Anyway, here's the only screenshot of the
newly free fonts I could find. Now, in an attempt to be nice to this guy's server, I'll make you cut and paste this one:
Skimming your linked post (sorry, will read it in more detail after this), I don't think we're describing quite the same thing here. What I'm referring to as trays should more accurately have been referred to as drawers, as that's the term that the Apple documentation seems to use.
OK, so I checked out some of the drawer stuff you posted
about, and remembered that there is a drawer in the silly Help Viewer program. That is a pretty interesting idea, except for one problem. It appears that for a window to have a drawer, you need to have enough "space" to open the drawer, since the drawer "pulls out" from the window. I'm not sure how well this would work in a web browser, given how many people have small screens or (for whatever reason) like to surf from a maximized window.
So, I think Safari *could* have implemented the "Bookmarks View" as a drawer, but chose to use a
completely different view. I think that view has some
big problems in terms of keyboard navigation (How
do you get from the left column to right without using
the mouse? Why doesn't hitting return when a book
mark is selected let you go to that page?), but if those
are fixed, it's a very interesting kind of idea. And it's
easy to imagine a full-featured "current windows" view
that would give all of the advantages of tabs and more
without the UI cruft.
So to summarize, drawers might be interesting, but I'm
not sure they are the right choice when you expect the
window that needs a drawer to be maximized on the screen.
It occurs to me that a better -- and arguably more "Cocoa-ish" -- way to present this would be a tray interface, like what you see in Mail.app.
I think you're suggesting the same thing I was trying to
get at in a post on
a previous Safari thread. Unfortunately, I have never used Mail.app since I don't dare try to read and file mail
that way since I need to read mail from way too many different places and systems. By "tray" do you mean the
same way that "bookmark view" (what you get by clicking the book icon or typing option-cmd-B) does stuff? If so,
that's what I hit on (although I also want navigation improvement which should be easy).
If you agree that this is a good idea, please do as I've done and submit the idea as feedback to Apple with Safari's bug reporter widget, or by using the bug reporter on Apple's site (sorry, I forget the url offhand). Now is the time to let them know what features you would hope for...:)
I would do this except that I'm pretty sure that if I were triaging bugs from these sources and saw *anything* with
the word "tab" or "tabbed" in it, I'd file it in the bitbucket
these days.:-) Plus, you'd expect somebody who knows
somebody at Apple is reading these posts, so posting about it here (or I guess there's a discussion at apple.com)
might have some effect as well.
Possible better answer to the tabs problem
on
Safari Beta Updated
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
OK, I'm not trolling here, it would have been really amazing if Apple had added supports for tabbed browsing in only two days. And I understand they haven't.
I used to think exactly what you think about this. Then
after seeing (again) some of the objections to them, I
came up with an idea to gain tab-like functionality using
ideas already implemented in what you might call "bookmark view" and the (key) idea that the information
about existing windows that exists in the "Window" menu
really wants to be treated like a collection as well. Check
out:
my previous
post on a different safari thread, and then maybe
also a slight tweak designed to bring up the
"tab list" separately from other bookmark stuff. In
both proposals, you would not have tabs listed across the
top of the browser by default, and you would have to hit
one keyboard combo (either option-cmd-B or option-cmd-w) to see the "tabs" at all. But after that, this view is *better* than what you get from tabs or the Window menu since it would essentially never have to truncate page titles and would obviously give you space to display URLs.
Again, the basic idea is that the "window list" information
could be made more navigable in a form very similar to
that for bookmarks or the late, great file selector dialogs that allowed type-ahead on filenames. (I think Safari
needs type ahead for links in normal webpages, too. Since
type ahead is intuitive when the focus is in the location bar, I don't think it's a big stretch to make the Mozilla-like leap
to allowing it when the focus is not on a text entry box of some kind.
The functionality of tabs (rapid navigation to one of the several pages you have open) is preserved, while UI cruft
is not required. Please tell me what you think.:-)
still having problesm running CSS tests?
on
Safari Beta Updated
·
· Score: 2
Hmm, it does seem to run the CSS tests now (and does pretty well)
Rats; I'm still getting failure with what claims to be Beta51.:-( I have the first beta still hanging around, though; is
there some trick to the upgrade I missed?
No, that's not right. iTunes shows you a list of MP3's, iPhoto shows you a list of photos, but Safari does not show you a list of web pages.
I didn't realize that people had gotten so close
to the answer I suggested. Safari does not show
you a list of web pages (it could). It does
show you a list of windows in the windows menu;
if that list were also a collection in collections
view, voila; keyboard accessible, fully visible (no constraint on menu width either!) display
of open windows; the moral equivalent of tabs (only better) just one keycombo away. (Sorry
to harp on this again...)
For bookmarks, Safari's bookmark view works. Would that same view work for browser instances? Absolutely not.
Ah, but bookmark view also works for history, for
collections of URLs generally. Unlike the original poster, I only care about it also showing
open windows, too. The only change I can see
needing to be made is to make it clear that the
viewer is looking at a list of windows rather than
(in essence) a list of URLs.
If mixing a list of windows in bothers you, then
an actually better idea might be to bind option-cmd-w to show a view of the current window list alone. Since we already have
bookmark view, window view hardly seems a stretch. Then it's just like the list contents of the window menu, only keyboard navigable, able to show full-length titles (and URLs for that matter), better able to handle long lists of windows, non-dock cluttering, and just good, clean, fun.:-)
OK, so I was one of the ones in hyperventilation
mode about this, but I think I have hit on a workable compromise that breaks no UI laws,
costs no screen real estate, and continues in
the tradition of list navigation that every
Mac user knows.
