend to use multiple desktops for this kind of thing so I'm not sure where the advantage is to have different apps sharing the same title bar and window size/area. But it could be a visual association thing which gives this value. Much like how the Compiz cube desktop was what it took to get the point across to MS Windows users of the concept of multiple desktops.

If this has a way of saving the multi window title bar configuration then this is a big win IMO. A feature of OS/2's Workplace shell which was amazingly useful was the feature of a folder where you enabled a "workspace" attribute on that folder. When a folder was a "workspace" then if you had 4 files in that folder open and closed the folder, all those files would be closed too and the next time you opened that workspace folder, those files would be opened and their windows located and sized as they were when closed. Give me something _that_ with this tabbed titlebar and it would be a big step forward in my book.

LoB

Re:Oh, FFS ...

[ShakaUVM]

>>It's not the same thing. With windows containing tabs for multiple applications and/or documents, you don't have one taskbar; you have as many "taskbars" as you have windows open.

This is good design for large numbers of open windows. This is not good design for small numbers of open windows.

I have four windows open right now. 1 Adobe Acrobat, 3 Firefox. Titles showing on all the windows so I know what they are.

On XP, it's a single click to the bottom of the screen to switch windows.

With Tabbed Browsing in Firefox - which I refuse to use (thanks, Tabkiller) due to the reasons in this post - I'd have to click twice to switch to the window I want: once on the bottom of the screen to go to Firefox, and then once at the top of the screen to pick my tab. This is stupid and annoying, so I use tabkiller. (Unfortunately, the Firefox guys were so enamored with tabbed browsing that they put in no native ability to disable tabs into the browser, and Tabkiller bugs out occasionally.)

On Win7, I have to mouse to the bottom of the screen, hover, and then click on the window that I want. I then (if tabs are enabled) have to mouse up to the top of the screen to pick the tab that I want. In other words, this is the slowest method yet of switching Windows.

So in summary, FUCK YOU WIN7. I wanted common operations to be easier in Windows 7, but it didn't happen. So yeah, I guess I Didn't Make Windows 7(tm).

Re:Oh, FFS ...

[Anonymous Coward]

"With windows containing tabs for multiple applications and/or documents, you don't have one taskbar; you have as many "taskbars" as you have windows open."

So it's a minor change to the multiple virtual desktops idea? Just replace "windows" with "virtual desktops" in the quote above.

Ubuntu/Gnome has this as a default. Windows XP has some small tool from MS that enables virtual desktops, etc. You just click a button on the taskbar et voila, you are in another desktop-taskbar-application-grouping-thingamajig-environment.

Sounds like another "Uuhh random-buzzword sound so hip and cool and trendy, let's call it random-buzzword!" idea ;)

Re:Oh, FFS ...

[KlaymenDK]

Good news: That's basically what vlm's suggestion (kpager + unchecked option) gets you.

Using virtual desktops (or "pages" or "screens" or whatever), each having a separate task bar that shows only the apps on that desktop, you can easily have this:

Screen 1: Text editor: file 1, browser: some related tabs, other app X
Screen 2: Text editor: file 2, browser: some related tabs, other app Y
Screen n: Text editor: file n, browser: some related tabs, other app Z

The task bar of each screen would then show three tabs: the text editor, the browser (which is handling its tabs internally), and the other app.

I use this all the time; I have my email on one screen, my fun and games on another, and system stuff (current compilation etc) on yet another. For browsing (in Firefox), I often keep a number of slashdot articles on tabs in one window, while I have my work stuff in another window -- it even doubles as a quick "boss key". :-)

Re:Oh, FFS ...

[Bill_the_Engineer]

The functionality you are wanting is already present in OS X. It's called Spaces. You can group your your windows together (any way you like) within a single desktop, and switch between desktops with a hot key. Gnome, KDE, and Windows have this functionality as well.

Re:Oh, FFS ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you could use IE8 which provides access to each tab in the hover list instead of each window. Don't blame MS for Firefox's shortcomings here.

You have no idea how GOOD this is

[morphles]

Ok let me say this, i have been using fluxbox for a long time, and it has this feature, some time ago i switched to kde for more "modern" feel, but i have always missed window tabbing.
People that say it shit, let me tell you this you have no clue how great this is.

Let me say this, there are people that are all gimp , blender UI sucks (hold on i know this seems out of the blue), and mac this mac that, or best *Windows* users who have not seen *Window* manager.
And all these people have no idea how life changing such thing as tabbed windows can be, and also focus follows mouse.

Now probably here pops a lot of people that goes something like this: "oh i tried this and it suck" or something like that. Well then i bet you haven't tried it enough. Cause if you get used to focus follows mouse, click to focus becomes super retarded. And id Say even more with window tabbing. Of course you should have multiple desktops to fully utilize this feature. And there is a lot of people who don even understand how good that is.

My point is there are a lot of people that bitch about fsf/oss software interfaces, while most of them are stuck with stone age interfaces, and don't know better.
Or people think hard to learn = hard to use (never mind that hard to learn most of the time means, i'm very lazy to learn something new, so I'll just say interface i don't know sucks).

I know the part about you haven't tried enough seems harsh or something like that, but its just that i know how easily/quickly people give up.

Re:You have no idea how GOOD this is

[Anonymous Coward]

Focus follows mouse (FFM) is really dumb (I used it for a year and a half, so don't tell me that I haven't used it enough). The really obvious problem with FFM is that you have a mouse pointer over the top of the very window that you're working in. So, you have some of what you're trying to work with obscured.

You also have some of what you're trying to work with obscured if you try to work in a window which is behind the frontmost one, which is possible with FFM. So you can't see what you're doing. You could alleviate this by having widows come forward when focussed, but this looks extraordinarily messy and distracting when you're moving your mouse around.

If you can work without being able to see what you're doing, why do you need a mouse, or a monitor at all. If you actually do need to see what you're interacting with, FFM is a world a failure.

Now on to the real topic. KDE should just sort out their window management. Since the advent of Exposé on Mac OS X, I've essentially stopped using tabbed browsing for all but the instance where I have a whole bunch of links from a main page, and want to look at the sequentially when I'm done. Every other situation where I used to find tabbed browsing beneficial has been replaced by Exposé. I cannot think of an instance where having a heterogenous collection of items in a single window would be of benefit. The only time that I see tabs being useful is when they are used to store a sequence of similar items.

The organisational characteristics of this idea are much better served by multiple desktops. Then you can keep related windows together, and you can flick between them using the taskbar on each of the desktops, or you can look at a few of the windows at the same time, copy work between them, whatever you need to do.

I simply don't see what the problem is that this idea makes any headway toward solving.

Re:You have no idea how GOOD this is

[93 Escort Wagon]

Whoa. You need to cut back on the caffeine, buddy.

Re:You have no idea how GOOD this is

[Anonymous Coward]

Focus follows mouse (FFM) is really dumb (I used it for a year and a half, so don't tell me that I haven't used it enough). The really obvious problem with FFM is that you have a mouse pointer over the top of the very window that you're working in. So, you have some of what you're trying to work with obscured.

Good God, how fucking big is your mouse pointer? And how easily are you to distract so that a mouse pointer - that YOU control! - gets in your way?

You also have some of what you're trying to work with obscured if you try to work in a window which is behind the frontmost one, which is possible with FFM. So you can't see what you're doing. ...

And how exactly is that problem limited to FFM?

People are still trying to reinvent all the usability features from NextStep and even OpenLook over a decade later - both of those were a helluva lot more usable than anything out there today. I'd damn near kill for a good up-to-date OpenLook implementation combined with a good Sun keyboard with all the Again/Undo/Front/Open/Cut/Paste buttons on the left. I did better writing code under OpenLook using textedit than all the fancy GUIs available now. CTRL-C/CTRL-V? Eff that overly complex multi-keystroke/multi-mouse-click crap.

Re:You have no idea how GOOD this is

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Now probably here pops a lot of people that goes something like this: "oh i tried this and it suck" or something like that. Well then i bet you haven't tried it enough.

I've tried it (FFM) for years and still use it and I've formally tested it in usability studies. Focus follows mouse is a useful UI feature, but it does not work with permanently positioned menus, which are an even bigger usability win.

Or people think hard to learn = hard to use (never mind that hard to learn most of the time means, i'm very lazy to learn something new, so I'll just say interface i don't know sucks).

Learnability is just one aspect of usability, and you're absolutely right that it is not the only function thereof. Take single button trackpads (not mice, trackpads), for example. They win on learnability of novice users. They fail on learnability for moderate users, who are already used to two buttons, but are unwilling to learn to use a keyboard key for chording. They win for advanced users who are willing to learn chording because they are faster once learned than two button trackpads. Mostly this has been supplanted by multi-touch now, but for the longest time this held true and usability experts all pretty much agreed based on the studies, but normal users did not understand, would not believe, and constantly spread misinformation based upon their own misguided opinions.

My point is there are a lot of people that bitch about fsf/oss software interfaces, while most of them are stuck with stone age interfaces, and don't know better.

I make a point of using multiple interfaces daily and being current on all of them. The same holds true for pretty much everything. Windows users complain about Linux, despite having never used it as their daily OS nor bothered to learn the major interface elements. But Linux users are just as loud bout complaining about OS X, while most clearly have never used it for more than 10 minutes since they don't even know what the user interface elements implemented in it are. I've tried to do comparisons of the strengths and weaknesses of major OS's many times, including soliciting opinions from Slashdot users. The results are frustrating, with greater than 90% of comments being from persons who clearly do not use or understand one of the two OS's they are comparing. This holds true for UI elements as well as most other aspects of OS's.

Re:You have no idea how GOOD this is

[A Life in Hell]

Wait, if you hated FFM so much, why did you use it for a year and a half?

Re:You have no idea how GOOD this is

[morphles]

Yeah i admit that i haven't used used mac os x much, well it should add up to like 3-5hrs overall. I know thats not much, but enough to feel the distinctive feature of mac os x: one menu for all windows. It's not bad thing, saves vertical screen space. But i don't like it because there is totaly no way this could be used with focus follows mouse, witch i consider more useful feature. Now even more personal thing, after like 2 years of using focus follows mouse, i decided to disable "click rasess" (that means that window can only be rased by clicking on border/titlebar or in a task bar) at first it seemed a little "WTF" (i had the same perception with focus follows mouse for first couple days when i tried it) but then i have seen how useful this is, especially if you have to copy/paste a lot.

Of course i understand that such thing like focus follows mouse are for more advanced users only, computer newbies are confused even without this, and if they would have to always look where the mouse is i think it would be much harder for them (although skill gained by this should be useful later on i guess).

Id say we can split all users in 3 categories:
newbies or low users, who use one app at a time, for them there is totally no difference in usability be it Windows, Mac OS X, or one of *nix/Linux WM styles, they have one window and are happy with it; Second group would be someone who use few apps at a time, i'd say 2-5, then the best thing for them i thin should be multiple desktops, switching between desktops using hotkeys is WAY faster and more intuitive then hunting for windows on task-bar or dock; And then heawy users, like me sometimes, i always have 8 desktops, and sometimes several apps/windows per desktop. Then focus follows mouse and tabbed windows should be better than mac style menus.

One type of apps that would GREATLY benefit from tabbed windows are instant messengers/skype. Such app have main window, and then window per chat. If your talking with several people, then task-bar and alt-tab becomes very cumbersome to use, but using tabbed windows you can manage skype/im apps windows very nicely and neatly. Same goes for browser. if you have a lot of tabs you might one to have another window, and it you can tab windows it's very nice hierarchy, same for terminals, text editor when programming etc.

Re:You have no idea how GOOD this is

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

one menu for all windows. It's not bad thing, saves vertical screen space. But i don't like it because there is totaly no way this could be used with focus follows mouse, witch i consider more useful feature.

