For example, if you had all your "Punk" songs sorted alphabetially by clicking on the song name column, then decided you wanted to listen to an entire album, the album would not automatically resort to track number
Uh... right. iTunes does not arbitrarily change your sort order for you. It does what you tell it.
File name, song name. Same thing if iTunes has ripped the track.
Not true. To pick one of my 5,000+ MP3's at random, its song name is "Blackbird." It's file name is "02 Blackbird.mp3."
I've got a botched copy of Sgt. Pepper's that the significant other burned out of iTunes to prove it.
Dude, if you're grumpy because iTunes did what you told it-- burned the CD with the tracks sorted by title instead of by track number-- then kindly take it somewhere else. There's no other sensible way for the program to do it!
Do you really think that it's going to bring your collection in (even *if* playlists, ID3 tags and albums are honored) sorted how you'd like all by itself? I'd place money on an alphabetical sort being the default.
Oh, I don't think that's a safe bet. Look at your iPod. When you look at a list of all songs by an artist, it sorts them by title alphabetically. (What you'd want.) If you look at all songs on a given album, it sorts them by track number (again, what you'd want). I think it's far more likely that a TiVo-based MP3 player would use this sensible method of sorting rather than just blindly sorting alphabetically all the time.
iTunes is different, though. iTunes is not an appliance; it's an interactive application. If you tell iTunes to sort by track number, then by god it's going to sort by track number until you tell it otherwise. Likewise with an alphabetical sort.
It should be as intuitive as possible for people who *don't* know what they're doing to be able to play an entire album in the proper order.
Users still shouldn't expect something labled as beta to be a 1.0.
Yes, but the converse is also true: users shouldn't expect something labeled as 1.0 to be beta-quality. When Mozilla went from beta to 1.0, they apparently didn't do a feature freeze or anything. I can't even seem to find any evidence of automated regression testing, although I can't imagine that there wasn't any.
Taking the last beta and slapping a "1.0" sticker on it is not a good way to release a software product, guys.
(I guess this is technically off-topic now. Sorry about that. End of rant.)
Remember when you found out your teachers lied to you about all illegal substances turning you into a zombie or worse?
<offtopic>Dude, drugs do turn you into a zombie and worse. Hell, there are plenty of legal substances that also turn you into a zombie. If you think you can do drugs (or smoke, or drink, or whatever) and not suffer for it, you're either ignorant or fooling yourself.
Life is full of compromises. If you want to sacrifice your health, your self-esteem, or your safety for a temporary pleasant sensation, go right ahead. But don't kid yourself into thinking there are no negative side-effects.</offtopic>
The responsibility for that problem lies squarely on the shoulders of the Mozilla guys. Back when I was young, "beta" meant "feature-complete, but not yet debugged." If a product is in "beta," that meant that it was absolutely not going to get any new features before release.
The Mozilla guys kept glomming features onto their browser for months and years. Eventually they got rid of the term "beta" and started calling them "prereleases" or "milestones" or something, but the fact remains that it's an awful practice.
Apple has a history of treating betas like betas. The Mac OS X public beta didn't get any major new features when it went to 10.0. iSync beta didn't get any major new features when it went to 1.0. And I hope, oh I hope, that Safari doesn't get any major new features before it goes to 1.0.
So that's all I mean when I say that multiple views, one window, is workable for web browsing because it's already been implemented in iTunes, iPhoto, Mail, etc.
Hmm. I still don't buy it. While what you're talking about could be done, I can't seem to think of a decent reason for it. There would be trade-offs, too; you'd have to have an iTunes/iPhoto-style sidebar, and those are always so wasteful of screen real-estate, not to mention being particularly unfriendly when dealing with long titles.
The bottom line is that the current way of doing things, despite your own preferences, is demonstrably better. The Window menu doesn't take up valuable screen real estate (lots of people are still running 1024x768 on their iBooks and 12" PowerBooks, remember), and it doesn't require users to deal with absurdly truncated titles.
So unless your idea brings some actual new features or functions to the table, I can't say I'd vote for it in a poll.
(It's better than tabs, though. Ugh.;-) )
Perhaps, but implementation wise you can imagine that Safari2 precaches a select list of bookmarks so that when you click on the link it loads instantaneously.