The short answer is that the list of currently open window would be the list of currently open (=tabbed) pages; it this list were supplied as an explict collection (like History) when in "bookmark" or "collections" mode (what you get when you click on the "book" icon or hit option-cmd-B), you can basically have your tabs
in one combo-key-stroke.
The window menu doesn't allow you to see, at a glance, what sites you have up and active.
Huh? Oh, you mean you have to pull it down, right? Okay, trade-offs.
Pull-down menus are a particularly annoying
trade-off in my mind. The mouse is always
slower than the keyboard. But this is okay,
since I realized moments ago that there doesn't have to be one. The list of open windows is a perfectly reasonable collection to track (at least
as reasonable as History), and could be navigated
under what you might call "Bookmarks" view (what
you get when you click the book icon or hit option-command-B). Done correctly, this provides
a perfectly useful alternative to tabs that I'm
getting excited about, as suggested in the post I just made about this.
Really, once I realized what you could potentially
do with the bookmarks view this way (it ain't there yet), I knew this was the right answer.:-)
Safari has a number of UI elements that replace tabs. Snapback in the address field and search fields takes you back to where you started surfing.
OK, so my comment began its life as something
of a screed, but now I think I see the way to
get the good effects of tabs with none of the
crufty side effects. The cool thing about tabs is that they give you visual feedback about
where you have been that you decided you want to
go back to, and ideally an easy way to get there.
(Current Moz has issues with the last one.)
What made the little lightbulb go on in my head
was:
The little book icon on the left of the Bookmark bar switches the window to a view of your Bookmarks and History, like lifting up a page to look at a TOC. Plus, it is FAST.
The little icon does not impress me (the shortcut
is option-command-B, but should be more accessible
than that as we shall see). The notion of navigating through bookmarks the same as history
the same as anything else...does.
First off, I'll note that right now,
what I will call "Collections View" has some
problems with keyboard navigation. You can't
go from the left (Collections) column to the
right or vice versa without using the mouse,
and you can't "launch" (or revisit, see below)
a URL by hitting carriage return, as you'd expect
from something viewable and highlighted. It
would also be nice to be able to type text in
this view and have it work as the Apple File Selectors of old (incremental highlighting; push
return and you select).
Now,here is my solution to the "Tabs are necessary but eveil problem". Note that the list of currently open windows is a very reasonable collection. As such, there should be folder in the Collections Column labelled "Current Windows" (or something) whose contents would appear as the list of current sites being visited and their URLs. In one way, this recapitulates
information in the window list under "Window", except that it contains only the list and not the other stuff, is more flexible, does not require the use of the mouse not going to use
a "Window" menu, and could easily handle dozens
of entries. Now navigating the entries in the
"Current Windows" collection has the intuitive
meaning of helping you "visit" one of the current
windows. Again, this should work just great because the list of current windows is the list
of current pages and is emphatically a reasonable
collection.
Now, if one were a "tabs" user, what you'd do in practice is hit option-cmd-B, navigate to the window=page=line of interest, and hit "Return". Navigation could be via arrow keys,
but again I would strongly suggest also allowing users to type in names that would be highlighted (possibly incrementally) a la Mozilla's type-ahead find in page and like the old Apple file selector.
Hitting carriage return then loads the URL and returns you to "page view"; hitting cmd-return loads it in a new window and returns you to page view.
There are several advantages of this over Mozilla's tabs:
There are no tabs.:-)
Each page can have a different size/shape window.
You use vertical space for navigation in collections mode generally, so now more current windows can be handled elegantly than in any
plausible tabs interface, while none take up space unless you're navigating.
There is just one window per document after all.
(Although all but one can be hidden)
Everything is achievable from the keyboard.
When in "bookmarks" view, typing text can be
like "type ahead find" in Mozilla, or for Mac
types, the way typing text in file selector dialogs used to work (incremental completion).
The Mozilla way has the major problem now that
you can only cycle through tabs, rather than
directly address each one.
There's no confusion between closing a tab
versus a window.
If "current windows" is a collection, you can
manage/shuffle/whatever windows (=current pages)
in the same way you can anything else that shows
up as a collection.
Note that "show all bookmarks" view is, in fact,
a mode, and an appopriately used mode. If it
were made a powerful mode, people who wanted to
use it that way would be rewarded while nobody
else would ever be confused.
I swear this has to be the correct way to deal
with this. It's a better way than tabs, breaks
no current UI rules that I know of, provides
a lot of power without requiring people to use it...it just has to be the right way. Hey,
you could then even select the contents of
"Current Windows" and save them into a folder for later, or make bookmark them from this view, or
what have you.
So you've convinced me that Collections is a
really great thing...if it were only done completely (include open documents) and with
beefed up keyboard navigation.
One of the hallmarks of good UI design is to maximize the amount of free desktop real estate, which is one reason why tabs are so popular.
If screen real estate was the hallmark of UI, we'd still be using CLIs. Look at an app that follows those rules: vi. You have *no* clue what's going on, but you've sure got lots of real estate!
Screen real estate is a red herring here. Ease
of navigation is way more important in this case.
I can more easily navigate to what I can see (read tabs here) than what I have to move stuff around
to see (even tabbing throught windows). Most GUI
navigational aids take up screen real estate, of course, so the two ideas are not completely independent in practice.
I am not sure what point you are getting at with
th CLI slam. In the days before windowed interfaces, a CLI was in one sense the ultimate screen hog, since it took up the whole screen. Now I guess you could say that vi saved screen real estate because no space was given over to
navigational aids or useful status indicators.
The other problem with vi is that it forced modes on you for things where modes did not necessarily make sense, and gave you no visual feedback about what was going on. The power of vi, of course, was the ability to use the power
of the command line, and the power of regexes.