The more important benefit of a single menu for everything is it is simply, much, much faster to access with a mouse. Users develop muscle memory because the menus are always in the same place and because they border the edge of the screen, they are essentially infinite in one dimension for mouse users. Most users never notice the speed difference because when they're accessing menus they are concentrating on the task and the perception of time's passage is greatly affected by that; but a formal usability study shows significant speed differences.

Of course i understand that such thing like focus follows mouse are for more advanced users only, computer newbies are confused even without this, and if they would have to always look where the mouse is i think it would be much harder for them (although skill gained by this should be useful later on i guess).

Most good user interfaces scale with the user. That is to say, they are easy to learn and easy to use for new users, but you can layer more complexity on top for advanced users. What you want to avoid is multiple methods for the same task, where an novice user can be stuck in an advanced user mode with no easy way out. A good example of this is mouse buttons. Chording or multitouch allows the same interface to work as expected for both types of users. Two physical buttons that have to be changed by changing hardware result in novice users mistakenly clicking the wrong button about 20% of the time. This is still one of the biggest usability failures of modern computing. Thankfully we're moving towards laptops and trackpads allowing for the problem to be overcome in the near future.

Id[sic] say we can split all users in 3 categories

We can, but a good interface should scale smoothly up as users become more proficient rather than changing drastically at some point. You go on to point out UI elements you like and which you think would be best for others. I've learned from long experience, you can't guess about these things. You can try different things, but you have to test everything and can't be attached to something cool, when testing shows it causes problems for users overall.

Personally, when I'm using text based programs like text editors, terminals, word processors, etc. I think keyboard tabbing is the fastest way to switch windows. You don't have to take your hands off the keyboard and if it is a tiered tab system (one command to switch app another for window) it scales very well even into hundreds of windows and tabs. Of course that is a learnability trade off, as it is harder for new users even if it scales better for advanced users. It is similar to multiple desktops, but without as much work on the part of users for setting up the desktops. It can also automatically switch your desktop in the process for those of us that like that feature. When using graphical applications I find that mapping a mouse button or gesture to an expose-like feature is faster by far than switching desktops and then moving the mouse onto the right window. It instantly puts all the windows in place and then you have the same behavior/workflow as mouse follows cursor.

Realistically, though, it is not what is fastest for you or I that should be targeted. It is what works best for the widest range of users when formally tested.

This has been around for much longer

[Anonymous Coward]

Window managers like fluxbox have been doing this for quite some time [years/ages/aons -ed.] and compiz also offers the option to tab windows together, some people like it but most people don't use it.

My guess is that unless KDE is doing something drastically different to make people see the need/usefulness of the feature you won't see this taking of much....

Tabs are an abomination!

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, I despise tabs. I like plain regular windows. I turn off tabs in IE, firefox, and every other application I can.

Why? I like to alt-tab between all of my windows. It's a fast & easy way to cycle between different programs. With tabs I first have to switch to the application, then switch to the right tab with different keyboard shortcuts (and some applications don't have keyboard shortcuts to switch between tabs).

Death to tabs!

There are lots of tabbed WMs out there

[Rufus211]

I've been using the Ion window manager for years. The principle behind it is keyboard-controlled tabbed and tiled windows. There's an entire wiki list of similar tiling window managers, which are all also tabbed window managers. Ion will also let you create non-tilled windows that are still tabbed, so exactly what KDE is now doing.

WMs that can do this have been around forever, but it's nice that they're finally going more "mainstream". I'm still never going to use KDE or Gnome (way to heavyweight), but it's nice that they might be a more reasonable option in the future.

Re:There are lots of tabbed WMs out there

[Anonymous Coward]

Flux box has also had this feature for years... not turned on by default, and I don't use it, but it is there.

Seems like most of the "New features" in any more main street system (kde, gnome, windows, mac os) are rip off's of other less popular systems.

I'm waiting for the slash dot article about this new feature that is going to be included in either windows 7 service pack x or windows 8... then I can post that KDE has had it for years...

Re:There are lots of tabbed WMs out there

[Anonymous Coward]

Whenever people say things like "X is too resource heavy" I wonder WTF they are using the rest of their cpu cycles or memory for. I mean, RAM is incredibly cheap, I wonder how much time they are wasting with their "better, lighter" WM... I just bought 4GB of RAM and don't worry about it!

Re: tab versus minimize

[macraig]

Yes, because clicking on a tiny little tab with truncated text in it is SOOOoooo much better than clicking on a tiny little minimized button with truncated text.

Blurring the lines

[gmuslera]

Chrome OS proposes that the apps are in the web, and put each page in a tab (or a separate window). This KDE proposal goes the other way around. All are native apps, and you can put them in a browser-like windows, tabs included. Microsoft should had done that first, as their business is more focused in apps than in web (even worse, they dont have native virtual desktops as alternate app organization/grouping as KDE), and blurring that line putting their apps on a new, web-like environment looks like an approach they should have used a while ago.

Something nice that have Konsole (that could be seen as a tabbed apps interface at least, even if they are console based apps) is to show in which have been some activity while arent the front tab, maybe they are adding this feature too (if have a meaning for non-console apps, of course).

Wonder if will be able to manipulate those tabs as in Chrome/Mozilla, dragging a tab to the desktop to create a new separate window with it, or dragging a window to another to put it as a new tab there. And if that will have some conflict with those browser apps that already do the same.

Tab bars versus taskbars? WTF?

[macraig]

It's rather disappointing that even now there are still people who think that "bars" crammed full of "tabs" with truncated text are somehow a game-changing paradigm shift compared to "bars" crammed full of "buttons" with truncated text.

More of the same, please!

Fluxbox Already Has This

[thePsychologist]

And has had it for years. It's useful for things like grouping together PDF documents, or say, a separate terminal window to Gvim for coding and compiling, or the like.

Screenshots?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure. Just use Google.

How about making it stable?

[SlightOverdose]

So far I've tried several releases of KDE4 and every one of them has been buggy as hell. Constant crashes, graphics glitches, and general random unpolished fuckups.

How about locking down functionality for a few months and focusing on stability? It's gotten so bad I've switched over to Gnome after many, MANY years of being an adamant KDE supporter.

Re:How about making it stable?

[Lemming Mark]

I've found the desktop reasonably stable since the KDE 4.1-4.2 era but I have also found that the experience varies a bit between distros. It's worth trying it out under a distro with a known-solid KDE 4 implementation before making a final judgement. (You may have already tried this, just thought it was worth noting).

No, they won't.

[amn108]

The next big thing will be when they will finally make computers work more for people than the other way around.

Re:No, they won't.

[Sanat]

Amen

Re:No, they won't.

[Rennt]

Hold you tongue! We'll all be out of a job.

Tabbed interface in Windows 3.11

[Bryansix]

My first computer was a Compaq Presario with a Pentium 75 processor and a 650 Megabyte hard drive. It came with Windows 3.1x (not sure the exact version) but it came out the same year Windows 95 was released because I only used that operating system for a short amount of time.

What I remember distinctly is that Compaq included this program which had a tabbed interface for organizing your applications which when I upgraded the Windows 95 the "Start Menu" felt like a downgrade.

Re:Tabbed interface in Windows 3.11

[Anonymous Coward]

TabWorks?

Here's a couple of screenshots, for anyone not familiar with it:
http://www.smartcomputing.com/images/smartcomputing/fullsize/393n1209.jpg
http://museum.reichel-orbital.de/index.php?page=presario425

In place of the Program Manager and its desktop, you had a "book" full of color-coded tabs, with a dock-like bar at the left for your most-used apps. Much less ungainly to navigate, IMHO, than some Start menus I've seen. From what little I remember, you could also create multiple "books" if one wasn't big enough for your tab groupings, or if someone else in the house had different preferences.

Dockable windows and toolbars in the WM please

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking beyond tabs, I'd like to see 'dockable' windows and toolbars into the domain of the window manager: the application presents separate windows to the window manager, and the window manager makes these features available to all apps: pinning them side-by-side, tabbing them etc.

This takes away yet more pain from application developers, makes it available for all apps. Importantly it allows more flexibility beyond what the application developer anticipated: when a user has multiple monitors (including different sized ones) or a virtual desktop.

I've often found I'm restricted by the app when I want to put a toolbar on a separate monitor, or tear off a sub-window onto a separate virtual desktop. If they were truly separate X windows, my window manager could look after this.

Windows 1.0

[Kayamon]

Isn't this basically Windows 1.0? All applications tiled onto fullscreen?

What goes around comes around...

Boring...

[Anonymous Coward]

Boring. Useless. I can do the same thing with the task bar. If I REALLY need multiple windows open I use my multiple monitors (WAY more useful).

Why maximize?

[ThrowAwaySociety]

Maximizing made sense when we were all using 640x480 screens. Every pixel was precious and had to be dedicated to the task at hand.

Today, with huge, HD-resolution widescreens becoming standard, it really doesn't make much sense. I'd much rather use the extra space to display two files side-by-side than one file with lots of extra blank space. Even if I don't have enough space to show both of them completely, I'd rather have one of them peeking out to the side than covered up completely.

Re:Why maximize?

[Ark42]

And what about a tabbed and paned interface loses the ability to see two windows side by side? You can easily have 3 windows maximized at once, with different panes and drag bars between them for resizing the 3 workspaces. I'm just talking about getting rid of the window borders and crap you don't need in order to work with multiple windows at once.

Re:Why maximize?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I think the communications failure here is no one is quoting the portion of the other's comment they are referring to. Let me try to clarify:

Pretty much a big failure on OS X that their Maximize doesn't even always make a window full screen.

Maximizing made sense when we were all using 640x480 screens. Every pixel was precious and had to be dedicated to the task at hand.

And what about a tabbed and paned interface loses the ability to see two windows side by side?

Nothing about tabbed and paned, but everything about a maximize button that always takes up the whole screen instead of maximizing the content. You see, if the button to expand a window makes that window take up the whole screen, even when there is not enough content to fit, then you can't see other open windows, like a second window that you would otherwise be able to see next to it. Hence, the expand button in OS X leaves it up to the app developer to decide if their application is one that should expand to fill the screen (like movie viewers and most games) or expand to show all content (like text editors and terminals). It was a smart UI choice, that gets a lot of negative comments from people who have not used it and know nothing about UI design.

Re:Why maximize?

[ThrowAwaySociety]

And what about a tabbed and paned interface loses the ability to see two windows side by side? You can easily have 3 windows maximized at once, with different panes and drag bars between them for resizing the 3 workspaces. I'm just talking about getting rid of the window borders and crap you don't need in order to work with multiple windows at once.

Nothing. I'm a big fan of tabbed, windowed interfaces. I was talking about maximizing only.

Positively Entirely Absolutely Not

[billsayswow]

If you think about it, the greatness of tabs as they are now is to avoid clutter in your taskbar by bundling multiple iterations of the same program into one window. I could see tabbing expanding into other programs, perhaps, but the taskbar as it is now serves, essentially, as tabbing of different programs already. Tabbed windows would only be a novelty, or serve a niche market, such as people who use many, many programs at once, or people on netbooks who use a moderate number of programs at once.

KDE SC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that a fork of KDE?

Re:Tab bars versus taskbars? WTF?

[Xiaran]

I don't think it game changing. But there is the important difference that I only have one taskbar. With my browsing I will tend to have multiple browser windows each with multiple tabs... each window will be a different "topic" such as a particular thing I'm looking up... or a personal window with my email etc. If people are using tabs and only have one browser window then I think they are doing it wrong.