No, prefetching is a bad idea. Most people still access the internet via modem, and prefetching a bunch of web sites-- or even just two or three-- can easily swamp a 56K connection for tens of seconds or longer. One of the great things about Safari is that it's so lightweight; launching it takes just a second or two even on a slower machine. (I have a 400 MHz G3 iMac here to prove it.) Adding a bunch of prefetching to the startup process would just bog things down.
What I want is *one* HTML window with multiple HTML views.
Sorry, you can't have that.;-) What else do you want me to say? That's not the way windows work on a Mac.
The same way that iTunes is an mp3 browser, iPhoto is a photo browser, Finder is a file browser, Mail is an email browser, then Safari2 could be a 'website browser'.
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. It would, if implemented in the way you describe, show you a list of views of web pages. Any view can display any web page. So the whole comparison to iTunes, iPhoto, et cetera breaks down. Safari just simply doesn't work like that, so it would be a bad thing to implement a similar UI.
For bookmarks, Safari's bookmark view works. Would that same view work for browser instances? Absolutely not.
You know, dude, you're not exactly off to a good start here. Your posting history has exactly three comments in it, all of them in this thread, all of them sarcastic and content-free. Why don't you try contributing something, instead of just adding to the noise-to-signal ratio?
IMHO, a video, wireless-networking iPod is definitely on its way.
Nobody wants a video, wireless-networking iPod. There's just no existing demand for it. Apple would be insane to release an expensive product for which there is zero demand.
Look, the standard-definition digital video problem has been solved DVD players are practically ubiquitous; you can buy cheap Chinese models at the grocery store, for cryin' out loud. There is absolutely no need (i.e., demand) for a wireless video iPod. It's just a dumb idea.
Now, if Apple were to build their own HD PVR with an embedded version of OS X, I'd be all over that. That's something that's in seriously high demand. Put Rendezvous and an AirPort Extreme card in it and have it work automatically with iMovie, iPhoto, and iTunes. Hell, yeah.
What they should do is re-encode old recordings to a lower quality, thereby taking up less space and making room for new recordings.
Two things. First of all, there's only one (or at most two) MPEG encoder ASIC's in a PVR, so you'd only be able to transcode shows while the encoder was not in use. My TiVo is busy just about all the time, either recording stuff I asked for or stuff it thinks I'll like. So that won't work.
Second, low-bit-rate MPEG transcoded to even-lower-bit-rate MPEG comes out looking like hammered shit. TiVo's picture quality is bad enough without multiple generations of increasingly constrained encoding making things even worse.
Re:How do you firewall tivo ads?
on
TiVo and Rendezvous
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Oh hell, fuck tivo I want a free/open linux pvr with xml show listings available on the net.
Yeah, okay, whatever. Let us know when you get that working, okay? Meanwhile, the rest of us are going to stick with something that actually works, and that does not require an absurd amount of work to set up and maintain.
What the hell are you talking about? For one thing, iTunes doesn't sort by the file name ever, under any circumstances. It only sorts by ID3 tags. (Well, unless there are no ID3 tags. That's the only exception.)
So whether you have track numbers in your file names or not doesn't matter a damn. If you want to sort alphabetically, sort by track name. If you want to sort numerically, sort by track numbers. All you have to do is click the column header.
As in: it's illegal to access and therefore to re-encode DVDs because of the DMCA.
It's only illegal to decode DVD's. It's not illegal to copy them from one medium to another. (At least, I don't think it is.) So you could legally copy a DVD's VOB file to your iPod and then play it (somehow) on your TV, if the device that was actually doing the playback had a licensed decoder in it.
The reason Apple hasn't done this already is because it's kind of a dumb idea, I think.
and doesn't play nice with other OS's (Windows included).
I think it's inevitable that Microsoft is going to add support for Rendezvous in Windows. It's an IETF standard (or rather a set of them) and third parties are adopting it like crazy. Microsoft sees where the wind is blowing.
I think people are getting fairly fed up with artificial barriers between mac/windows/linux on the same network.
What artificial barriers? A Mac can browse and mount Windows shares directly, without any additional software. It can also export shares to Windows machines without any additional software. No barrier there.
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.
And, in Mouse Time, click-drag-un/click takes a whole lot more time than just click.