According to some of the developers who wish to remain nameless (no, Hyatt isn't one of us... publicly) Safari will get tabs over our dead bodies. We didn't omit them because we didn't have time. We left them out because they're a terrible UI design. To see this in action, just open six or seven tabs in a Chimera window. You can't even read the titles any more! Tabs are pretty useless at that point.
OK, so tabs are bad UI design, but the (default!)
behavior of adding bookmarks to the bar
without any visual separation between them was a good UI design? Or what
about giving the user the option to hit cmd-1...cmd-n to go to that bookmark, but making the user count from left to right to
figure out which key to hit?
I have been a Mac user since 1984, but I'm a fast touch typist and I'm *not* going to reach for my mouse unless I have to, and I shouldn't in this
case. Actually, why should my bookmarks appear
on the bar by default anyway?
For that matter, I know that Safari programmers have nothing to do with the Apple website, but don't you think it is interesting that Apple's own website uses a tabbed interface itself. Only they are fakey pseudo-tabs (seven of them at the top level; why isn't that useless?) with no non-mouse means of navigation.
Seriously,
I will admit that multiple document interfaces can be tricky, but to tell me that the row of 7 tabs
in my Mozilla session (under Mac OS X, of course)
is useless is pathetic. I can immediately see
what pages I have "open", I can get to them via
the keyboard without having to count items across
the bar, I can have 3 windows full of 7 tabs each
and reach any of those pages within 7 keystrokes
(yes that should be 2; assigning cmd-# to each of the tabs and putting the number in the corner is a no-brainer while ctrl-pageup/down is doofy). You
apparently want me to cycle through windows via cmd-~ or something.
For that matter, shouldn't cmd-# take me to a window (like Terminal.app) rather than to an un-numbered bookmark?
Read my lips. Safari will never have tabs.
I'm glad that you can be so triumphant in
your pronouncements about working solutions
to problems when you have no answers to
those problems yourself. Is the tab interface in Mozilla perfect? Heck no. Does it solve a real problem? You bet. Does it get in the way of users if they don't want it? Nope. Could Apple
do better? I'm sure they could, but it's not clear from your post whether they even want to,
which is unfortunate.
If you really want to change something as fundamental as windowing, you don't want to do it on a per-application level. That gives you both inconsistency, and the ability only to do this hierarchical organization trick only with windows from one app.
Well, I would have no strong objection to a tabbed word processor, either, myself.
But I think the stronger argument here is that this is not the 90s anymore, and while the Microsoft "the whole OS is a web browser!" notion is clunky and weird, while Mozilla's "the browser is the kitchen sink!" is bloated, the notion that your web browser is just another app seems really dubious
to me.
The more general solution to this is multiple desktops. You can then put all you browser windows relating to a project on one desktop, along with all your editor sessions in which you're taking notes, and all the mail messages which have useful reference material, and your IM conversations with your colleagues, etc, etc.
Been there. Seen it. Liked it a bit, too, but along the way I realized that what I really wanted in life was as few visible
windows as necessary. Man, you should have seen my standard gnome set-up at one point... And I really did want Mac OS X to be like that. What cured me was cmd-tab an an invisible dock. That way, I maximized screen real-estate, but, whenever I wanted, could go immediately to a maximized open app and cycle through its windows (or not).
I also have an issue with the way most multiple desktops
seem to think I should organize my work. So, in a nice
workshop, you might have different workstations for your
router and your band saw and what not and a separate area for painting. You might have multiple projects going, but it's usually easy enough to see what goes where. This is
an analogy for the notion of multiple applications each with
multiple documents. Now, you could imagine a virtual
workshop of some kind where each project has its own bandsaw and router and what not, and that's the multiple desktops, with one desk per project. Interestingly (to me), I don't find that idea as attractive (with a couple of telling exceptions I won't go into here). What I usually do on my
Linux boxes is set up a simple 3x3 screens desktop, plonk
down 3 xterms, and emacs, an acrobat, 3 screens of (tabbed) web browser and leave one screen for Matlab or whatever other "special" app I need around. This is a nice set-up, and I thought I'd miss it in OSX, but I ended up not missing it because I could still go "anwhere" with just key strokes, and didn't ever run into the problem where I would "run out" of space if I needed (say) a space to run xfig. Now, a nice virtualdesktop could probably handle that, too, but OS X does this with a lot more style and grace than I would have expected.
I've been around for longer than I'd care to admit, but I have to say that I'm impressed with how much nicer my computing environment is these days than it used to be the 80s, on Mac, unix box, or PC.
Now all I have to do is convince them that the lack of type-ahead-links and type-ahead-find in web pages are truly important shortcomings in Safari
What are those? I'm not familiar with those features.
You get these in Mozilla. Imagine you're looking at www.yahoo.com. There are hundreds of links, and you can visually scan them easily. Now to choose the one you are looking at...you have to take your hand off the keyboard, and hit a relatively tiny link with something shaped too much like a hockey puck. Or you could just type some of the text in the link, and have Mozilla highlight it for you, hit return, and the browser will follow the link. This might sound weird, but I insist that you try it in a recent version of Mozilla. Once you've seen the light, you don't want to go back. It's that good. Notice that unless a text widget or the location bar has the focus, typing text does nothing usually, so doing so is (I think) a fairly intuitive act. Type ahead find in the page is...perhaps less intuitive unless you're a vi or "less" (the pager) junky. If you type/perfect (with the slash), you're asking Mozilla to find the text "perfect" anywhere in the page and go there. That's a micro-optimization of cmd-f, really. I like it, but it doesn't ruin my life not to have it.
I'm afraid that tabs might be beyond their UI guidelines.