Not a new feature but new in a big DE, I think

[Lemming Mark]

Don't think GNOME has done this, don't know about XFCE. Compiz can do it, plus at least some basic tiling I think. And obviously not on Win or Mac. So KDE it the most "mainstream" desktop to have tabbed windows so far. But it's far from a new invention. There has also been talk of tiling support for KWin, the KDE window manager, which would make it even more useful. Various window managers using tabbing / tiling exist, such as ion, dwm, wmii, Xmonad, etc. They're nice but I missed the integration of having a full DE (though you can get it if you try). Partiwm is a project to create a more DE-friendly tabbing window manager but AFAICS it's gone a bit off track since its creator invented xpra and concentrated on that instead...

Friends of mine have observed that tabbing in the WM makes a lot of sense. Tab together a load of single browser instances and you have a multi-process web browser. OK, so it's not quite Chrome in security features but it's a heck of a lot simpler. Tab a load of terminals together and get a slick multi-terminal app. Tab OpenOffice together with your web browser whilst you're writing a report and researching stuff online. Tab together emacs + console running LaTeX + PDF viewer and get an integrated development environment for scientific papers. Nice.

I'm exaggerating the simplicity slightly but the point is that things are far more flexible if commonly-needed features (how many apps use tabs these days) are provided by the platform where possible.

Re:Not a new feature but new in a big DE, I think

[jonaskoelker]

Tab together emacs + console running LaTeX + PDF viewer and get an integrated development environment for scientific papers. Nice.

I think that's what M-x shell and workspaces are for. Yeah okay, I cheat and using a tiling window manager (emacs) on top of another window manager which I use to just switch between two windows (when I'm on the scientific-papers workspace).

But I don't think tabs will revolutionize the way I work.

Maybe I just haven't gotten the point of them yet? Maybe I overfill my keyboard with shortcuts for other things so I can't find the room for shortcuts it takes to create tabs and switch between them efficiently?

Re:Not a new feature but new in a big DE, I think

[drinkypoo]

I was just going to post how to turn on group and tab windows on Ubuntu Karmic, but I just turned it on and it doesn't work. I've used it before... I wonder if Ubuntu or Compiz fucked this up, they both have long histories of breaking good things.

Re:Not a new feature but new in a big DE, I think

[Anonymous Coward]

While it may not be exactly the same thing, doesn't this feature already exists in OSX and a whole lot of *ix systems as virtual desktops?

I'm most familar with the OSX version, but if you combine Spaces (Apple's virtual desktop implementation) where you can put specific document windows and Expose which lets you easily switch between them it pretty much does just that.

True, the alt-tab does not work well since it shows all apps active and not just the ones in that specific space, but that is why you use expose to show only the windows in that 'space'.

The benefit is that you can arrange a space to see multiple documents at once.

At least that is how I use it...

Re:Not a new feature but new in a big DE, I think

[Lemming Mark]

Emacs 23 can actually embed a PDF viewer, can't it? So perhaps my example wasn't particularly well chosen since one can do it all already :-) FWIW I currently do exactly as you do! On my papers desktop I have a fullscreen emacs and fullscreen Okular and Alt-Tab between them (and sometimes a web browser for looking stuff up).

A more salient example is perhaps how I (used to) use Konqueror as a universal document browser: I'd browse the web in various tabs but also have PDF viewers open in others and file managers in yet others. It had a nice task-grouping property (e.g. windows relating to researching a particular topic, windows relating to generic browsing) that I've lost in recent years since I started playing with Firefox / Chrome. It would be pretty nice to be able to get the grouping ability back without the developers of these applications having to miraculously agree on a style (and embedding API) that fits my workflow. With WM support you could even tab a Windows app running under Wine, or a remote app over X forwarding / NX / xpra, which could be sweet. And when administering virtual machines I'd love to be able to tab together the VNC viewers.

Another thing is that (in *some* ways) it just seems like better software engineering to have tabs implemented outside applications - Windows has an extension to enable tabbed applications to preview their tabs when you mouse-over the taskbar. AFAIK only IE supports that currently. If it's implemented in the window manager then it's trivial to support that for all apps. And the apps themselves can potentially be simpler.

I don't think this would be revolutionary for me (that'll have to wait until there's full tiling support) but I think it'd be somewhat useful - and I can think of various ways it might be extended to make things even better.

Re:Not a new feature but new in a big DE, I think

[rovolo]

I don't think your examples are quite accurate. For emacs + console + PDF you want to see all of them at the same time, rather than hidden behind tabs. I think a more apt metaphor would be frames where the sides of applications stick together: that would be much more handy. Groups of app already have tabs—they're called workspaces.

Tabs work well in browsers because you don't need interoperability between webpages that often. Somebody will find a use for attaching apps together, but that feature isn't the revolutionary bit; tabs for every application for free is.

Re:Not a new feature but new in a big DE, I think

[Lemming Mark]

They're accurate for me ;-) But maybe I'm weird. I don't usually want to see emacs and console and PDF at the same time because if I'm editing the document in emacs the PDF will be out-of-date already. My current solution to this is to have emacs editor plus emacs shell running (I do often do that side-by-side but not always) in maximised emacs, plus a PDF viewer in another maximised window. The sequence is then edit in emacs -> compile in console -> view in PDF viewer. This might vary for others though.

Also, a tabbed workflow is something I'd be more likely to use on my netbook where I'm short on screen space than on my desktop. So it's a bit of a YMMV, I think.

Re:Not a new feature but new in a big DE, I think

[Gunstick]

well it's all nice but I don't like clicking every time I want to chenge application. Better have them in separate windows.
So it would be rather better to have tabbed desktops, or just plain simple desktops. Oh we already have that :-)

What I really like is focus follows mouse without automatic window raising. That's my most effective working setup.

Re:Not a new feature but new in a big DE, I think

[Lemming Mark]

Agreed about not using clicking; I'd only really want the tabbing if I could switch using a keyboard shortcut.

It does seem maybe a bit redundant to having both virtual desktops and window tabbing but I think I'd use the extra level of "categorisation" it gives - in some circumstances anyhow.

Focus-follows-mouse is my preference but weirdly I'm finding it much less useful these days since I got the habit maximising everything and using apps with tabbing / tiling + keyboard navigation internally. Tried using tabbed window managers a bit and liked it but never found one that quite suited me.

Re:More useless stuff from the KDE team

[HBoar]

Oh really? Like pretty much everything else in KDE, I'm sure one will be able to disable this feature if it isn't wanted. How is adding new features 'shooting themselves in the foot'? If no one likes the feature, no one will use it, and it will probably die. However, there is a good chance that some will find it useful. Software would never improve if they listened to people like you.

Re:More useless stuff from the KDE team

[Jeremy Erwin]

I thought that Linux users were supposed to react to the absence of choice by coding their own.

Re:Tab bars versus taskbars? WTF?

[Lemming Mark]

I personally like the idea of having tabbed windows, however in support of your argument it's worth noting that KDE 4 already supports arbitrary drag-n-drop grouping of apps into named taskbar buttons: http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3864

Can someone make the tabs almost disappear, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine how much more productive you could be if you were able to make a window much smaller when you don't need to access that application, but still want that application to keep running.

I'm struggling to name that concept, though.

Multiple Document Interface - Not Taskbar

[syousef]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_document_interface

Only difference is it's usually a menu that changes between maximised documents. We've had this in Windows for a very long time, but it's fallen out of favour. Doing it tabbed based might be the fashion of the day but won't get over the issues that led to its decrease in popularity.

BeOS

[Anonymous Coward]

BeOS did tabbed windows years ago.

This is nothing new.

Re:BeOS

[Narishma]

Those were just title bars rendered to looked like tabs, but you couldn't group different windows together.

Re:BeOS

[Blakey Rat]

You certainly could in version 4. I don't know about previous versions.

Re:BeOS

[izomiac]

True, although you could slide the tabs around and almost replicate the feature. Haiku has improved in this area and has a feature called Stack and Tile.

Re:BeOS

[Lemming Mark]

KDE's BeOS window manager style allows you to move the tabs around the top of the window with a shift-drag (and/or attempts to avoid tabs getting hidden by moving them itself, not entirely sure how it works), which helps for tabbed-ish operation. Not as nice as a proper tabbing window manager but the BeOS style has been in KDE since forever. Could TWM do this, I wonder? I've seen that themed to look like BeOS although given its level of sophistication as a WM the theme was probably just "made the tabs yellow" ;-)

Re: tab versus minimize

[Anonymous Coward]

That is one problem windows has had for 20 years now. They even have a FREAKING REGISTRY KEY to change the minimum width of a taskbar button. They've had it since win95 I believe. What do they do instead with win7? Get rid of text! Then you don't have it truncated! And you can turn the text back on, and then you still have to change the registry key to get it to be usable width! Even moreso now that the default monitor is widescreen. Kinda ridiculous by now.

Fluxbox

[Anonymous Coward]

Fluxbox has this feature... And for about five or six years, or more. You middle-click a window in the title bar and then drag it to another window, and then the title bar will be split among the two joined windows, or if the user wants, it will appear as a space consuming tab over the title bar.

Wrong

[CrashNBrn]

Windows has had multiple desktops since Win98 (or before).

Google: Virtual Desktop

VirtuaWin - Virtual Desktops for Windows
VirtualWin provides virtual desktops for the Windows operating system much in the same way Linux/Unix does.

I've also seen Beta-software: Deskloops v2.0.1.0 (2007) - which tended to be somewhat buggy, but let you create Windows to contain other windows/apps.

More likely TaskBar customization will arise that allows customIcons to conain multiple apps/windows than a dated Tab implementation.

Re:Wrong

[Bwerf]

I've used VirtuaWin, and a bunch of other virtual desktop apps for Windows. And I have to agree with crispytwo (windows has nothing useful). That said, I'd be very happy if someone could prove me wrong.

Re:Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Litestep worked just fine with win95, and the default theme at that time included a virtual desktops app.

Having said that, *Windows* has not had multiple desktops since then. Third party addon apps have. Does windows itself have multiple desktops yet?

Re:Wrong

[stonedcat]

Thank god, someone else who remembers litestep, everyone else thinks I'm crazy.
I hear windows 7 has them? But I'm not going to bother finding out for sure because I don't care.

Re:Wrong

[Zero__Kelvin]

Right, and Windows has had a flight simulator since before that, because I could buy one and install it! DOS also has Banking software! (I don't think "has" means what you think it does.)

Re:Wrong

[Zero__Kelvin]

"(Windows has nothing useful)"

There, I fixed that for you ;-)

Re:Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has offered a virtual desktop manager in PowerToys for years.

Re:Wrong

[traycerb]

dexpot is free (though not open source) and very customizable. It has a few idiosyncracies (e.g. can't drag a window by a title bar to a different desktop), but even with them, it's better than the many other solutions I've tried.

Re:Wrong

[Gadget_Guy]

Having said that, *Windows* has not had multiple desktops since then. Third party addon apps have.

That is not exactly fair. The entire philosophy of Linux is to have third party programs providing extensions. Linux itself can't do multiple desktops because it requires a third party package to handle the graphics and then another one to provide the desktop environment.

There is less of a need for more than one desktop on Windows because of the tendancy for Windows users to maximise every damn application that they run. Even with high resolution widescreen monitors I see some of my users diving for the maximise button, which irritates me. Why the hell did we get fancy monitors for them!

Re:Wrong

[Spyware23]

BBLean and Litestep (shell replacement software for Windows) both have themes available which emulate multiple desktops.

Re:Wrong

[jedidiah]

> Windows has had multiple desktops since Win98 (or before).

No. Not really.

It's had a few pisspoor attempts at clones that would annoy anyone used to proper multiple desktops.

Re:Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Virtual Dimensions is by far the best I've used. Its superior to the ones I've used in Linux or any of the other Windows ones. The second best was Norton Desktop for Win95, which had beautiful shell integration, but of course its non-functional by now.

Re:Wrong

[hairyfeet]

I'd have to put my vote in for AltDesk as being the best virtual desktop I've seen for Windows. Not free but works on every version of Windows from 98se to Windows 7 64bit, plenty of hotkey customizations, and if you really want to get fancy integrate it with Aston 2 for a truly custom desktop any way you want it.