Not actually true. Because tabs are at the top of the window (or side, or wherever) they present a very small mouse target that the user has to it. Hitting the menu bar is much easier, because it's essentially infinitely tall: just push your mouse forward until you get to the top of the screen; you don't have to be precise. The menu bar is easier and faster to use than tabs.
This, of course, ignores the important fact that the Window menu shows you all, or at least a great deal of, the titles of your windows, even on the smallest screen. Tabs can't do that.
No, but it does allow you to have different documents within that project to be in the same window.
Okay, then implement it Project Builder-style, with a pop-up list of pages or whatever. The net result will still be a feature that's harder to use and less effective than the SDI/Window menu way.
(The eds, in their infinite wisdom, rejected my story about this yesterday. Oh, well.)
Re:this is just the beginning
on
TiVo and Rendezvous
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· Score: 5, Insightful
No offense, but I think you're full of shit. An iPod holds 20 GB today, and presumably 40 GB real soon now. DVD's put about two hours into about 7 GB, at about 8 Mb/s. So you could store five DVD's without additional compression on a 40 GB iPod, and stream them over plain old AirPort, and still have room left over for some MP3's.
So everything you describe could be done right now, with last year's technology. If Apple were planning to do it, they would have been doing it already.
I'm not 100% sure, but I think you're full of shit.
Actually, and in all seriousness, it's like AppleTalk for IP. AppleTalk was great, but had problems, not the least of which being that it was proprietary. Windows networking-- Network Neighborhood and all that-- was a horrible copy of AppleTalk. Now here comes Rendezvous, which combines the ease of use and convenience of AppleTalk with the goodness of IP without having to suck.
Gonna change the world, man.
Here's just one example of why Rendezvous is cool. Safari has Rendezvous support built-in. I have a friend who works for a company that builds web applications; their apps run on Apache, and they have dozens and dozens of development servers in their lab, all with names like SVR-LAB-01-A-342 and stuff like that. Keeping track of which server is running what, and on what ports, is a nightmare. So I set him up with mod_rendezvous yesterday. Now everybody who uses Safari (which is like half the damn company already) gets a nice list of all the currently running servers on his bookmarks screen. All you have to do is pick the one you want.
I'll say it again. Rendezvous is gonna change the world.
Heh. I like it. "That thing that Rendezvous will let you do with zero configuration? Oh, you can do the very same thing today with this list of obscure tools and a couple of weekends of hacking work."
That, ladies and gentlemen, is why Rendezvous is a good thing.;-)
The basic gist of the problem is that you don't think tabbed browsing really works well.
Just to clarify, I think that tabbed browsing at best provides you with the same functionality you could get through use of the Window menu and the Minimize function, only not as well. Since it's "different and same," I'm lobbying for its exclusion from Safari.
I don't care if other browsers implement it. But Safari is an Apple flagship application. It needs to have the highest degree of ease of use and UI consistency. Adding tabs will compromise that for no benefit whatsoever.
You claim that no other Apple application uses Tabs, but you might want to load up Project Builder sometime to see that it's not really true.
I claim that no other Apple application uses tabs to represent multiple documents in the same window. Project Builder uses tabs to represent different modes of the interface: build, find, debug, et cetera.
In Project Builder, the document is the project itself. When you open two projects at once, each one gets its own project window. (Depending on how your prefs are set up, there may be other windows as well.) Project Builder never puts two separate projects into the same window. Ever.
I'm starting to come to the conclusion that the people who like tabbed browsing most often come from Windows, where there's the issue of taskbar crowding, or UNIX, where opening a new window can be a significant investment of time and CPU cycles. I'm sure that's not always true, but I'm quite confident that the desire for tabs will disappear completely once a person learns how to use the Window menu, Minimize and the dock, and command-`.
Not a Mac app. The fundamental strength of the Mac is that every Mac app works (more or less) the same as every other Mac app. On Windows, or even Linux, on the other hand, one application can often be completely different from another. This results in a bad user experience. It's hardly something to emulate.
Aside from that MDI was the way to go for a long time in the MS Windows world, before they decided that SDI was better.
As you yourself note, even Microsoft, who invented MDI, have since deprecated it in favor of SDI. To go back to MDI now is to go against a decade-long tide of UI development.