There's an extremely active discussion going on over in the Apple support forum about how-- if at all-- to implement a multiple document interface for Safari. There seem to be three camps on the issue: 1) Tabs are absolutely essential for browsing, and not including them is stupid. b) Tabs are bad and wrong, but some kind of multiple-document interface would be a good idea. iii) The best way to browse the web is with the good old single-document interface paradigm: one web page, one window.
OK, so I suppose it's possible that there is a better UI notion than tabs waiting to be discoverd to do multiple-document interfaces, but choice iii is just insane. Look, if tabs bother
you, then I guess you don't like multiple links on a web page either. In my mind, it's basically the same kind of thing; you want to see where you're likely to want to go and be able to
make it happen with a minimum of fuss. Sure, I could cmd-~ my life away through a bunch of windows, but since most of them would be hidden, I can't easily tell what is there. With a row of tabs, I can just see everything in my working set, and
then select a tab to go there (just like hitting a link in spirit).
A secondary nice thing about tabs is that I personally use them
to organize my browsing. Often, I have one window full of tabs that point to results of various BLAST searches on NCBI,
another window with tabs that point to my course web pages
and stuff like that, and third window that has stuff like, well, slashdot on it. Easy to go from window to window, and then from tab to tab; voila, my very own hierarchical web interface and no hands ever leave the keyboard.:-)
Myself, I fall somewhere between b and iii. I think a multiple-document interface for browsing is a dumb idea-- once you look past the superficial details of how to arrange the widgets on screen, you run into a whole assload of inconsistencies and irregularities in the paradigm
Look at Mozilla, or even the Apple home page that *explicitly*
uses tabs as the navigational metaphor. The Apple home page
looked weird for about 30 seconds, but then my only complaint was that the tabs were just a fakey image hack.
but I think so many people are clamoring for it that it makes sense to try to make it work. But I wouldn't vote for a MDI that's anything less than absolutely perfect. Better not to use MDI at all, even as an option, than to implement it in a bad or illogical way.
Well, sure, a bad implementation would suck.:-) But I really don't want to get into a situation where the perfect is the enemy of the good. There are some issues with the current Mozilla tab interface (cntrl-page_up to cycle through them is not a terrific choice), but I'd fix the obvious problems and put it in as an option in the Beta. They would get feedback on the feature, and I'd be surprised if it were less than strongly supportive.
I can't give you the information you want, but I wanted to let you know that I've appealed to somebody who can. Dave Hyatt works on WebCore (he has a blog [mozillazine.org]) and if anybody can provide a pointer to docs, he probably can.
Thanks for the link; Hyatt's
blog gives some info on what kind of CSS support should be there (much of CSS2 and bits of CSS3), what the status of XML rendering support is (not yet), and that, yes, a bug they just fixed did prevent it from running the CSS1 test suite at w3c.org. Now all I have to do is convince them that the lack of type-ahead-links and type-ahead-find in web pages are truly important shortcomings in Safari...I'm afraid that tabs might be beyond their UI guidelines.
FYI, everything that can print had PDF export on the mac. Converting to a PDF is part of the printing process in OSX. What I'm getting at here is that mac users already have PDF export in ppt. Vanguard
Um, yeah. I did know that of course, since that's how I sanitize
read-only Word documents. I probably did have something in mind back there, but I have no idea what it was now.:-)
I'm using (used) OmniWeb and don't miss tabs at ALL! Ctrl-click on the browser icon and get a list of windows; cycle only through those windows with ctrl-~ and ctrl-shift-~. Hide the browser with ctrl-h; show the browser and hide all OTHER applications with cmd-opt-click on the icon.
There is absolutely no need for stinking tabs.
I'm a big fan of cmd-~ myself, and use it a lot in all apps that
support it. Hiding is cool, too. BUT! I disagree that tabs are
useless. First off, tabs provide visual feedback for
what pages are in your "working set" which is very
useful if you often have 6 or 8 of them up there. Second, tabs provide a way to organize your browsing hierarchically. When I'm using BLAST at ncbi, I
like to keep all of my search/results/whatever pages in
one place *in a separate window* from the rest of my life.
I can understand your argument about "one document - one window", but I think there is a stronger principle of "avoid clutter" and "provide visual feedback" which the tab metaphor does a beautiful job of doing. In my opinion. The great thing with tabbed browsing in Mozilla is that you can choose not to use it at all and it doesn't ever get in your way.
It's fairly useful, although
I must confess that I haven't gotten in the habbit yet of using it
in Mozilla; I still find myself hitting Ctrl-F and Ctrl-G a lot.
The incremental find text is a bit nicer than ctrl-F since it doesn't drag up a little dialog that (in Mozilla 1.2 under OSX) you can't close without using your mouse.
Incremental highlight link is an absolute miracle; try pulling up yahoo.com; there's no way you want to reach for the mouse to hit one of the hundreds of tiny links. But you can just type "fin" to leap to finance (just hit carriage return) and find out that your stocks have plummeted yet again...
I think type-to-highligh-link (is this a better name?) is extremely useful, inutitive to any Mac user who used to do the same thing in the file selection dialog, and all around worthwhile.
I took a look at the source to that test page. Its not the CSS that is messing it up, its the tag that they are using to load the test html.
...
Seems a strange way of loading what is essentially a floating frame. If you manually change the address of the current page to the page shown in the data attribute "http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS1/current/tes t11.htm", it renders fine.
I didn't think it was the CSS per se (since it was whining about
mime types), but I didn't see how this html could be that objectionable compared to some you see on, well, slashdot.
I just checked at w3c.org, and OBJECT is certainly an element
that should be handled correctly under HTML 4.01. As far as doing this rather than a frame, I'll confess that I didn't know that OBJECT could be so handy; frames stink in my opinion,
and this is a cute (and presumably blessed) device for exactly
this kind of thing.