After trying Altdesk and AstonShell on my Win2K years ago I don't think I could go back to the 2K/XP way of doing things. I'm using Windows 7 with Rocketdock to replicate some of the functionality I had on my old Astonshell but I think I'll probably go back to Aston. It is just too easy to customize the workspace for YOUR way of doing things. Both have free trails if anybody wants to give them a spin for 30 days and both are really nice and solid pieces of software that let you customize your Windows experience far more than I thought was possible.

For multiple desktops in Windows i would have to give AltDesk two big thumbs up.

Re:Wrong

[jhol13]

How does it handle pop-ups?

The biggest problem with VirtuaWin is that e.g. Outlook alert are not "always on top" and not visible on all desktops.

This alone means that VirtuaWin is hugely worse than anything on *NIX.

Re:Wrong

[jhol13]

Maximizing windows increases need for multiple desktops, not decreases.

For example in EeePC with small screen it is extremely nice to be able to maximize Firefox and run other applications on other desktops. Same with bigger screens too (I could not live without VirtuaWin on WIndows though it is a toy compared to Gnome/KDE/...).

Re:Wrong

[mspohr]

I have to agree this drives me crazy. We have huge wide screens where I work and I see all of the clueless running Outlook full screen. When they compose a message they get about 50 words across the full screen. Long messages will wrap to two whole lines!

Re:Wrong

[Beale]

And it never really worked very well, if I recall.

Re:Wrong

[tehcyder]

Even with high resolution widescreen monitors I see some of my users diving for the maximise button, which irritates me. Why the hell did we get fancy monitors for them!

Most normal people can only concentrate at one thing at a time, however much people blather on about "multi-tasking". So, especially at work, it makes sense to have one application maximised at a time.

Re:This is just the dumbest thing I have ever hear

[Zhiroc]

This is what workspaces are for--to group windows together for a certain task. I have a GNOME desktop, and while I lament on the amount of CPU it seems to use, it has a pretty good model, particularly if you turn on the "group windows together on the taskbar" (something that I *don't* like on Windows, btw, because of the lack of workspaces).

It's even better when you have two monitors. However, I don't like the one-big-workspace-across-both model. I'd rather be able to select a workspace for each, though I'd go beyond what I've seen so far, and let one pick a workspace for either out of a common pool (of unlimited size), not a static set for each.

Much better than grouping on the task bar

[thetoadwarrior]

The Windows implementation of grouping windows on the task bar was rather annoying. I would much rather see tabs within the applications.

My favorite solution:

[Hurricane78]

Instead of tabbing windows, have a screen for each window! ^^

Only if the screen becomes too big to be practical (more than your field of view or more than 360 degrees in both directions), go into the third dimension by stacking things.

Then go one step further:

Group your windows into a tree hierarchy. Or even better: A proper full graph. Depending on the things they belong to.

Now if you could just stop having the difference between opened and closed applications, we would already have that. Just make the task bar and the directory structure of your documents folder the same thing, and act as if everything were open all the time.
Then for consistency, remove the in-application tabbing (like in Firefox), an that would just be redundant.

I wonder why the KDE people did not come up with this before, with all their semantic desktop ideas?
Too much fear of the loud retards at the lower (and closer to Windows) end of the bell curve of their target group? ^^

Re:My favorite solution:

[jdogalt]

You sound dangerously close to the kind of young people screwing up Linux distributions. But I do find the core of this idea to be brilliant. I've had similar thoughts in the past, but you've really nailed the heart of the issue. I would love to see a niche distro do this, to let the idea catch on (somehow finding yourself with the authority to make it a new default for a mainstream distro, would be criminal however).

I suppose one implementation would be a filesystem, that stores metadata of application state along with each file. Really, the userspace memory image of the application with the file open would be overkill sufficient. And OS smarts along the lines of VMWware/recent-linux memory de-duplication.

Re:My favorite solution:

[Hurricane78]

Oh god. Who of you losers with mod points have a upset now??

Firefox users? Naah.
KDE users? Unlikely.
loud retards? *PING*

Fun fact: Watch me, not caring. ^^

Ummm, soda

[danwesnor]

I understand they're bringing back Tab, too.

Haiku OS tabbed windows prototype

[GeLeTo]

Haiku OS has a tabbed windows prototype - see a video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccniJHjo_Uw You can skip to 3:40 to see it in action

Re:Haiku OS tabbed windows prototype

[Misagon]

Haiku is a clone of BeOS. BeOS has had tabbed windows for a long time.

paste and go

[Anonymous Coward]

when will firefox implement paste and go,,,as it stands i have to paste something i copy and hit enter

Wonderful

[abulafia]

So I can stick my tabbed windows in a tabbed window? Great! But it would be better if, instead of multiple desktops, I could have a tabbed desktop, because tabs rock! And then VNC should support tabs for the different machines I use.

Re:Wonderful

[lbbros]

And then VNC should support tabs for the different machines I use.

Actually, KRDC does that. You can have several tabs with different connections (and not only VNC, also RDP).

Re:Tab bars versus taskbars? WTF?

[macraig]

You've never heard of taskbar grouping? Windows has had it since XP, and KDE has an even better rendition (windows can be manually grouped, buttons can be re-titled, etc.). How is that massively different than multiple browser windows each with tabs in them? And what of app windows that aren't browsers and don't use tabbing for other instances?

Same paradigm, slightly different application of it.

Oh well since the famous *KDE* is doing it...

[Anonymous Coward]

So "As goes KDE, goes the industry" is the delusion at work here?

Less Simply put

[dov_0]

As someone who argued strongly with the Nautilus team for tabs a couple of years ago, I love tabs in applications. gedit, nautilus, firefox, gnome-terminal etc all have tab capabilities and I find all of them quite useful for having several things running IN THE SAME APPLICATION at once. Tabs within a lot of apps make sense. I find it hard however to find grouping applications together such a useful feature. I like to size my app windows differently, depending on the window layout for instance. The only common use I can really think of is connecting an open file browser window to an app. Past that, laying things out in separate desktops would seem to be a far neater alternative. If I'm really busy, I just double my number of desktops.

This being KDE however, I can kinda understand where they are coming from. They seem to be pushing more and more to become a viable desktop environment alternative for Microsoft Windows as well as in Linux, so tabbing applications could make a lot more sense for MS Windows users who are only used to one desktop.

My real concern however is that while KDE has some absolutely fantastic apps, great code and brilliantly logical ideas behind how they design their desktop environment, I've never found it stable enough to install on anyone's pc. It's just too easy to stuff up the taskbar etc and too busy/confusing for people who aren't very computer literate. In fact I've seen KDE (both 3 and 4) turn those interested in trying Linux into people who really distrust any Linux desktop. It's a real shame as there is a lot of really great work done in KDE.

Re:Less Simply put

[19thNervousBreakdown]

The tricky thing is, what do you do when an app already has its own tabs? Ideally there would be some sort of an API that states whether the WM is capable of application tabbing, and if so, whether it is tabbed, because otherwise you'll end up with a "we put tabs in your tabs so you can tab while you tab" situation, and that's just ridiculous.

Re:Less Simply put

[amRadioHed]

I've never found it stable enough to install on anyone's pc. It's just too easy to stuff up the taskbar etc and too busy/confusing for people who aren't very computer literate.

What exactly do you mean here by not stable? KDE 4.3 is stable as could be on my system. KDE 3.5 was too, although the earlier KDE 4 releases obviously had there problems.

Re:Less Simply put

[dov_0]

I've never found it stable enough to install on anyone's pc. It's just too easy to stuff up the taskbar etc and too busy/confusing for people who aren't very computer literate.

What exactly do you mean here by not stable? KDE 4.3 is stable as could be on my system. KDE 3.5 was too, although the earlier KDE 4 releases obviously had there problems.

By using 'stable' I mean more a stable user experience than straight code. Sure. Things crash. That's part of using software. On occasion things just don't work right, but with KDE I found that it was too easy for users to accidentally remove things from the task bar for example. Even if I had things locked down as much as I could, a simple sweep of the touchpad could have really strange consequences. I had to remove it from 3 or 4 computers after the users wanted to try it out, but found it too hard to use without things going wrong. Sure, none of these people were highly computer literate at all, but KDE is supposed to be easy to use.

Apart from building giveaway computers for disadvantaged students, I currently have pc's running Linux in three rooming houses for international students. I just can't risk putting KDE onto them without writing a script to replace the home folder with a clean default config every boot. Instead, I just configure wonderful, boring old Gnome to look as much like XP as possible, lock everything down so the students can't screw it up and do updates over the network once a fortnight. Half the time I don't even think they realise it's not XP until their pirate copies of Photoshop won't install. By contrast, when my mates had KDE on their pc's I was out every week fixing the stupid things.

Re:Less Simply put

[amRadioHed]

Ok, I suspected that's what you were getting at. You have a point. For instance I think it's too easy to accidentally remove a panel and lose all your customizations. I've seen that on forums a number of times and the users had no idea how to get it back to how it was.

Re:Less Simply put

[dov_0]

The panel was the biggest issue by far, but the general 'exuberance' of the desktop environment put people off a bit. It even took me a while to figure out how to get the panel widgets back after they'd disappeared. It just didn't seem to want to do it and was amazingly frustrating. KDE apps like Dolphin, KPPP and others I have nothing by admiration for. Brilliant pieces of software. I used Dragonplayer myself on my Gnome desktop until I moved over to Mplayer (yes, command line. It's a bit old school, but it works so well.) The ideology behind the structure of KDE4 is very well thought through and quite impressive. The follow through leaves a bit to be desired though...

KDE3 was just too busy. To me it was like a manic depressive woman constantly on manic, or watching Bay Watch in fast motion, with everything bouncing around all the time. Personal preference there though. I found it just too distracting, too much going on. It'll be interesting to see how the crowd at KDE sort out this tabs idea. Hopefully the execution will be as good as the planning this time.

Re:Less Simply put

[amRadioHed]

Nothing wrong with using mplayer! I use it for almost everything except DVDs.

Anyway, I'm confident the usability glitches will be worked out of KDE4 in time. It's still a very young DE. One year ago KDE4 was just barely becoming usable for expert users like us. It's really impressive how fast it's been maturing.

Re:Less Simply put

[Froobly]

Exactly.

I honestly can't see a way this can even work with third-party applications. Either you need a specialized API for tabs (in which case, good luck getting any of the major projects to adopt it), or you sweepingly treat all windows as tabs, in which case you get nested tabs.

From the video that was posted, they've only shown this working with the file manager (or whatever it's called in KDE). Maybe that's all it works for?

Re:Less Simply put

[dov_0]

Strange you say that about mplayer. I use it almost exclusively for DVDs. My mates are pretty much all into Hindi movies, but a lot of players won't play the disks you can get in the markets. Dragonplayer will usually read them well and do the menus/subtitles, but I don't really need the menus most of the time. Mplayer is best for the subtitles and the configuration is so powerful. For flash videos I use totem and for mp3's I use rhythmbox via X forwarding over SSH when playing music on my music/file server (yeah I still use alsamixer to up the volume when I'm across the other side of the house.)

The KDE development crowd are doing a lot of great things. Maybe I should give it another look sometime, but I still find Gnome the easiest to set up for those who are not so computer literate. For me personally, I just use whatever window manager or desktop environment suits what I want to do on that particular machine. Usually gnome, e16 or Xfce. KDE has always let me down no matter how much I admire parts of it.

Re:Less Simply put

[clone53421]

gedit, nautilus, firefox, gnome-terminal etc all have tab capabilities and I find all of them quite useful for having several things running IN THE SAME APPLICATION at once. Tabs within a lot of apps make sense.

Tabs *can* be useful, but they can also prevent you from seeing two things at once.