Tabs allow you to group related views, giving you an extra level of organisation over a single window per view.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but no, they really don't. You can't drag tabs from one window to another. You can't reorder tabs. You can't organize tabs either spatially or in relation to one other except by altering the order in which you open them. Windows, on the other hand, can be arranged in any way a user sees fit. They can be stacked, tiled, or cascaded to suit a user's needs. And easy access to an individual window is always there, via the Window menu. To reduce clutter, windows can easily (one keystroke or mouse click) be minimized to the dock, where they're represented not just by name (as in tabs) but by a real-time scalable thumbnail image.
In other words, windows let you do everything tabs let you do, and more, and better.
If, however, you make tabs 'collapsable', in that you can move a window onto a stack and have them 'share' real estate, I think that would work.
You mean like the Dock?;-)
I don't mean to be flip, but instead of trying to figure out new and different ways of doing things, spend a few minutes first trying out the built-in ways. You might just find that they get you right where you want to be without any additional hand-wringing at all.
I see nothing wrong itself with tabs or MDI.
What's wrong with it is that it's "different and same." Tabs/MDI is a different way of doing things. Different and better is okay; that's how innovation happens. Different and worse is terrible, of course, but one man's worse is another man's better, so sometimes it comes down to a judgment call. But different and same-- in other words, providing no new functionality but simply a different way to accomplish the same task or goal-- is bad. It makes your application bloated and confusing. Having two equivalent ways of doing the same thing can make novice users spend more time deciding which one to use than either one of them would have required. Faced with both "open in new window" and "open in new tab," a significant fraction of users will sit and stare at them and say, "What's the difference? Which one do I want?" which makes the whole experience no fun for anybody.
You can imagine each tab akin to an icon in the Dock, and the Site Switcher is akin to the Dock or the Application Switcher.
Slashdot Mirror
For example, if you had all your "Punk" songs sorted alphabetially by clicking on the song name column, then decided you wanted to listen to an entire album, the album would not automatically resort to track number
Uh... right. iTunes does not arbitrarily change your sort order for you. It does what you tell it.
File name, song name. Same thing if iTunes has ripped the track.
Not true. To pick one of my 5,000+ MP3's at random, its song name is "Blackbird." It's file name is "02 Blackbird.mp3."
I've got a botched copy of Sgt. Pepper's that the significant other burned out of iTunes to prove it.
Dude, if you're grumpy because iTunes did what you told it-- burned the CD with the tracks sorted by title instead of by track number-- then kindly take it somewhere else. There's no other sensible way for the program to do it!
Do you really think that it's going to bring your collection in (even *if* playlists, ID3 tags and albums are honored) sorted how you'd like all by itself? I'd place money on an alphabetical sort being the default.
Oh, I don't think that's a safe bet. Look at your iPod. When you look at a list of all songs by an artist, it sorts them by title alphabetically. (What you'd want.) If you look at all songs on a given album, it sorts them by track number (again, what you'd want). I think it's far more likely that a TiVo-based MP3 player would use this sensible method of sorting rather than just blindly sorting alphabetically all the time.
iTunes is different, though. iTunes is not an appliance; it's an interactive application. If you tell iTunes to sort by track number, then by god it's going to sort by track number until you tell it otherwise. Likewise with an alphabetical sort.
It should be as intuitive as possible for people who *don't* know what they're doing to be able to play an entire album in the proper order.
You mean like an iPod is? Yeah, I agree.
Users still shouldn't expect something labled as beta to be a 1.0.
Yes, but the converse is also true: users shouldn't expect something labeled as 1.0 to be beta-quality. When Mozilla went from beta to 1.0, they apparently didn't do a feature freeze or anything. I can't even seem to find any evidence of automated regression testing, although I can't imagine that there wasn't any.
Taking the last beta and slapping a "1.0" sticker on it is not a good way to release a software product, guys.
(I guess this is technically off-topic now. Sorry about that. End of rant.)
Remember when you found out your teachers lied to you about all illegal substances turning you into a zombie or worse?
<offtopic>Dude, drugs do turn you into a zombie and worse. Hell, there are plenty of legal substances that also turn you into a zombie. If you think you can do drugs (or smoke, or drink, or whatever) and not suffer for it, you're either ignorant or fooling yourself.