Given that konq apparently renders this correctly, I'm presuming this was a bug in khtml that got fixed after Apple secretly started banging on the code, so it should be easy to fix.
The RAM is much, much faster in the new PowerBook vs. the iBook. The 12" PowerBook is using 266MHz DDR, the iBook 100MHz SDRAM. I'd pay about $100 for that difference on its own (at least). >2.5-fold increase in RAM speed will make a huge difference in performance, probably about as much as the G3->G4 change.
Well, I won't know about the performance until I see one, but as far as I know, the DDR memory system implementation is still that weird suboptimal one forced upon them by memory bus issues. In other words, you might get some improvement in memory bandwidth, but not as much as you might like. When I tried to "guesstimate"
the improvement overall, I factored in the DDR,
but not as highly as the G4, which is pretty key
for things like iPhoto in particular (or so it seems to me).
We're talking Mac's here, I would have thought someone would've mentioned that its not just MHz that matters by now:)
That's true, but given enough truth serum I have to report that something even as old and klunky as the IBM Thinkpad A21p just completely stomps on
the current G3 offerings in terms of speed...on the other hand, that sucker is huge, has a wireless card that sticks out almost 2 inches, and runs Win2K. *That's* the stuff that matters to me.
A bazillion thanks! So why hasn't the parent been
modded up to 6?:-)
Seriously, the Apple X11 release looked really very impressive on paper, but I lived in mortal fear of
messing with what worked well enough with fink...
I personally think the 17" pb will be the one to go "cube". It's just too big! That'll be like carrying around a pizza box! I guess it works as a semi-mobile desktop though.
A-yup! It's really a desktop that you can take on the road with you. I can predict that a lot of these will be use by people with second LCD monitors in the office with bluetooth keyboards and mice, and then just picked up and taken onto the plane...although you will definitely need a first class seat to whip one out at 30,000 feet.:-)
The notebook I think is closet to "going cube" is the 14 inch iBook. I still don't understand that one at all. Bigger than a regular iBook, and portability is a nice feature, but lacking the features of a Powerbook. Oh well...
Yes, you're right: a shot across the bow of Bill Gates' boat. But I think it was a less significant announcement than Safari, which will surely replace IE as OS X's default browser.
I'm not a real PowerPoint weenie, but it was massively unclear whether it could do anything that Keynote couldn't, and Keynote has the crushing advantage of better looks and PDF export.
As far as Safari goes, it has CSS support problems
in the beta, no tabs, no "type ahead to links", and no real reason to use it over Mozilla or Chimera other than a small speed boost (at least as far as I can tell so far). It might ship as the default, but that means I'll just have to go around and change that setting...c'est la vie.
Erm, it does have type ahead -- I just used that feature.
I meant "type ahead find" (or highlight links on the page). Mozilla has this, but I cannot find this feature (or help on it) anywhere in Safari. I don't mean type ahead in the location bar.
This choice sounds utterly insane to me. With the greatest respect, khtml is nowhere near as good as Gecko in terms of it standards support or behaviour or stability especially when dealing with some of the crap sites out there in the world. Run it through a few random sites involving nested tables, CSS or frames and it quickly screws up rendering.
Well, I'd noticed it seemed to be doing okay on
most CSS pages I'd tried, so I was *going* to
say, "nyah, nyah", but then I figured I go to
the ever-useful
CSS1 test suite pages.
Oops...on the very first test, it fails to display even the test page correctly and the dialog tells me it's choking on the illegal mimetype text/html. Very ungood.
Well, it's beta, and Apple has never seen a wheel
it didn't want to re-invent at some point...
Slashdot Mirror
http://tieguy.org/fonts.png
Pretty decent stuff, in my opinion.
OK, so I checked out some of the drawer stuff you posted about, and remembered that there is a drawer in the silly Help Viewer program. That is a pretty interesting idea, except for one problem. It appears that for a window to have a drawer, you need to have enough "space" to open the drawer, since the drawer "pulls out" from the window. I'm not sure how well this would work in a web browser, given how many people have small screens or (for whatever reason) like to surf from a maximized window.
So, I think Safari *could* have implemented the "Bookmarks View" as a drawer, but chose to use a completely different view. I think that view has some big problems in terms of keyboard navigation (How do you get from the left column to right without using the mouse? Why doesn't hitting return when a book mark is selected let you go to that page?), but if those are fixed, it's a very interesting kind of idea. And it's easy to imagine a full-featured "current windows" view that would give all of the advantages of tabs and more without the UI cruft.
So to summarize, drawers might be interesting, but I'm not sure they are the right choice when you expect the window that needs a drawer to be maximized on the screen.
I think you're suggesting the same thing I was trying to get at in a post on a previous Safari thread. Unfortunately, I have never used Mail.app since I don't dare try to read and file mail that way since I need to read mail from way too many different places and systems. By "tray" do you mean the same way that "bookmark view" (what you get by clicking the book icon or typing option-cmd-B) does stuff? If so, that's what I hit on (although I also want navigation improvement which should be easy).
I would do this except that I'm pretty sure that if I were triaging bugs from these sources and saw *anything* with the word "tab" or "tabbed" in it, I'd file it in the bitbucket these days. :-) Plus, you'd expect somebody who knows
somebody at Apple is reading these posts, so posting about it here (or I guess there's a discussion at apple.com)
might have some effect as well.