For instance, it’s a pain to get two spreadsheets opened in Excel side-by-side. It’s much nicer, when you want to view two spreadsheets side-by-side, to just have two separate Excel windows.

Re:Less Simply put

[amRadioHed]

I guess mplayer finally has menu support these days, but I've been using Xine for a long time to play DVDs so I haven't really had a reason to switch. It plays everything I throw at it.

The interface is a bit clunky, but I use a remote with LIRC to control it so I'm never really exposed to it anymore. With menus and the remote it works pretty much like a standard DVD player so it's easy for the girlfriend and guests to use.

I also use the remote to control the system volume, music player, mplayer (for other videos including youtube using youtube-dl), answer calls from skype, TV, and some other random stuff. Pretty nice what you can do with a $30 MS Media Center remote.

Fluxbox has done this for years.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can move arbitrary applications in an out of tabs in other windows, and it's highly configurable.

System resources in the Windows 9x era.

[tepples]

IE 6 used the system taskbar as its tab bar. But between the release of IE 6 and the release of Mozilla Application Suite with tabbed browsing, a lot of PCs still ran Windows 98. Now Windows 9x had a misfeature called "system resources" held over from the Windows 3 days, where certain data structures had to fit in one of two 64 KiB heaps: "user" and "GDI". An application-level tab took less space in system resources than a system-level window.

Fantabulistic!

[bryll]

Great new feature - but not precisely new. It's been in WM's like ion3 and fluxbox for years - I used to damn-near rely on applications tabbed together in ion3's non-tiled workspaces for lots of stuff I was doing several years ago when I worked at a Linux-based dev-shop.

Re:This is just the dumbest thing I have ever hear

[sznupi]

Tabbed browsing doesn't make sense. You have one application, a web browser, with multiple pages, taking up less taskbar space but replicating it inside its window. It's tabbed so you don't have to click on a bunch of minimized windows or use Expose or whatever shiny workalike the Gnome / KDE bunch has now to find what you want on taskbar - you have to do the same in browser window now - and so you aren't cluttering up the desktop with a hundred web browser windows. Instead you clutter browser window.

However, there is something to be said for separating out the different groups of tasks instead of applications and simply clicking the icon or what have you, to switch between them. In fact, isn't that what X-windows has had for about 20 years now in the form of virtual desktops? Sure, the application tab bar goes on the bottom the screen by default, and is called the "Start Menu" but it is essentially, exactly what is proposed here.

Sure, the virtual desktop selector goes on the bottom of the screen by default, beside what's called usually "task bar" but is in reality "launched applications bar", but it is essentially, exactly what is proposed here.

The problem is that you end up filling up the bar at the bottom with two different structures of organization, and then having to collapse the bar in one of several ways, all of which are annoying.

Expose, or whatever the Gnome / KDE equivalent is, is another way of abstracting that.

OK, my quick paraphrasing effort is a bit rough...but does nobody else sees that it's simply a different take on the concept of virtual workspace? With the former "application bar" becoming true task bar, replacing completely distinct virtual desktops with apps grouped inside windows? (with current sizes of screens...)

Another intermediary step between "desktop" and "the window in which I'm working right now". Might be interesting...

Turn your widescreen monitor to portrait

[Anonymous Coward]

Turn your widescreen monitor to portrait.
Or better yet, if you have 2 monitors. 1 portrait (web, text editing) and 1 landscape (spreadsheets, movies, video games).

Microsoft better get started on the patent quickly

[originalhack]

Sounds like a great new UI feature from KDE. Microsoft better get working on their patent application.

Virtual desktops anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm having a hard time imagining how this is useful where virtual desktops aren't. Not that it's a bad idea mind, just sorta redundant.

Everyone's got a preference

[Steeltoe]

I *love* tabs. Excel has had'em for a loong time, even before Mozilla and Opera implemented them I think.

I think every application should basically be given the opportunity to have tabs, because it would free up space on the taskbar. Instead of grouping 4-5 windows under one taskbar button, you could have it all tabbed under one process (hopefully with multiple threads).

What I don't like is having to have my taskbar 3 lines high, and whenever Windows arbitrarily decides its time to group Windows. The grouping requires more clicks, and you forget what is under each group and lose overview.

Tabs in Firefox, Notepad++ and other editors is a big plus for me.

MDI was an UI disaster from day one. What seemed like a good idea, was really just a limitation of binding the UI to one "UI-process". On the other hand, GIMP is even more of a disaster, how it "un-MDI" everything. So we have yet to find a general solution for all kinds of different applications.

This tab-thing, if implemented correctly and consistently throughout an OS could actually meld all these half-baked techniques into one workspace, where YOU decide what workspace to work on and what tasks they consists of, or just default to something sane and simple.

Dunno, why you don't like tabs. I really dislike multiple windows and pop-ups in eg. Firefox more. Although I wish MS Office supported multiple processes, because THAT is really half-baked solution.. Often what you do in one Excel worksheet can affect other worksheets, just because they share the same stupid process. That's not right.

The example would be handy

[Anonymous Coward]

This would be handy for applications like The GIMP and VirtualBox that don't normally support tabbed views (they should though!).

So, like the example in TFA you can make VirtualBox work more like VMware (ie. better).

Whhhaaat?

[Steeltoe]

Sounds like an UI abonmination, unless you REALLY like to give all your memory to Firefox.

What you need is Tab Mix Plus, and set it to use show multiple tab rows (why its not default beats me). Thus, on the occation you need many windows open, you won't run out of space too fast. I hardly see the need to have more than 10-12 open browser-tabs simultaneously regularly though. A tree structure sounds like a nightmare, but whatever, if you're happy about it that's jolly good! For managing simultaneous projects maybe, but as said, you will be handing over all your Gbs to the Firefox beast..

Arrrgh

[Steeltoe]

Your UI sounds like something I would run away from screaming.

But maybe you could get it to work. Who knows? :-)

The panel in OS X is pretty simple and customizable. I like that better, but am stuck with the taskbar and silly grouping and hiding everywhere. All "panel" or "virtual desktop" projects on Windows are just horrible hacks. Most defaults in XP works though, but not as simple and powerful as it could have been. Why do we need desktop icons, start menu, "quick launch", task bar and "notification" icons? If you look at exploder in Vista, the redundancy seems only to be exploding, and not diminishing. Searching is a joke and hopeless unless you're know how to start indexing arcane file extensions again and turn off animated characters, and control panel is just a maze of options everywhere.

The designers in Microsoft should copy much more of Apples designs - blindly rather than trying to think too much by themselves. They just have no clue what makes good design - or they're forced by a clueless management to "make things simple" (but getting the opposite effect by cluttering everywhere). Vista is a big pain to navigate through.. Soo much redundancy.. aah. Glad I upgraded back to XP at least ;-)

And don't get me started of "hiding" menu items in MS Office and the Start Menu. Could you confuse your users more?? Most people don't even know you can turn such fucked up "features" up even! ("Fuck" in this context is entirely justifiable.. ;)

Re:Arrrgh

[Hurricane78]

About the running away screaming. You just imagined it to the end didn’t you? Of course nothing good came from that. Nobody can come up with a proper design in seconds, based on a vague idea presented. :)
And UI design is maybe not even your priority in being competent at.

But see, you then thought, that what you imagined were anything I would design. :)

My basic rule is: It *has* to be great, to get presented to other people. And the basic idea is great, like every lossless unification of different concepts is great.
And that is the point: I would never ever accept any compromise when implementing it.
Because I know that no one will use something that has not a least every little detail of what they were used to PLUS some more to overcome the natural inertia. :)

I also don’t mean that it would stay a task bar. Because obviously, you can’t put a whole graph of your home directory in your task bar. ^^

I would have one global tree UI element for all applications. Well, not a tree, but a graph in tree-view. Which works, because you could grab any item in the tree, and “lift it up”. Thereby making it the new root node. Then you could filter “child” nodes by link type (eg parent/child or other semantic associations), and sort them, like you would do with table or in SQL.
It would be a file system, task manager and the whole structure *inside* of files in one. On the top would be an XPath-like path/adress/url/uri line that would allow for filtering and the like too.

So you could for example change something in *all* your documents, according to a rule.
But of course, as it would have to support all levels/depths of “wanting to get involved” (because not everyone wants to invest so much time in it), basic operation would still be as easy as browsing your files with your favorite file manager.

But all in the spirit of UNIX: Everything is a file. And small tools that do one job, and do it right.

Oh yes, it can not only be done. I already have detailed implementation plans for it. Now all I need is a couple of dozen developers and a load of money to pay them. ;)))

  First you take a simple idea. Then you extrapolate it into the worst design (by the way: are you in UI designer? Have you got any competence?), based on the basic fear of new things. And finally you tell me how bad that it.

Luckily, what you call bad, are your own thoughts, and has nothing to do with what I imagined. ^^

Re:Arrrgh

[Hurricane78]

Oh shit! FAIL. I think I have to explain the last two paragraphs:

See, first I wrote my comment in a pretty insulting and aggressive way, because I forgot that all that would bring me, is being rightfully called an ass. Then I re-wrote it, because well, that’s not who I want to be.
But then I forgot to delete the old stuff before submitting the comment.

I’m sorry. :( Those lines are not what I am or want to be. :)

Re:Tab bars versus taskbars? WTF?

[Xiaran]

I'm not a day to day user of KDE so I can't comment on its features... but if you mean the group of related applications in windows then it is lame... It just groups together all the same windows of that application. With a tabbed browser I don't have to click on the taskbar item to see the list. Anyway what I would like to see is tabbed windows... that is windows that are grouped together in a tabbed parent window. These windows would be completely arbitrary... I could have a tabbed session with a word processor, a browser, a video game, a whatever. I think that is different unless I am misunderstanding what you mean by taskbar grouping?

The next big thing

[zarathruster]

"Hey Beavis, I think I know what the next big thing is. It's in my pants."

WindowTabs does this on Windows

[Sosigenes]

A utility I found a while ago which I absolutely live by these days is WindowTabs, which gives the ability to use tabs in Windows - grouping things however you want, autogrouping by application and other fairly useful features.

It's found at http://www.windowtabs.com/

It's great when dealing with lots of putty windows, Outlook messages, switching between browser windows, vim windows and so forth.

Just thought I'd post this for anyone else looking for something like this, because I never realised something like this existed, so hopefully it'll help someone :)

Virtual Desktops

[ProzacPatient]

A lot of desktop environments support multiple desktops and someway to switch between them (The Compiz Cube is probably the most famous), so I really don't see the point in tabbing applications.
I use virtual desktops to divide up what I'm doing at the time (e.g. desktop #1 contains browser and chat applications, desktop #2 contains graphics applications, etc..) and I really wish Windows supported this natively for when I'm not working with Linux.

BeOS had it first

[technix4beos]

Funny how UI elements keep moving in the direction BeOS was in so long ago.

Re:BeOS had it first

[OrangeTide]

I know I played with a few X11 window managers that could tab multiple applications into the same window. Mostly it was to tab a bunch of xterm/rxvt's together since the tabbed views needed to be the same size. This was back in 1995-ish when I downloaded a few things from xcontrib, if I recall correctly. So no, BeOS didn't invent it. And the idea of putting multiple apps inside the same tabbed window is not new. It is actually super easy to implement in a window manager, and has appeared in several window managers before being discarded.

Re:Yes - umm, actually, no

[Anonymous Coward]

I use overlapping xterms in Linux all the time when programming. I keep open multiple editor windows and I don't always need to see all of a window, I just want part of it showing to see some definitions in a H file, or the first couple errors that came out of a make. When I'm editing code and want to look at three or four files at once, it's often not necessary to see the full width of the code - the window on the right can block the last 10-20 columns without losing most of what I'm looking for. So overlapping windows buys me more effective screen real estate, which I value.

