Yeh, the moon doesn't have all that water that has to be kept out of robot innards, it doesn't have those clouds hiding the sun from the solar collectors, it doesn't have those trees turning the nice smooth regolith into a fractal maze. Any sane robot would pick the moon over MN...
Why robots? Because they can work at -40 temperatures, doing 16 hour shifts.
Except they can't, because apart from the fact that you're lucky to get 8 hours of sunshine in MN when it's -40 out, things like rain and snow and vandals and wind and mud and thieves that make your average human grumble in the pub after work bollix up robots completely.
Every mile of road we build takes a team of twenty people working at least a couple days.
You're building roads damn fast in MN.
The robots we're talking about only have to build 160 feet of dirt-pile. They don't even have to compact it. And they can take six months to do the job. And, again, they don't have to worry about wind and rain and green things with teeth and Mrs Cake.
Why is it a usability flaw to put the tabs above the toolbar if it removes unused whitespace and gives the user more real estate for viewing pages?
Because it breaks the visual metaphor that makes tabs so effective and easy to understand and use.
And if saving space was that important, they could get rid of the menu bar completely and make it a contextual menu on the title bar, they could get rid of the toolbar and add more title bar icons, and make the location box a hover-tip on the title bar, and so on.
If you want to save space, you ought to remove all the window decorations and use keyboard commands only. I've used window managers like that. Don't care for them myself, but I'm sure you can hack OS X to emulate them if you want.
The whole point of the GUI is that the value of the metaphor is high enough to make it worth burning a few percent of the available real-estate on it. Playing games with the UI to scrape up a few extra pixels is daft.
They say "Oh, we just need to do this on another planet and everything will be okay." Nevermind that the "this" is something we aren't even remotely approaching be able to accomplish right here in our own backyard.
Well, you know, when you're talking about slamming cruise-liner chunks of ice into a planet, I'll be the first to say "Not In My Back Yard".
It's possible some spacecraft have been hit by meteorites large enough to damage them, but space is pretty damned empty... even in crowded neighborhoods like LEO and the vicinity of Jupiter and Saturn (including Saturn's ring system) the biggest impacts are from dust-sized chunks. When probes fail they look for defects in design or operation before even considering impacts.
No weather on the moon. No thieves. No vandals. No vegetation. No mud. 1/6th gee. No wind to blow piles of dirt away. It's a simpler environment to work in.
Forget the construction work, could you build a rover that would last 90 days in Minnesota. just driving around photographing things?
What do you mean? The URL field shows you the URL of the tab you are looking at. How is that not part of the page?
It's not part of the page because the URL field is in the same place, and has the same shape, on every page. It behaves the same way on every page, you don't get it turning into a search bar on Google and a Knowledge base lookup on Microsoft.com.
As for the rest of the toolbar items, you might as well argue that the menu bar is part of the page. Or the keyboard, since the behaviour of keys on the keyboard depend on what widget you're focussed on.
Studied UI design and usability for years so feel free to get technical if you have a real objection.
Argument from authority is one of Slashdot's most popular logical fallacies.
I have already tried that, and that leaves you with a broken tab bar. Only the currently viewed page has a tab visible, the remaining tabs are pushed to the pulldown menu on the right of the tab bar.
I've noticed that in some countries, forget opinion - it's getting to the point where even truth is no longer an absolute defense to libel, because truthful statements can still be "defamatory".
The URL field is not part of the web page, neither is anything else in the toolbar and bookmarks bar. It makes no sense at all to have static content shared by all tabs inside the tab.
I couldn't plow through all the spam about the actors and characters and storyline, cut to the chase... is this just VRML-style backdrops like Myst and Riven again?
Slashdot Mirror
The "top of the folder" is the top of the web page, not the top of the window.
Yeh, the moon doesn't have all that water that has to be kept out of robot innards, it doesn't have those clouds hiding the sun from the solar collectors, it doesn't have those trees turning the nice smooth regolith into a fractal maze. Any sane robot would pick the moon over MN...
All of those arguments work just as well in Minnesota as they do on Luna.
MN is a much more hostile environment for robots than the moon is.
This is catering to power users more than anything
Power users have screens that are big enough they don't begrudge losing 2% of the screen height.
Mad geeks who try and act like power users on ultranotebooks are the only ones who need this crap.
I've thought about it. Tabs aren't like windows: I've used browsers where tabs were like windows, it's called "MDI", and it sucks.
Besides there is an option to put the tab bar back, just search for it.
Doesn't work on Windows, I've tried it.