I used to think exactly what you think about this. Then after seeing (again) some of the objections to them, I came up with an idea to gain tab-like functionality using ideas already implemented in what you might call "bookmark view" and the (key) idea that the information about existing windows that exists in the "Window" menu really wants to be treated like a collection as well. Check out: my previous post on a different safari thread, and then maybe also a slight tweak designed to bring up the "tab list" separately from other bookmark stuff. In both proposals, you would not have tabs listed across the top of the browser by default, and you would have to hit one keyboard combo (either option-cmd-B or option-cmd-w) to see the "tabs" at all. But after that, this view is *better* than what you get from tabs or the Window menu since it would essentially never have to truncate page titles and would obviously give you space to display URLs.
Again, the basic idea is that the "window list" information could be made more navigable in a form very similar to that for bookmarks or the late, great file selector dialogs that allowed type-ahead on filenames. (I think Safari needs type ahead for links in normal webpages, too. Since type ahead is intuitive when the focus is in the location bar, I don't think it's a big stretch to make the Mozilla-like leap to allowing it when the focus is not on a text entry box of some kind.
The functionality of tabs (rapid navigation to one of the several pages you have open) is preserved, while UI cruft is not required. Please tell me what you think. :-)
Rats; I'm still getting failure with what claims to be Beta51. :-( I have the first beta still hanging around, though; is
there some trick to the upgrade I missed?
I didn't realize that people had gotten so close to the answer I suggested. Safari does not show you a list of web pages (it could). It does show you a list of windows in the windows menu; if that list were also a collection in collections view, voila; keyboard accessible, fully visible (no constraint on menu width either!) display of open windows; the moral equivalent of tabs (only better) just one keycombo away. (Sorry to harp on this again...)
Ah, but bookmark view also works for history, for collections of URLs generally. Unlike the original poster, I only care about it also showing open windows, too. The only change I can see needing to be made is to make it clear that the viewer is looking at a list of windows rather than (in essence) a list of URLs.
If mixing a list of windows in bothers you, then an actually better idea might be to bind option-cmd-w to show a view of the current window list alone. Since we already have bookmark view, window view hardly seems a stretch. Then it's just like the list contents of the window menu, only keyboard navigable, able to show full-length titles (and URLs for that matter), better able to handle long lists of windows, non-dock cluttering, and just good, clean, fun. :-)
The short answer is that the list of currently open window would be the list of currently open (=tabbed) pages; it this list were supplied as an explict collection (like History) when in "bookmark" or "collections" mode (what you get when you click on the "book" icon or hit option-cmd-B), you can basically have your tabs in one combo-key-stroke.
The whole story is spelled out here in my recent reply on a previous thread.
Please let me know if you think this could or could not work.
Pull-down menus are a particularly annoying trade-off in my mind. The mouse is always slower than the keyboard. But this is okay, since I realized moments ago that there doesn't have to be one. The list of open windows is a perfectly reasonable collection to track (at least as reasonable as History), and could be navigated under what you might call "Bookmarks" view (what you get when you click the book icon or hit option-command-B). Done correctly, this provides a perfectly useful alternative to tabs that I'm getting excited about, as suggested in the post I just made about this.
Really, once I realized what you could potentially do with the bookmarks view this way (it ain't there yet), I knew this was the right answer. :-)
OK, so my comment began its life as something of a screed, but now I think I see the way to get the good effects of tabs with none of the crufty side effects. The cool thing about tabs is that they give you visual feedback about where you have been that you decided you want to go back to, and ideally an easy way to get there. (Current Moz has issues with the last one.) What made the little lightbulb go on in my head was:
The little icon does not impress me (the shortcut is option-command-B, but should be more accessible than that as we shall see). The notion of navigating through bookmarks the same as history the same as anything else...does.
First off, I'll note that right now, what I will call "Collections View" has some problems with keyboard navigation. You can't go from the left (Collections) column to the right or vice versa without using the mouse, and you can't "launch" (or revisit, see below) a URL by hitting carriage return, as you'd expect from something viewable and highlighted. It would also be nice to be able to type text in this view and have it work as the Apple File Selectors of old (incremental highlighting; push return and you select).
Now,here is my solution to the "Tabs are necessary but eveil problem". Note that the list of currently open windows is a very reasonable collection. As such, there should be folder in the Collections Column labelled "Current Windows" (or something) whose contents would appear as the list of current sites being visited and their URLs. In one way, this recapitulates information in the window list under "Window", except that it contains only the list and not the other stuff, is more flexible, does not require the use of the mouse not going to use a "Window" menu, and could easily handle dozens of entries. Now navigating the entries in the "Current Windows" collection has the intuitive meaning of helping you "visit" one of the current windows. Again, this should work just great because the list of current windows is the list of current pages and is emphatically a reasonable collection.
Now, if one were a "tabs" user, what you'd do in practice is hit option-cmd-B, navigate to the window=page=line of interest, and hit "Return". Navigation could be via arrow keys, but again I would strongly suggest also allowing users to type in names that would be highlighted (possibly incrementally) a la Mozilla's type-ahead find in page and like the old Apple file selector. Hitting carriage return then loads the URL and returns you to "page view"; hitting cmd-return loads it in a new window and returns you to page view.
There are several advantages of this over Mozilla's tabs:
I swear this has to be the correct way to deal with this. It's a better way than tabs, breaks no current UI rules that I know of, provides a lot of power without requiring people to use it...it just has to be the right way. Hey, you could then even select the contents of "Current Windows" and save them into a folder for later, or make bookmark them from this view, or what have you.
So you've convinced me that Collections is a really great thing...if it were only done completely (include open documents) and with beefed up keyboard navigation.
Let the flames begin:-)
Screen real estate is a red herring here. Ease of navigation is way more important in this case. I can more easily navigate to what I can see (read tabs here) than what I have to move stuff around to see (even tabbing throught windows). Most GUI navigational aids take up screen real estate, of course, so the two ideas are not completely independent in practice.