I usually look at more than one file/document/application at a time, often several, when I'm creating anything more complicated than an opinion post on a web site - like code, or a technical document, or a presentation, or even a technical email. Code files, web pages with API documentation, technical documents - all need to be up where I can see them. My memory's not good enough to read a man page, then switch to a different tabbed window, and recall enough of it to write the code, unless the API is trivial.

Creating is not the same as consuming. When reading or watching a video or playing a game, I usually focus on that one thing, and everything else is a distraction. When writing, I usually need to have several things in view in order to efficiently synthesize multiple pieces of information into a whole. I use tabbed browsing in FFox all the time. I almost never use it in editors like Eclipse or UltraEdit and will probably never use it on my desktop either.

What would really be useful would be the ability to save and load complete desktop state, in any or all of my virtual desktops, to a named file, which I can save, backup, and transport from one machine to another and reuse. Full state, including positions of windows, files I had open in them, vim's open in the same windows at the same position in the files as before, 'top' running in one of them as it was before, same web pages in view in ffox, command histories, etc. Preferably in a portable text format that works across different window managers and versions, at least within a given distro (yeah, I know, not a chance of either type of compatibility ever happening, Linux can't even standardize the output format of 'top' from one minor rev of the same distro to the next, oh well). Saved state would really be helpful, because sometimes I actually (*gasp*) turn computers off, or reboot them, and I also tend to work on multiple machines.

YouTube have it

[Macka]

There's a nice walk through of some of the KDE 4.4 additions in this YouTube clip. The Window Grouping preview starts at 4:28 into the show.

Re:YouTube have it

[GreatBunzinni]

You can link youtube videos with a time jump tag. For example, this clip jumps to 4m28s, more or less.

Re:YouTube have it

[Anonymous Coward]

What were they thinking putting the switching at the top like that with hard to see divisions (it should have system menu icons for each app in that space)?

I'd rather use multiple desktops, except maybe extend that concept to allow floating sub-desktops within a desktop. Then use the desktop's "tray" equivalent to switch between apps.

Taking a step backwards?

[synthesizerpatel]

Isn't the point of having a windowed user interface that you can multiple windows concurrently open _next_ to each other? If you tab them contextually you then limit interaction to a single window. So, next big thing? How about, the old thing we all know?

It's an interesting idea to group applications by task into what would essentially become an IDE. That model only works if you can save and restore the context in some efficient manner that you can tear-down and rebuild on the fly.

Re:This is just the dumbest thing I have ever hear

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

I'd personally like to have this, assuming I can drag for top/bottom/tiled docking without having to manually drag the windows to the exact size. It means I don't have to have the window decorations on each window, and can share the menu space between them.

Re: tab versus minimize

[Anonymous Coward]

I happen to think that's exactly the sort of customization that is best served by a registry or config file operation. This isn't something you want to change accidentally and it isn't something most people would ever change.

Virtual Desktops aren't at odds with tabbed apps.

[Zero__Kelvin]

"However, one big obstacle in front of the widespread aceptance of tabbed windows is virtual desktops. ... So, if tabbed windows is to be accepted widely, it has to exit side by side with virtual desktop."

The two aren't at odds at all. On Virtual Desktop One maybe I am documenting an application I am writing, and I want to add drawings, use the web to look up information that will go in the document, and modify my Project Plan to update the subtask entry as I cover each topic. On Virtual Desktop 2, maybe I want develop the software, and lets say it is an app for a LAMP stack. I have an IDE, another instance of a web browser to look up API info and test my code, etc, and a terminal to edit OS config files as I find out from something I found on the net that certain settings are better in httpd.conf and restart Apache. Maybe my application isn't working for some reason I haven't been able to figure out and I'm starting to get really stressed out, so on desktop 3, I want to "watch some porn" ... OK, maybe that's TMI :-)

Mac: Its a design perspective

[bussdriver]

Mac windows are DOCUMENT centric; multiple windows represent multiple documents - this is why it did not matter in the early years that only 1 application could run at a time (except Desk Accessories.) This is also why the menu bar is disconnected; remains at the top, and indicates the frontmost application - the MENUBAR is application centric. The document paradigm comes from Xerox.

Windows is application centric. So the menus go inside the application window and there is trend to give the application the whole screen space because its trapped (perspectivly) inside the window. This results in multiple documents being document centric windows inside an application window; which is confusing initially. OR they run multiple instances of the same application (appearance wise) to make it more document centric in behavior to avoid the nested window confusion. IE is an example of this; with the new IE tabs providing a document level "task bar" for switching IE documents within 1 application window as well as avoid the task bar clutter caused by lacking document centric windows.... A bunch of patches to what initially was a mistake; proven by the need to change so much of it.

Re:Mac: Its a design perspective

[ClosedSource]

"The document paradigm comes from Xerox."

Yes, but it wasn't used exclusively.

Re:Mac: Its a design perspective

[IntlHarvester]

Mac windows are DOCUMENT centric; Windows is application centric.

IMO this statement is either a vast oversimpification, or sorely outdated at the very least.

Just as a prominent example, iTunes has a very "application-centric" UI. If iTunes followed the oldschool Mac style, each different function (store, ipod management, etc) would be in separate windows rather than in panes.

Both OSes have a blend of application- and document-specific functionality, depending on the task and the app's UI design. Windows in particular actually is "windows-centric", the contents of those windows is very much up to the app.

Instead I agree with those old Ars Technica articles about the Old Mac UI being "spatial" -- the idea was that you would have to navigate in 2 dimensions with the mouse. (The Dock and the modern Finder have softened that though.) Windows was always more 'one dimensional' in how it switched tasks (taskbar, alt-tab), although that too has softened over the years.

Either way, both Windows and Mac have converged quite a bit and are closer in operation today than in say 1990.

Re:Mac: Its a design perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't let this little piece of misinformation stand. The Mac GUI is completely APPLICATION centric. With the Mac you have a maximized transparent window with MDI children. There are some windows applications like this, like Excel and MIRC, but they are few and far between. Windows applications by contrast give you a full set of options with each and every document you have open. The biggest strength of Windows is that you manage document windows with the taskbar, not applications.

Re:Mac: Its a design perspective

[bussdriver]

Nope. iTunes STILL is the document model despite influences of the web on the main window. Besides, iApps from apple often break their own design guidelines.

1) Try double clicking on a playlist in iTunes; you'll get multiple playlist documents.

2) Sound Jam is iTunes and its still document based despite the main window's short cuts. The scripting API still has document objects; however, since the playlists went to an internal DB those are not document tied anymore.

3) Most mac apps and even apple's dev tools work from the document paradigm. Even most the single doc apps. There is no multiple app instance trick like windows.

The history influences them both to this day.

I would argue that the WEB influenced both GUIs more since Windows 98 than they did each other. The convergence is the web to them and them to the web.

Re:Mac: Its a design perspective

[IntlHarvester]

I would argue that the WEB influenced both GUIs more since Windows 98 than they did each other. The convergence is the web to them and them to the web.

An excellent point.

However, you may be ignoring the broader implications. A "web-like" UI is much closer to the application model than the document model, as the web generally relies on navigation paths rather than layered windows.

And some of your post is argument from definition: Apple has "document" APIs therefore it must be document-oriented. Nope - iTunes is still basically MS Access for Music.

If iTunes were designed like a classic Mac-style program it would be structured around multiple floating windows, playlist window, song window, store windows, and so on. Of course that 1984 style is considered obsolete even for first-rate Mac apps.

Only point being that the "purity" argument is so much bullshit - the best UIs are what works in context, which IMO iTunes does well despite being "Windowsy"

Re:Mac: Its a design perspective

[bussdriver]

Insulting! iTunes is far far from MS Access for Music! MS Access sucks. period. iTunes is one of the best designed music library programs ever made! I've tried tons of them.
It is true that web apps are moving to application windows; but also, the nature of the framework severely limits it from breaking out of the browser window paradigm. A multi-document web app is a rare beast because they don't function well in the current framework (its essentially a 1 doc at a time limitation; ironically multiple document frames are heavily used just to implement the 1 doc behavior.)

Breaking the rules is ok based on context; but just like the 1/3 rule of image composition, it shouldn't be broken lightly - one should know what they are doing. I don't see much being broken in iTunes from old mac; now iMovie that thing breaks the most stuff... Final Cut is much more old mac like (except the app-based theme) and I've used the 1st video apps which were made on old mac. One of the fundamentals of design is target audience; which causes many exceptions to naturally occur (plus they WERE guidelines not "rules.")

Owning and having read the 1st interface design book for that obsolete mac - I can say that floating pallets and tool bars are not obsolete and the concepts largely remain the same. In fact, apple has a whole window theme for the floating pallet windows. The tool bars unfortunately are demoted to be attached to windows now instead of floating (this is not ideal, it should be a window and the right side toggle should make it snap to the frontmost window; being on by default.) The menubar remains at the best spot. Right-clicking is not required and property windows (which is a pathetic design hack still commonplace on windows) still don't exist.

How is this different from workspaces?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this any different than Workspaces? I just have a workspace for each task, and only show that workspace's windows in the window list

Compiz has this

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one that realizes Compiz has had window grouping and tabbing in place (as a plugin) for a long time? I actually like their method of handling it as well because it gives you live previews of each window instead of 'tabs' that are always visible and cluttering up your UI.

Tabs are cool, but we need tab management

[grouchomarxist]

I like using tabs, but I noticed that once I started using them you can lose track of where something is. There needs to be tab management, probably integrated with window management, to make getting to the tab you're looking for easier. I'd like a combination of expose-type window management plus text search.

Re:Tabs are cool, but we need tab management

[Lemming Mark]

Well, with this tabbing support hopefully that should become really easy for apps that don't implement their own tabbing internally. Especially if they were to add an "Expose all tabbed applications" and "Expose all tabs in this group", that would be very useful. But for things like Firefox and Chrome I guess we'd still want an extension like Windows 7 has that allows tabbed apps to provide previews to show on the taskbar etc.

MS will make it work.

[timmarhy]

good idea, no doubt OSS will botch it, then MS will steal it and refine the idea into something that works.

I tried the latest ubuntu the other week, it was all very slick right up until i tried to use it to browse youtube. mouse wheel didn't work, flash wouldn't work. fucking FAIL.

Re:MS will make it work.

[westyvw]

You mean like in KDE where you can maximize windows vertically, horizontally, or full screen? Or push to back? Or renaming without changing the filetype? Or single clicking? Or all the other things that are standard in an OSS DE but Microsoft still cant do right?

Re:Tab bars versus taskbars? WTF?

[macraig]

KDE doesn't group actual windows themselves, but it does allow arbitrary grouping of taskbar buttons for those windows, in a fashion similar to Windows but without the unilateral assumption (it's an option that has to be enabled, by default it acts like Windows unfortunately). It can organize dissimilar apps under the same taskbar button, which allows grouping multiple windows by actual common task. Then the buttons themselves can be renamed to be descriptive of that common task. I doubt they have "persistence" yet, but who knows?

Re:Tab bars versus taskbars? WTF?

[Jeeeb]

Aside from the headline I don't think anyone is saying that this will be the next best thing.

Tab bars improve my productivity. When I browse tab bars are extremely handy for opening lots of links at the same time, and letting them load in the background while I continue to focus on the thing I was doing. I can also utilise tabs and windows together to group my browsing by what I'm browsing for. Allowing me to subdivide by the task I'm doing which is really useful, IMO.

Multiple work spaces also improve my productivity. I can shift windows out of my current workspace that aren't related to the task at hand. I can group windows into different work spaces based on the task I have them open for and so on.

Tabbed windows is the same concept. It will make it possible to break the task I'm currently doing down in new ways. You don't have to use it but I'm always thankful when developers provide me with new ways to further organise my workflow in ways that make sense to me. I.e. For what purpose do I have this open? When will I need to use this window again? .etc. Rather than having them jammed into the task bar, which (IMO at-least) you rightfully complain about.