Why robots? Because they can work at -40 temperatures, doing 16 hour shifts.
Except they can't, because apart from the fact that you're lucky to get 8 hours of sunshine in MN when it's -40 out, things like rain and snow and vandals and wind and mud and thieves that make your average human grumble in the pub after work bollix up robots completely.
Every mile of road we build takes a team of twenty people working at least a couple days.
You're building roads damn fast in MN.
The robots we're talking about only have to build 160 feet of dirt-pile. They don't even have to compact it. And they can take six months to do the job. And, again, they don't have to worry about wind and rain and green things with teeth and Mrs Cake.
Why is it a usability flaw to put the tabs above the toolbar if it removes unused whitespace and gives the user more real estate for viewing pages?
Because it breaks the visual metaphor that makes tabs so effective and easy to understand and use.
And if saving space was that important, they could get rid of the menu bar completely and make it a contextual menu on the title bar, they could get rid of the toolbar and add more title bar icons, and make the location box a hover-tip on the title bar, and so on.
If you want to save space, you ought to remove all the window decorations and use keyboard commands only. I've used window managers like that. Don't care for them myself, but I'm sure you can hack OS X to emulate them if you want.
The whole point of the GUI is that the value of the metaphor is high enough to make it worth burning a few percent of the available real-estate on it. Playing games with the UI to scrape up a few extra pixels is daft.
Hm... guess they've got a pretty good case then.
They say "Oh, we just need to do this on another planet and everything will be okay." Nevermind that the "this" is something we aren't even remotely approaching be able to accomplish right here in our own backyard.
Well, you know, when you're talking about slamming cruise-liner chunks of ice into a planet, I'll be the first to say "Not In My Back Yard".
It's possible some spacecraft have been hit by meteorites large enough to damage them, but space is pretty damned empty... even in crowded neighborhoods like LEO and the vicinity of Jupiter and Saturn (including Saturn's ring system) the biggest impacts are from dust-sized chunks. When probes fail they look for defects in design or operation before even considering impacts.
No weather on the moon. No thieves. No vandals. No vegetation. No mud. 1/6th gee. No wind to blow piles of dirt away. It's a simpler environment to work in.
Forget the construction work, could you build a rover that would last 90 days in Minnesota. just driving around photographing things?
When IBM and HP came out with clamshell handhelds, we didn't call them "netbooks". Who came up with this new terminology?
I don't use Google Chrome or Opera either, because they have the same idiotic layout. Am I penalizing myself for not using them as well?
My browser of choice on OS X is Camino, and on Windows it's Firefox.
What do you mean? The URL field shows you the URL of the tab you are looking at. How is that not part of the page?
It's not part of the page because the URL field is in the same place, and has the same shape, on every page. It behaves the same way on every page, you don't get it turning into a search bar on Google and a Knowledge base lookup on Microsoft.com.
As for the rest of the toolbar items, you might as well argue that the menu bar is part of the page. Or the keyboard, since the behaviour of keys on the keyboard depend on what widget you're focussed on.
Studied UI design and usability for years so feel free to get technical if you have a real objection.
Argument from authority is one of Slashdot's most popular logical fallacies.
I have already tried that, and that leaves you with a broken tab bar. Only the currently viewed page has a tab visible, the remaining tabs are pushed to the pulldown menu on the right of the tab bar.
If an anonymous statement holds no weight, then why is journalism filled with "anonymous sources say" and "unnamed government officials state"?
Because the journalist is giving the statements weight by repeating them.
I've noticed that in some countries, forget opinion - it's getting to the point where even truth is no longer an absolute defense to libel, because truthful statements can still be "defamatory".
In many countries truth has never been a defense.
When it's the default browser on your desktop, it's going to get more attention.
Which wouldn't be such a problem if Internet Explorer wasn't such a security nightmare, of course.
The URL field is not part of the web page, neither is anything else in the toolbar and bookmarks bar. It makes no sense at all to have static content shared by all tabs inside the tab.
It's just an ugly hack.
As I pointed out in a previous article, that doesn't work on Windows.
Until they fix the title-bar abuse, I'm sticking with Safari 3.
I couldn't plow through all the spam about the actors and characters and storyline, cut to the chase... is this just VRML-style backdrops like Myst and Riven again?
Oh, good to hear. None of the stories I read included that detail, I guess it would have spoiled the drama.
But didn't the publisher of World of Goo just file Chapter 11? :(
They're concerned about TTS competing with audiobooks? Are they smoking crazy weed or has it really improved that much?