I am not sure what point you are getting at with th CLI slam. In the days before windowed interfaces, a CLI was in one sense the ultimate screen hog, since it took up the whole screen. Now I guess you could say that vi saved screen real estate because no space was given over to navigational aids or useful status indicators. The other problem with vi is that it forced modes on you for things where modes did not necessarily make sense, and gave you no visual feedback about what was going on. The power of vi, of course, was the ability to use the power of the command line, and the power of regexes.
OK, so tabs are bad UI design, but the (default!) behavior of adding bookmarks to the bar without any visual separation between them was a good UI design? Or what about giving the user the option to hit cmd-1...cmd-n to go to that bookmark, but making the user count from left to right to figure out which key to hit? I have been a Mac user since 1984, but I'm a fast touch typist and I'm *not* going to reach for my mouse unless I have to, and I shouldn't in this case. Actually, why should my bookmarks appear on the bar by default anyway?
For that matter, I know that Safari programmers have nothing to do with the Apple website, but don't you think it is interesting that Apple's own website uses a tabbed interface itself. Only they are fakey pseudo-tabs (seven of them at the top level; why isn't that useless?) with no non-mouse means of navigation.
Seriously, I will admit that multiple document interfaces can be tricky, but to tell me that the row of 7 tabs in my Mozilla session (under Mac OS X, of course) is useless is pathetic. I can immediately see what pages I have "open", I can get to them via the keyboard without having to count items across the bar, I can have 3 windows full of 7 tabs each and reach any of those pages within 7 keystrokes (yes that should be 2; assigning cmd-# to each of the tabs and putting the number in the corner is a no-brainer while ctrl-pageup/down is doofy). You apparently want me to cycle through windows via cmd-~ or something.
For that matter, shouldn't cmd-# take me to a window (like Terminal.app) rather than to an un-numbered bookmark?
I'm glad that you can be so triumphant in your pronouncements about working solutions to problems when you have no answers to those problems yourself. Is the tab interface in Mozilla perfect? Heck no. Does it solve a real problem? You bet. Does it get in the way of users if they don't want it? Nope. Could Apple do better? I'm sure they could, but it's not clear from your post whether they even want to, which is unfortunate.
Well, I would have no strong objection to a tabbed word processor, either, myself.
But I think the stronger argument here is that this is not the 90s anymore, and while the Microsoft "the whole OS is a web browser!" notion is clunky and weird, while Mozilla's "the browser is the kitchen sink!" is bloated, the notion that your web browser is just another app seems really dubious to me.
Been there. Seen it. Liked it a bit, too, but along the way I realized that what I really wanted in life was as few visible windows as necessary. Man, you should have seen my standard gnome set-up at one point... And I really did want Mac OS X to be like that. What cured me was cmd-tab an an invisible dock. That way, I maximized screen real-estate, but, whenever I wanted, could go immediately to a maximized open app and cycle through its windows (or not).
I also have an issue with the way most multiple desktops seem to think I should organize my work. So, in a nice workshop, you might have different workstations for your router and your band saw and what not and a separate area for painting. You might have multiple projects going, but it's usually easy enough to see what goes where. This is an analogy for the notion of multiple applications each with multiple documents. Now, you could imagine a virtual workshop of some kind where each project has its own bandsaw and router and what not, and that's the multiple desktops, with one desk per project. Interestingly (to me), I don't find that idea as attractive (with a couple of telling exceptions I won't go into here). What I usually do on my Linux boxes is set up a simple 3x3 screens desktop, plonk down 3 xterms, and emacs, an acrobat, 3 screens of (tabbed) web browser and leave one screen for Matlab or whatever other "special" app I need around. This is a nice set-up, and I thought I'd miss it in OSX, but I ended up not missing it because I could still go "anwhere" with just key strokes, and didn't ever run into the problem where I would "run out" of space if I needed (say) a space to run xfig. Now, a nice virtualdesktop could probably handle that, too, but OS X does this with a lot more style and grace than I would have expected.
I've been around for longer than I'd care to admit, but I have to say that I'm impressed with how much nicer my computing environment is these days than it used to be the 80s, on Mac, unix box, or PC.
You get these in Mozilla. Imagine you're looking at www.yahoo.com. There are hundreds of links, and you can visually scan them easily. Now to choose the one you are looking at...you have to take your hand off the keyboard, and hit a relatively tiny link with something shaped too much like a hockey puck. Or you could just type some of the text in the link, and have Mozilla highlight it for you, hit return, and the browser will follow the link. This might sound weird, but I insist that you try it in a recent version of Mozilla. Once you've seen the light, you don't want to go back. It's that good. Notice that unless a text widget or the location bar has the focus, typing text does nothing usually, so doing so is (I think) a fairly intuitive act. Type ahead find in the page is...perhaps less intuitive unless you're a vi or "less" (the pager) junky. If you type /perfect (with the slash), you're asking Mozilla to find the text "perfect" anywhere in the page and go there. That's a micro-optimization of cmd-f, really. I like it, but it doesn't ruin my life not to have it.
OK, so I suppose it's possible that there is a better UI notion than tabs waiting to be discoverd to do multiple-document interfaces, but choice iii is just insane. Look, if tabs bother you, then I guess you don't like multiple links on a web page either. In my mind, it's basically the same kind of thing; you want to see where you're likely to want to go and be able to make it happen with a minimum of fuss. Sure, I could cmd-~ my life away through a bunch of windows, but since most of them would be hidden, I can't easily tell what is there. With a row of tabs, I can just see everything in my working set, and then select a tab to go there (just like hitting a link in spirit). A secondary nice thing about tabs is that I personally use them to organize my browsing. Often, I have one window full of tabs that point to results of various BLAST searches on NCBI, another window with tabs that point to my course web pages and stuff like that, and third window that has stuff like, well, slashdot on it. Easy to go from window to window, and then from tab to tab; voila, my very own hierarchical web interface and no hands ever leave the keyboard. :-)
Look at Mozilla, or even the Apple home page that *explicitly* uses tabs as the navigational metaphor. The Apple home page looked weird for about 30 seconds, but then my only complaint was that the tabs were just a fakey image hack.