As for the snide comment at the end of your post, if you have a revolutionary new way of handling windows (Which is better than grouping than providing new more powerful ways of grouping by task), then please share it with us! If you don't then maybe it would be better to not criticise the work of others for not being revolutionary.

Re: MDI

[TaoPhoenix]

"Back in the old (3.x) days of Windows it was much more common to have actual windows. Then MDI came along and limited you to moving docs within the space of the parent window, so the only thing was to maximize the Window if you wanted to compare docs. "

Is THAT where that started? I supposed the OS had to "own" dependencies somehow, but I'm 1 comp generation too late to know how the whole mess started. I think I've been seeing web apps able to pop windows out lately.

Requires Vista WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Install a beast on a beast. no thanks :)

Re:Requires Vista WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

It uses Vista's fancy compositing jazz. Doing this on XP would be significantly slower (it would have to screenshot every window?)

surely yes

[pydev]

I mean, Gnome has had this for several years now (as part of Compiz and its precursors).

Now, KDE finally has them too.

That leaves only Windows and Macintosh, right?

tiling window managers

[pydev]

Long ago, tiling window managers were more popular than they are today. They allow you to split the screen into a bunch of non-overlapping regions and then place windows within each region, usually using some sort of tab or menu selection mechanism.

You can still get these today in the form of Ion and RatPoison and similar window managers. Unfortunately, window managers like Ion have a horrendously bad user interface, using myriads of keyboard commands and providing little in the way of visual guidance.

It would be really nice if some of the major desktop environments actually provided a user-friendly tiling window manager. This would mean using standard "split window" components for splitting the screen, and indicating available windows within each tile using tabs. Tabs could be dragged and dropped between tiles.

I think this would actually help a lot of beginners, since overlapping windows still confuse many users.

Re:tiling window managers

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have an ATi card, you can actually do this using HydraVision's "HydraGrid."

Re:tiling window managers

[lbbros]

There's a branch of KWin dedicated to adding tiling support. It couldn't be merged as there wasn't enough time to properly test and integrate it, but chances are very likely that it'll appear with KDE SC 4.5.

Re:tiling window managers

[lennier]

"I think this would actually help a lot of beginners, since overlapping windows still confuse many users."

Not just beginners. I'm one of the people who generally maximises windows - not just because I don't have a huge Cinerama screen (though I don't), but because overlapping windows are just nasty and inefficient to work with, from an interaction perspective. You swing the mouse and click; you don't know whether your click is going to switch to the window you hoped to hit, or whether you were a few pixels off and you might accidentally raise an overlapping window, and now you can't see all of the window you wanted. You can't always 'unraise' a window as easily as raising it - you may have to hunt around for the task bar or dock to find the window you were originally looking for.

Plus, once your target window is raised and selected, now you have to deal with optimising the precise position and size of it. The size might be incorrect, meaning you can't see all of the panes (which is likely on Windows if it's just been launched with application defaults, which might be under-sized for the way you want to view it); the size might be correct but the position incorrect (which is likely on Mac with a big but not huge screen if you've slid it off the side of the desktop to get it temporarily out of the way while you work on something else). So there's more hunting, first for the top of the window so you can drag it to the right place, then to the tiny grab target on the bottom-right so you can resize it. You have to hold the mouse button pressed while you do all this, putting strain on your wrist while you make complex circular motions, which is not pleasant to do if you don't have to.

And, if you don't get the window lined up precisely to the pixel-perfect edge of the screen or the edge of adjoining windows, Fitt's Law kicks in with a vengeance. If windows are maximised, they're effectively infinite in size - hit the edge of the screen and you're still inside them. If they're one pixel away, suddenly they're not. Hit the edge of the screen or the window and foom, you're now talking not to the window but to the desktop, and that's almost always not what you want.

All of this complex paper-shuffling - simulating a messy desk - goes away if your window manager has some kind of maximising/tiling function. If windows have a small range of acceptable positions and sizes, you just don't have to worry about fiddling with them.They're just there doing what you want.

Re:tiling window managers

[Anonymous Coward]

Try Bluetile (http://projects.haskell.org/bluetile/). It's really nice for newbies, especially to learn the core concept of tiling.

COMPIZ PEOPLE

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? no one has mentions this yet but compiz does this exact thing. It's the "Group and Tab Windows" plug-in that is built in!

Learn from Xerox

[grilled-cheese]

The concept of a tab based OS has been done before with Windows 3.1 & 95 when Xerox introduced their TabWorks GUI.

Interesting idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Have it where you can also launch a whole group of programs at once that will come up in their own window with it's own taskbar type thing. Lauch you IDE, refrence web pages, explorer window with project files, and anything else you might want to launch or maybe your web browser and IM client.

Re:Interesting idea

[Maven0]

I like this idea.. I could get all my porn opened at the same time!

Actually

[commodoresloat]

If you want to combine the best of OSX and Windows, you absolutely need Switcher.

Actually, if you combine the best of OS X and Windows, what you get is OS X.

Re:Actually

[RocketRabbit]

I got OS X because it combined the best of Macintosh and Openstep, and left Windows completely out of the design process.

Re:Actually

[Anonymous Coward]

but that only works if you're a thick bastard who knows jack-shit about computers.

of course you can tell yourself that your choice of computer is a lifestyle statement but again, that only works if you're a retarded prick.

Re:Actually

[Anonymous Coward]

Without all the windows apps being available natively..........

Re:Actually

[bigngamer92]

Unless Software compatibility is something you consider worthy of "best feature", or openness for that matter. Seriously the above comment has fanboy written on it.

Re:Actually

[commodoresloat]

Somebody forgot to take their meds today.

Old news

[cybereal]

This is not new. I'm probably not citing the first instance of it, but, I was utilizing this feature fairly regularly in fluxbox 6+ years ago.

It's nice to have but I seriously doubt it will take off for general users. Tabbed browsers already confuse the average computer user beyond belief. I know people who don't even understand that their computer has windows at all.

I'm glad to see this finally show up in KDE but still... nothing special. Slow news day.

been using fluxbox for 5 years now

[t35t0r]

and the only reason why I don't use KDE3 (4.0 sucked when I tried it) is because it really didn't have tabbed windows (the BII window theme doesn't really count). When fully tabbed windows come back to KDE I'll try it again.

At last!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I certainly don't mean to think I hold any form of absolute truth here, but I know a bunch of devs and other daily linux users at work that run ion2/3. I tried it myself and never went back. So when I read that someone that develops KDE or Gnome will *finally* add that feature, I want to kiss the floor.

screen real-estate

[microbox]

The windows on OS X aren't designed to take over the whole screen -- even on a smaller monitor. Most program observe this behaviour, creating a truly better user experience. I use Windows a lot, so I'm used to the more modal "program at a time" approach, and it is not a complete step backwards, however, I do hate how every program just wants to take over the entire screen.

Software should only use the screen real-estate that it needs to use, and no more.

The tabbed interface, 0.3.56

[hedge49]

This is all beginning to sound like Lotus Notes. Boy, was that a fun environment.

Re:This is just the dumbest thing I have ever hear

[wvmarle]

I just use the hot-corner for that. Move mouse to right top corner and I see all my windows. In a way it becomes like a gesture that way. No need to have a mouse with so many buttons, and then trying to remember which button to use when.

How recursive will this get?

[Imazalil]

So I will have my OS tabs between IE and Firefox (or whatever) then tabs inside each application? Will MS Office just be a black hole then? top-level OS tabs to get to Excel, tabs inside excel for different files, the ribbon thing (pretty much tabs) for functionality, and then tabs to switch between worksheets? I'm sure all these tabs will have popup thumbnail previews as well, and half the population will die of epileptic seizures just moving their mouse from one corner of screen to the other.

Still a kludge.

[zippthorne]

Yeah, but even that's actually just a workaround because web browsers aren't properly buffering rendered pages in your history.

If you could hit the back button and instantly be back on the page you were looking at and at the same position of that page, with no reloading and reflowing to mess you up, you wouldn't need tabs to load a quick check of a link. Refresh is a single key-combo away if you need it. It shouldn't be the default. You shouldn't need tabs just to look at three or four links in the middle of a page one at a time.

Opera kinda-sorta seems to do things correctly, although I think it's just caching the page and re-rendering it every time, rather than properly trading memory for instantaneous flip-back.

Re:Still a kludge.

[dkf]

If you could hit the back button and instantly be back on the page you were looking at and at the same position of that page, with no reloading and reflowing to mess you up, you wouldn't need tabs to load a quick check of a link. Refresh is a single key-combo away if you need it. It shouldn't be the default. You shouldn't need tabs just to look at three or four links in the middle of a page one at a time.

You seem to be assuming that the only use for tabs is for doing quick checking of links. That's definitely not the only use I put them to (I've currently got 13 long-lived pages open on different tabs and I browse them asynchronously relative to each other). Your assumption only holds for a subset of browsing behavior.

Are you all on 13" screens ?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is wrong with you guys ?
Tabs is for non-related contents on small screens. Like opening 10 search results in tabs, and looking at them one at a time. One will load in the background when I say open next in new tab. I use them for background loading contents.

One tab with a HTML page, and one with the source code, and one with the CSS makes no meaning. You can see only one at a time. The next step up from tabs is a 17" or bigger screen and multiple Windows.

In coding, thy are often also used to keep related files together. I still can't really see the advantage of forcing youself to not having 2 visible documents at the same time.

Re: tab versus minimize

[RocketRabbit]

It's not about what's harder, it's about what's informative.

Re:This is just the dumbest thing I have ever hear

[Anonymous Coward]

Those that switch between their usual applications with the mouse are missing the point.

Most people have a standard set of applications which they usually run. These apps need to have their own hotkey assigned, so they can be switched to at once.

The taskbar and mouse switch are for those apps which one does not usually run, so they have no hotkey assigned. The mouse is very inefficient for a such frequent task as app switching.

isn't it the same as virtual desktop?

[mcn]

It looks like virtual desktops in the form of tabs. Instead of putting a bunch of windows in deskop1 and another bunch in desktop2, now I put a bunch of windows in windows-tab1 and another bunch in windows-tab2. What am I missing?

Re:isn't it the same as virtual desktop?

[phrank]

Same question here. Workspaces are my top-level tabs.

For each task I am currently working on I use one workspace containing all the required objects (documents) and tools (programs). When I have to switch tasks, I just switch workspaces and come back later.

Since I am not able to read two texts in parallel, most of my windows remain fullscreen. Sometimes I miss the ability in gnome-terminal to tile single tabs for watching log-files while typing commands, but then, I am too lazy to grab the mouse and rearrange rectangular boxes.

TabWorks

[Anonymous Coward]

was the standard Compaq laptop shell for a time in the early 1990s, until Windows 95 arrived.

Don't we already have that?

[Patch86]

"Tabbing", correct me if I'm wrong, is where you have the name of various different pages or programmes lined up next to each other, where clicking them brings that page/programme to the front.

On an application level, isn't that just the taskbar? Surely "tabbed browsing" and such is just bringing the main taskbar concept to an individual programme.

in the eye of the beholder

[SuperDre]

I'm sorry to say this, but 'good productivity tool'? is all in the eye of the beholder.. personally I don't think tabbed browsing is anything better as seperate windows. And having different windows tabbed together don't seem like a handy tool to me.. but as I said it's all in the eye of the beholder, wahat works for you certainly doesn't mean it works for someone else..

How do you mean?

[jonaskoelker]

Ion appeals to a specific type of eccentric.

What do you mean? You can use ION without listening to Metallica...

Bah, Tabs.

[Khyber]

I already have tabbed windows - see the one at the bottom (or top if you use the default ubuntu stuff) of your screen with a bunch of tabs for already-running programs. Huh, imagine that, it's already been done, since Windows 95. Granted, it's a small window with limited functionality - but it's a window nonetheless.