Life is full of compromises. If you want to sacrifice your health, your self-esteem, or your safety for a temporary pleasant sensation, go right ahead. But don't kid yourself into thinking there are no negative side-effects.</offtopic>
The responsibility for that problem lies squarely on the shoulders of the Mozilla guys. Back when I was young, "beta" meant "feature-complete, but not yet debugged." If a product is in "beta," that meant that it was absolutely not going to get any new features before release.
The Mozilla guys kept glomming features onto their browser for months and years. Eventually they got rid of the term "beta" and started calling them "prereleases" or "milestones" or something, but the fact remains that it's an awful practice.
Apple has a history of treating betas like betas. The Mac OS X public beta didn't get any major new features when it went to 10.0. iSync beta didn't get any major new features when it went to 1.0. And I hope, oh I hope, that Safari doesn't get any major new features before it goes to 1.0.
So that's all I mean when I say that multiple views, one window, is workable for web browsing because it's already been implemented in iTunes, iPhoto, Mail, etc.
;-) )
Hmm. I still don't buy it. While what you're talking about could be done, I can't seem to think of a decent reason for it. There would be trade-offs, too; you'd have to have an iTunes/iPhoto-style sidebar, and those are always so wasteful of screen real-estate, not to mention being particularly unfriendly when dealing with long titles.
The bottom line is that the current way of doing things, despite your own preferences, is demonstrably better. The Window menu doesn't take up valuable screen real estate (lots of people are still running 1024x768 on their iBooks and 12" PowerBooks, remember), and it doesn't require users to deal with absurdly truncated titles.
So unless your idea brings some actual new features or functions to the table, I can't say I'd vote for it in a poll.
(It's better than tabs, though. Ugh.
Perhaps, but implementation wise you can imagine that Safari2 precaches a select list of bookmarks so that when you click on the link it loads instantaneously.
No, prefetching is a bad idea. Most people still access the internet via modem, and prefetching a bunch of web sites-- or even just two or three-- can easily swamp a 56K connection for tens of seconds or longer. One of the great things about Safari is that it's so lightweight; launching it takes just a second or two even on a slower machine. (I have a 400 MHz G3 iMac here to prove it.) Adding a bunch of prefetching to the startup process would just bog things down.
What I want is *one* HTML window with multiple HTML views.
;-) What else do you want me to say? That's not the way windows work on a Mac.
Sorry, you can't have that.
The same way that iTunes is an mp3 browser, iPhoto is a photo browser, Finder is a file browser, Mail is an email browser, then Safari2 could be a 'website browser'.
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. It would, if implemented in the way you describe, show you a list of views of web pages. Any view can display any web page. So the whole comparison to iTunes, iPhoto, et cetera breaks down. Safari just simply doesn't work like that, so it would be a bad thing to implement a similar UI.
For bookmarks, Safari's bookmark view works. Would that same view work for browser instances? Absolutely not.
You know, dude, you're not exactly off to a good start here. Your posting history has exactly three comments in it, all of them in this thread, all of them sarcastic and content-free. Why don't you try contributing something, instead of just adding to the noise-to-signal ratio?
Being able to carry around your entire photo album in your pocket is something people would be interested in.
Not really. People are keeping their photo albums on their web sites. There's no reason to carry them around.
IMHO, a video, wireless-networking iPod is definitely on its way.
Nobody wants a video, wireless-networking iPod. There's just no existing demand for it. Apple would be insane to release an expensive product for which there is zero demand.
Look, the standard-definition digital video problem has been solved DVD players are practically ubiquitous; you can buy cheap Chinese models at the grocery store, for cryin' out loud. There is absolutely no need (i.e., demand) for a wireless video iPod. It's just a dumb idea.
Now, if Apple were to build their own HD PVR with an embedded version of OS X, I'd be all over that. That's something that's in seriously high demand. Put Rendezvous and an AirPort Extreme card in it and have it work automatically with iMovie, iPhoto, and iTunes. Hell, yeah.
But a video iPod? No way. No way.
What they should do is re-encode old recordings to a lower quality, thereby taking up less space and making room for new recordings.
Two things. First of all, there's only one (or at most two) MPEG encoder ASIC's in a PVR, so you'd only be able to transcode shows while the encoder was not in use. My TiVo is busy just about all the time, either recording stuff I asked for or stuff it thinks I'll like. So that won't work.
Second, low-bit-rate MPEG transcoded to even-lower-bit-rate MPEG comes out looking like hammered shit. TiVo's picture quality is bad enough without multiple generations of increasingly constrained encoding making things even worse.