Well, sure, a bad implementation would suck. :-) But I really don't want to get into a situation where the perfect is the enemy of the good. There are some issues with the current Mozilla tab interface (cntrl-page_up to cycle through them is not a terrific choice), but I'd fix the obvious problems and put it in as an option in the Beta. They would get feedback on the feature, and I'd be surprised if it were less than strongly supportive.
Thanks for the link; Hyatt's blog gives some info on what kind of CSS support should be there (much of CSS2 and bits of CSS3), what the status of XML rendering support is (not yet), and that, yes, a bug they just fixed did prevent it from running the CSS1 test suite at w3c.org. Now all I have to do is convince them that the lack of type-ahead-links and type-ahead-find in web pages are truly important shortcomings in Safari...I'm afraid that tabs might be beyond their UI guidelines.
Um, yeah. I did know that of course, since that's how I sanitize read-only Word documents. I probably did have something in mind back there, but I have no idea what it was now. :-)
I'm a big fan of cmd-~ myself, and use it a lot in all apps that support it. Hiding is cool, too. BUT! I disagree that tabs are useless. First off, tabs provide visual feedback for what pages are in your "working set" which is very useful if you often have 6 or 8 of them up there. Second, tabs provide a way to organize your browsing hierarchically. When I'm using BLAST at ncbi, I like to keep all of my search/results/whatever pages in one place *in a separate window* from the rest of my life.
I can understand your argument about "one document - one window", but I think there is a stronger principle of "avoid clutter" and "provide visual feedback" which the tab metaphor does a beautiful job of doing. In my opinion. The great thing with tabbed browsing in Mozilla is that you can choose not to use it at all and it doesn't ever get in your way.
The incremental find text is a bit nicer than ctrl-F since it doesn't drag up a little dialog that (in Mozilla 1.2 under OSX) you can't close without using your mouse.
Incremental highlight link is an absolute miracle; try pulling up yahoo.com; there's no way you want to reach for the mouse to hit one of the hundreds of tiny links. But you can just type "fin" to leap to finance (just hit carriage return) and find out that your stocks have plummeted yet again...
I think type-to-highligh-link (is this a better name?) is extremely useful, inutitive to any Mac user who used to do the same thing in the file selection dialog, and all around worthwhile.
I didn't think it was the CSS per se (since it was whining about mime types), but I didn't see how this html could be that objectionable compared to some you see on, well, slashdot. I just checked at w3c.org, and OBJECT is certainly an element that should be handled correctly under HTML 4.01. As far as doing this rather than a frame, I'll confess that I didn't know that OBJECT could be so handy; frames stink in my opinion, and this is a cute (and presumably blessed) device for exactly this kind of thing.
Given that konq apparently renders this correctly, I'm presuming this was a bug in khtml that got fixed after Apple secretly started banging on the code, so it should be easy to fix.
Thanks again for the nice detective work.
Well, I won't know about the performance until I see one, but as far as I know, the DDR memory system implementation is still that weird suboptimal one forced upon them by memory bus issues. In other words, you might get some improvement in memory bandwidth, but not as much as you might like. When I tried to "guesstimate" the improvement overall, I factored in the DDR, but not as highly as the G4, which is pretty key for things like iPhoto in particular (or so it seems to me).
That's true, but given enough truth serum I have to report that something even as old and klunky as the IBM Thinkpad A21p just completely stomps on the current G3 offerings in terms of speed...on the other hand, that sucker is huge, has a wireless card that sticks out almost 2 inches, and runs Win2K. *That's* the stuff that matters to me.
A bazillion thanks! So why hasn't the parent been modded up to 6? :-)
Seriously, the Apple X11 release looked really very impressive on paper, but I lived in mortal fear of messing with what worked well enough with fink...
A-yup! It's really a desktop that you can take on the road with you. I can predict that a lot of these will be use by people with second LCD monitors in the office with bluetooth keyboards and mice, and then just picked up and taken onto the plane...although you will definitely need a first class seat to whip one out at 30,000 feet. :-)
The notebook I think is closet to "going cube" is the 14 inch iBook. I still don't understand that one at all. Bigger than a regular iBook, and portability is a nice feature, but lacking the features of a Powerbook. Oh well...
I'm not a real PowerPoint weenie, but it was massively unclear whether it could do anything that Keynote couldn't, and Keynote has the crushing advantage of better looks and PDF export.
As far as Safari goes, it has CSS support problems in the beta, no tabs, no "type ahead to links", and no real reason to use it over Mozilla or Chimera other than a small speed boost (at least as far as I can tell so far). It might ship as the default, but that means I'll just have to go around and change that setting...c'est la vie.
I meant "type ahead find" (or highlight links on the page). Mozilla has this, but I cannot find this feature (or help on it) anywhere in Safari. I don't mean type ahead in the location bar.
I'm not; I'm using the safari public beta based on khtml. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Well, I'd noticed it seemed to be doing okay on most CSS pages I'd tried, so I was *going* to say, "nyah, nyah", but then I figured I go to the ever-useful CSS1 test suite pages.
Oops...on the very first test, it fails to display even the test page correctly and the dialog tells me it's choking on the illegal mimetype text/html. Very ungood.
Well, it's beta, and Apple has never seen a wheel it didn't want to re-invent at some point...