Tab - n: A projection, flap, or short strip attached to an object to facilitate opening, handling, or identification.

I swear, people just don't pay attention to English.

Use compiz

[jonaskoelker]

clicking in the window with the focus brings that window to the front. If anyone knows how to disable that, I'd appreciate it.

Don't use metacity.

In Compiz, ccsm, General Settings, Focus & Raise Behaviour, disable "Click to Focus" and "Raise on Click".

(If you don't have the mouse buttons to dedicate one just to raising windows, binding Alt-mouse1 to both raise and move works fairly well. All I'd wish for is that the move functionality waited for me to drag the window a few, say 5, pixels before wobbling my windows; openbox does this the right way.)

Or use openbox, vim ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml, read the comments, change "yes" to "no" (or vice versa) at the right places. It integrates with gnome just as well as metacity and gives you the flexibility and "crackrock features" (in the words of Metacity designer Havoc Pennington) you want.

I'm all for the crack rock, btw :)

Windows doesn't fully support multiple Desktops

[idji]

Windows really only has the concept of ONE Desktop. If you create 4 desktops (as Systinternal's desktops does), you CANNOT move programs between the desktops.

This is the CORE reason why Windows never supported virtual desktops, and Mark Russinovich's solution is the simplest.

Quote from Mark Russinovich Sysinternal's Desktops.
Sysinternals Desktops uses a Windows desktop object for each desktop. Application windows are bound to a desktop object when they are created, so Windows maintains the connection between windows and desktops and knows which ones to show when you switch a desktop. That making Sysinternals Desktops very lightweight and free from bugs that the other approach is prone to where their view of active windows becomes inconsistent with the visible windows.

Desktops reliance on Windows desktop objects means that it cannot provide some of the functionality of other virtual desktop utilities, however. For example, Windows doesn't provide a way to move a window from one desktop object to another, and because a separate Explorer process must run on each desktop to provide a taskbar and start menu, most tray applications are only visible on the first desktop. Further, there is no way to delete a desktop object, so Desktops does not provide a way to close a desktop, because that would result in orphaned windows and processes. The recommended way to exit Desktops is therefore to logoff.

But why not just use workspaces?

[jonaskoelker]

With tabbed heterogeneous windows, instead, I would be able to group webpage-related windows together, and C-related windows together. It sounds like a very useful feature to me.

Isn't that what workspaces already do for you? Isn't that why workspaces is such a great feature?

bah

[Anonymous Coward]

Just give me the ability to drag the buttons in my Windows taskbar around when Firefox decides to pull a disappearing act on me again and I'd be happy. I like my taskbar buttons in a certain order dang it.

Window tabs for Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

WindowsTabs - http://www.windowtabs.com

Grouping developer tools together or Outlook email messages can be very useful and tidy

MOD PARENT UP

[cyclomedia]

I've only been complaining about this since Win95 came out, i'd like to be able to grab the title bar of the app and alongside being able to use the 2d movement of the mouse to move it on the screen use the mouse wheel to adjust the z-index, how hard can it be!?

Again, please STOP!

[gbutler69]

This is nonsense. It IS NOT and NEVER HAS BEEN easier to read stupid magazine/newspaper columns than fully wide pages of a book. It is annoying to read narrow columns. Magazines and Newspapers (and now many Websites) format like this so the can squeeze in as much annoying advertising as possilbe. It has absolutely nothing to do with making it easier to read, and in fact, makes it harder. Everytime I hear someone repeate this nonsense I want to punch a baby in the face!

Re:Again, please STOP!

[Anonymous Coward]

"My opinion is the only valid opinion! Anyone who disagrees with me is an idiot!"

Re:Again, please STOP!

[clone53421]

This is nonsense. It IS NOT and NEVER HAS BEEN easier to read stupid magazine/newspaper columns than fully wide pages of a book.

Well, that settles it. The expert has spoken.~

http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/72/columns.asp

New?

[Zaph_Beeblebrox]

My window manager (fluxbox) does this from the beginning ...

They had this 10 years ago in linux

[hesaigo999ca]

They had this 10 years ago in linux, 7 red hat version, when you could switch desktop environments in a tabbed setting on the bottom of the tray. Seriously nothing new here, and also a bit insulting to Linux users everywhere that already have had these tabbed environments for all this time, what are...., they chopped liver???

Because tabs are evil!

[Livius]

Okay, not evil, I can see the appeal. But not every software developer really gets the idea of 'option'. Personally I despise tabs and it astonishes me how difficult it can be to turn them off or how often it's not even possible. (I'm looking at you, Firefox!) A nice idea, maybe, but I don't get the missionary zeal with which tabbed windows are being forced on people who are happy with sticking to what they've been using for 25 years.

Re:Because tabs are evil!

[clone53421]

I think you need to get in touch with this guy:

Luckily, it's easy to disable all tab use in Firefox.

Re:Because tabs are evil!

[Livius]

That doesn't prevent *all* tabs, which was my point.

Re:Tab bars versus taskbars? WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

You should try compiz window grouping, pretty much just like the tab things but you get a small rendered windows of the various windows that are tabbed together and they only appear when you mouse over the top bar of the window group

Uh...taskbar?

[jduhls]

So I dragged my Windows taskbar to the top of my desktop and, viola: tabs for my applications. Then, using VirtuaWin, I have multiple application "windows". Go figure. This is sooo 2001.

Re: tab versus minimize

[clone53421]

Umm, the default on my Win7 laptop was the text, same as the same old.

I don’t know if some Win7 installs actually default to no-text, but I can’t see why anyone would want that. I saw someone’s computer with that feature turned on, and I was puzzled as to why they would like it that way.

tabs do not eliminate the problem!

[costinel]

I might be too late for the comments party, but imho tabs are not increasing productivity. tabs appeared because there was not enough room on the taskbar. YES. not because we NEEDED tabs. not for productivity. but for more porn alt-tab windows. for this I have eliminated the cause, and not applied symptomatic solutions: i have moved the taskbar from horizontal lower to vertical right. voila! a lot more space, plus I get full title, plus there is enough space left on the screen even with the wider vertical taskbar. plus, I am right-handed. close/minimize/maximize buttons are on right. my mouse will travel a lot less when the taskbar is vertical right. no need for supplemental tabs.

a few related works

[stefski66]

The debate 'overlapping vs tiling' is as old as window managers [1]... And novel interaction techniques have been explored in 2001, though we are far from the ideas presented in the second paper [2], check the video http://open-video.org/details.php?videoid=8280 ...

cheers.

[1] Myers, B. A. 1988. A Taxonomy of Window Manager User Interfaces. IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl. 8, 5 (Sep. 1988), 65-84. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/38.7762
A taxonomy for the user-visible parts of window managers is presented. It is noted that there are actually very few significant differences, and the differences can be classified in a taxonomy with fairly limited branching. This taxonomy should be useful in evaluating various window managers, and it will also serve as a guide for the issues that need to be addressed by designers if future window-manager user interfaces. The advantages and disadvantages of the various options are presented.

[2] Beaudouin-Lafon, M. 2001. Novel interaction techniques for overlapping windows. In Proceedings of the 14th Annual ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology (Orlando, Florida, November 11 - 14, 2001). UIST '01. ACM, New York, NY, 153-154. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/502348.502371
This note presents several techniques to improve window management with overlapping windows: tabbed windows, turning and peeling back windows, and snapping and zipping windows.
http://open-video.org/details.php?videoid=8280

Re:Tab bars versus taskbars? WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a difference because modern displays are big and allow comfortably using multiple windows side by side. Tabbed windows are a good way to divide the screen in a comfortable way and have all -- or most windows -- fit in a certain screen layout. And it allows to rearrange the screenlayout easily without reapplying the same changes to whole bunch of windows.
In a way, tabbed windows are for those not manly enough to use a tiling wm like ion3/ratpoison/xmonad (which, I guess, make using gimp a real torture).
I think: Tabbing Windows + http://live.gnome.org/DevilsPie = ultimate awesomeness ... bit thats just me, I guess.

Re:Tab bars versus taskbars? WTF?

[macraig]

I've been running at 1600+ horizontal res for at least 15 years now, and using a double-window paradigm the whole time. Once upon a time it was an entirely manual, forced thing, since Microsoft and Windows itself had no real interest in helping with that. Later I discovered tools like Shove-It and HandyThing that helped me do it better. From a glance at Devil's Pie, it looks like it might be a rough analog of how I've been using HandyThing in Windows. While I started with nothing but side-by-side windows, HandyThing gave me a means to define other regions of the screen for specific applications, and then make those definitions 'sticky' and automatic.

Re:More useless stuff from the KDE team

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps "thought" produces more stereotypes than code...

IceWM can do it

[Anonymous Coward]

With IceWM you can use the RaiseOnClickClient and RaiseOnClickTitleBar properties to fine tune this behaviour to your liking.

HTH

It's alright

[Steeltoe]

Hehe, whatever you imagine to be offensive, got deleted I think. Because no offense taken what is in your posts. I am usually very sensitive, but maybe because you are actually trying not to be aggressive, it doesn't hit? Dunno. Browsing /. earns you a thick online skin anyways. Too many insecure nerds I guess :)

It doesn't matter. If you are out to get the project accomplished, I have some suggestions along the road. Aside from being polite, which you are, that is a very constructive start.

I am by no way an UI designer though, but know what I like. Fact is, the XP UI seems good enough for me now, so anything new would have to be brilliant and simple, such as many of the Google interfaces. Examples: Google Search, labels/tags in GMail, Picasa, Photoshop, etc. I haven't tried Win7, but I think they haven't cleaned up their configuration yet, only changed things around, so many of my beefs with XP is still there. Maybe the taskbar is better though, haven't bothered to look that hard at it (if something works, I think people tend to stick with it).

Requirements gathering - you do have a list of requirements for the project, don't you? It should be treated like any regular company project, with requirements gathering, architecture, system design, etc. Requirements gathering will ensure you know *where* the project is heading, and *why* you do the design choices that you do. Ie., something might seem like a good idea (hello KDE), but putting every feature in, might actually make the product suck in the end. For many, KDE is overkill, and Gnome is just simpler and cleaner, like OS X. I usually use KDE though, since I'm a poweruser and want it to be more like Windows, so the features should be present, just hidden cleverly, as you already mentioned.

Requirements can be high-level goals of project success, and also a list of more low-level ones.

Instead of hiring programmers (sounds expensive, and the product might never take off). I would suggest find a prototype-language, ie. like Ruby, or Visual Basic, just something simple to get started on a prototype. I would prefer Ruby, since you could actually do many things in-language, and it could actually go all the way to production. It'll probably be fast enough.

So making a prototype, you are more free to do changes during development, and since you're the only guy who knows what you want, you can save time in so many ways. Not having to document too much, changing thins underway, and making something that actually works (according to you).

Then it's user acceptance testing. Getting someone else to use your system, get their complaints etc. Fun stuff! ;-) Often with such an experimental system, you will need to change half of the interface around, so it should be a little flexible from the start, but not invest too much time in classes and fancy frameworks either.. Just make it work.

It'll take longer time than you thought. So you should really just decide to go through with it, no matter how long it takes, or how it turns out.

Requirements should take care of the future of the product as well. Will you send the prototype to production. Will you give it off to KDE or Gnome, for them to implement the prototype in their frameworks? Will you sell the idea? Patent it? It should have a clear future, even before you begin, and even if you never really finish it, someone else might use the project to accomplish something.

And above all, have fun with it :-) Sounds like a fun project, and I like the *idea*, if you can accomplish all what you say you can :-)

In the end though, you would have to convince me and everybody else why we should leave our current system, which sorta works, for this. Maybe it shouldn't differ too much in basic functionality?