Oh hell, fuck tivo I want a free/open linux pvr with xml show listings available on the net.
Yeah, okay, whatever. Let us know when you get that working, okay? Meanwhile, the rest of us are going to stick with something that actually works, and that does not require an absurd amount of work to set up and maintain.
What the hell are you talking about? For one thing, iTunes doesn't sort by the file name ever, under any circumstances. It only sorts by ID3 tags. (Well, unless there are no ID3 tags. That's the only exception.)
So whether you have track numbers in your file names or not doesn't matter a damn. If you want to sort alphabetically, sort by track name. If you want to sort numerically, sort by track numbers. All you have to do is click the column header.
Aren't the new Airport extremes out yet? Steve announced them, what... 48 hrs ago? :)
The Apple Store says AirPort Extreme base stations will ship in 2-4 weeks.
As in: it's illegal to access and therefore to re-encode DVDs because of the DMCA.
It's only illegal to decode DVD's. It's not illegal to copy them from one medium to another. (At least, I don't think it is.) So you could legally copy a DVD's VOB file to your iPod and then play it (somehow) on your TV, if the device that was actually doing the playback had a licensed decoder in it.
The reason Apple hasn't done this already is because it's kind of a dumb idea, I think.
It won't change nothing if it's proprietary
;-)
Good thing it's open then, huh?
and doesn't play nice with other OS's (Windows included).
I think it's inevitable that Microsoft is going to add support for Rendezvous in Windows. It's an IETF standard (or rather a set of them) and third parties are adopting it like crazy. Microsoft sees where the wind is blowing.
I think people are getting fairly fed up with artificial barriers between mac/windows/linux on the same network.
What artificial barriers? A Mac can browse and mount Windows shares directly, without any additional software. It can also export shares to Windows machines without any additional software. No barrier there.
I used "proprietary" in the Slashdot sense: something that was invented by a company instead of by a university or a teenager or something. ;-)
You were right to call me on it.
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.
And, in Mouse Time, click-drag-un/click takes a whole lot more time than just click.
Not actually true. Because tabs are at the top of the window (or side, or wherever) they present a very small mouse target that the user has to it. Hitting the menu bar is much easier, because it's essentially infinitely tall: just push your mouse forward until you get to the top of the screen; you don't have to be precise. The menu bar is easier and faster to use than tabs.
This, of course, ignores the important fact that the Window menu shows you all, or at least a great deal of, the titles of your windows, even on the smallest screen. Tabs can't do that.
No, but it does allow you to have different documents within that project to be in the same window.
Okay, then implement it Project Builder-style, with a pop-up list of pages or whatever. The net result will still be a feature that's harder to use and less effective than the SDI/Window menu way.
You know, you're right. I'm surprised Google hasn't picked it up yet. Clicky-clicky:
_ rendezvous/
http://homepage.mac.com/macdomeeu/dev/current/mod
(The eds, in their infinite wisdom, rejected my story about this yesterday. Oh, well.)
No offense, but I think you're full of shit. An iPod holds 20 GB today, and presumably 40 GB real soon now. DVD's put about two hours into about 7 GB, at about 8 Mb/s. So you could store five DVD's without additional compression on a 40 GB iPod, and stream them over plain old AirPort, and still have room left over for some MP3's.
So everything you describe could be done right now, with last year's technology. If Apple were planning to do it, they would have been doing it already.
I'm not 100% sure, but I think you're full of shit.
Actually, and in all seriousness, it's like AppleTalk for IP. AppleTalk was great, but had problems, not the least of which being that it was proprietary. Windows networking-- Network Neighborhood and all that-- was a horrible copy of AppleTalk. Now here comes Rendezvous, which combines the ease of use and convenience of AppleTalk with the goodness of IP without having to suck.
Gonna change the world, man.
Here's just one example of why Rendezvous is cool. Safari has Rendezvous support built-in. I have a friend who works for a company that builds web applications; their apps run on Apache, and they have dozens and dozens of development servers in their lab, all with names like SVR-LAB-01-A-342 and stuff like that. Keeping track of which server is running what, and on what ports, is a nightmare. So I set him up with mod_rendezvous yesterday. Now everybody who uses Safari (which is like half the damn company already) gets a nice list of all the currently running servers on his bookmarks screen. All you have to do is pick the one you want.
I'll say it again. Rendezvous is gonna change the world.
Heh. I like it. "That thing that Rendezvous will let you do with zero configuration? Oh, you can do the very same thing today with this list of obscure tools and a couple of weekends of hacking work."
;-)
That, ladies and gentlemen, is why Rendezvous is a good thing.
The basic gist of the problem is that you don't think tabbed browsing really works well.
Just to clarify, I think that tabbed browsing at best provides you with the same functionality you could get through use of the Window menu and the Minimize function, only not as well. Since it's "different and same," I'm lobbying for its exclusion from Safari.
I don't care if other browsers implement it. But Safari is an Apple flagship application. It needs to have the highest degree of ease of use and UI consistency. Adding tabs will compromise that for no benefit whatsoever.
You claim that no other Apple application uses Tabs, but you might want to load up Project Builder sometime to see that it's not really true.
I claim that no other Apple application uses tabs to represent multiple documents in the same window. Project Builder uses tabs to represent different modes of the interface: build, find, debug, et cetera.
In Project Builder, the document is the project itself. When you open two projects at once, each one gets its own project window. (Depending on how your prefs are set up, there may be other windows as well.) Project Builder never puts two separate projects into the same window. Ever.
I'm starting to come to the conclusion that the people who like tabbed browsing most often come from Windows, where there's the issue of taskbar crowding, or UNIX, where opening a new window can be a significant investment of time and CPU cycles. I'm sure that's not always true, but I'm quite confident that the desire for tabs will disappear completely once a person learns how to use the Window menu, Minimize and the dock, and command-`.
gedit will open files in multiple tabs.
Not a Mac app. The fundamental strength of the Mac is that every Mac app works (more or less) the same as every other Mac app. On Windows, or even Linux, on the other hand, one application can often be completely different from another. This results in a bad user experience. It's hardly something to emulate.
Aside from that MDI was the way to go for a long time in the MS Windows world, before they decided that SDI was better.
As you yourself note, even Microsoft, who invented MDI, have since deprecated it in favor of SDI. To go back to MDI now is to go against a decade-long tide of UI development.
Tabs allow you to group related views, giving you an extra level of organisation over a single window per view.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but no, they really don't. You can't drag tabs from one window to another. You can't reorder tabs. You can't organize tabs either spatially or in relation to one other except by altering the order in which you open them. Windows, on the other hand, can be arranged in any way a user sees fit. They can be stacked, tiled, or cascaded to suit a user's needs. And easy access to an individual window is always there, via the Window menu. To reduce clutter, windows can easily (one keystroke or mouse click) be minimized to the dock, where they're represented not just by name (as in tabs) but by a real-time scalable thumbnail image.
In other words, windows let you do everything tabs let you do, and more, and better.
If, however, you make tabs 'collapsable', in that you can move a window onto a stack and have them 'share' real estate, I think that would work.
;-)
You mean like the Dock?
I don't mean to be flip, but instead of trying to figure out new and different ways of doing things, spend a few minutes first trying out the built-in ways. You might just find that they get you right where you want to be without any additional hand-wringing at all.
I see nothing wrong itself with tabs or MDI.
What's wrong with it is that it's "different and same." Tabs/MDI is a different way of doing things. Different and better is okay; that's how innovation happens. Different and worse is terrible, of course, but one man's worse is another man's better, so sometimes it comes down to a judgment call. But different and same-- in other words, providing no new functionality but simply a different way to accomplish the same task or goal-- is bad. It makes your application bloated and confusing. Having two equivalent ways of doing the same thing can make novice users spend more time deciding which one to use than either one of them would have required. Faced with both "open in new window" and "open in new tab," a significant fraction of users will sit and stare at them and say, "What's the difference? Which one do I want?" which makes the whole experience no fun for anybody.
You can imagine each tab akin to an icon in the Dock, and the Site Switcher is akin to the Dock or the Application Switcher.
Heh. Or you could just use the Dock.
I completely agree, and one of Omniweb's sweetest features to me is it's ability to open links behind your current window.
Safari can do this, too. Command-shift-click a link. OmniWeb has the feature in a context menu, unlike Safari, but that's the only difference.
(I may have mentioned this before. Pardon me if I'm being redundant; I just woke up.)