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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."
Why is this a big deal?
Fluxbox (and probably something else before *box) had tab grouping windows long time ago.
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.
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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.
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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?
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.
I.O.U One Sig.
Isn't that pretty much a given feature of Chrome OS?
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Window tabs are already here!
They're in the taskbar.
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Um, hasn't Fluxbox had this for years? It's one of the reasons I love Fluxbox so much.
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No thanks.
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...
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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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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?
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
Overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death. - Major Motoko Kusanagi(Ghost in the Shell)
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.
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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.
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.
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.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
You can have it all! Today! http://www.wintabber.com/
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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!
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.
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.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
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.
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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?
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.
Isn't this basically Windows 1.0? All applications tiled onto fullscreen?
What goes around comes around...
Kayamon
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.
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.
I can already tab between my various programs
Ah, so you don't use tabs in FireFox then?
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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.
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.
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.
I thought that Linux users were supposed to react to the absence of choice by coding their own.
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
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.
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And you want every tabbed window contained, not only the same size but only viewable one at a time?
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!
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).
Amen
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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.
Do you really think it's simpler to manage 12 open browser windows than one window and 12 tabs? What is your reasoning there?
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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.
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
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.
The Windows implementation of grouping windows on the task bar was rather annoying. I would much rather see tabs within the applications.
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.
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.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I understand they're bringing back Tab, too.
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
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.
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.
I forget what 8 was for.
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.
It certainly isn't limited to /.; just look at the editor wars!
$ make available
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.
sudo mount --milk --sugar
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.
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.
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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...
One that hath name thou can not otter
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?
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.
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.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
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.
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..
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
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.
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.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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
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.
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.. ;)
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
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?
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.
Those were just title bars rendered to looked like tabs, but you couldn't group different windows together.
Mada mada dane.
"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.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
"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.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
"Hey Beavis, I think I know what the next big thing is. It's in my pants."
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 :)
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.
Funny how UI elements keep moving in the direction BeOS was in so long ago.
user@host$ diff
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.
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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.
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.
You certainly could in version 4. I don't know about previous versions.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.
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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.
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.
WTF Slashdot, why do I have to login 50 times to post?
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.
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.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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" ;-)
If you go and double-check your collection you'll find that it's Jo and Nella
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?
Aside from the headline I don't think anyone is saying that this will be the next best thing.
.etc. Rather than having them jammed into the task bar, which (IMO at-least) you rightfully complain about.
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?
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.
Rather the sementic web, maybe?
"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.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
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?
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.
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.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
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.
The concept of a tab based OS has been done before with Windows 3.1 & 95 when Xerox introduced their TabWorks GUI.
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.
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.
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
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.
I like this idea.. I could get all my porn opened at the same time!
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.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
This is all beginning to sound like Lotus Notes. Boy, was that a fun environment.
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?)
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
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.
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.
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.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
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.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
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.
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.
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.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
One word big fella: Exposé - you don't need to keep track of anything.
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.
Yes.
It's not about what's harder, it's about what's informative.
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.
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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?
"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.
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.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
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..
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! :)
Microsoft has just released their much anticipated hands-free cordless mouse. Warning, it may hurt a little at first.
Ion appeals to a specific type of eccentric.
What do you mean? You can use ION without listening to Metallica...
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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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 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.
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?
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.
You can always move the task bar icons together using the mouse (pre-Vista, you can do it with TaskBar Shuffle).
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!?
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
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.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Hold you tongue! We'll all be out of a job.
gee MDI with different click thingies. We have come so far.
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).
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.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
You forgot to say "now get off my lawn" at the end there.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
My window manager (fluxbox) does this from the beginning ...
Have fun, Z.
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???
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.
Wow. I suddenly understand genocidal dictators and/or ideologies much better.
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.
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?
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.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
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.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
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
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.
I have ten workspaces, configured to the shortcuts ctrl+KP_n. Best efficiency ever. I was somehow inspired by Blender3D's control of viewports.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
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.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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.
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
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.
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)...
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
If only we could unlock the taskbar and move it to the top of the screen...
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
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.
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.
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?
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
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.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
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.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
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.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein