unity-design team mailing list archive

[Dylan McCall <dylanmccall@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 7:05 AM, Tyler Brainerd <tylerbrainerd@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Haha. I guess what I'm getting at is theres plenty of apps (like Empathy)
> that have tabs available, but they work on different rules. Not to mention
> that some apps are on top, others on bottom, some are full featured tabs,
> some are content only and not tool bars and so have
> inconsistent appearance....

There is also some variety in what tabs feel like; what they mean, and
how they relate to windows. Lots of apps (Empathy, Firefox, gedit)
have tabs representing toplevel windows, to the extent they can be
dragged / dropped to expand into new toplevel windows.

Reinteract is a neat alternative case. The application lets you do
math with Python and you get results in-line (plotting graphs, etc).
It has Notebooks, which contain Worksheets. Each notebook is
represented by a new window, and all the worksheets in a notebook
appear as separate tabs in its window. It makes no mention of tabs in
the surrounding chrome (there isn't a Tabs menu), and it is impossible
to drag a tab to create a new window. This isn't a problem of any sort
because they are a distinctly defined part of the user interface; they
represent something in a concrete way and they don't conflict with top
level windows. The tabs are just there.

I think I have seen a few other apps like this, but Reinteract is the
one I remember. I think it is a nice example of tabs done right,
because it doesn't feel like they're just throwing tabs in for the
sake of it.

Not that ”tabs are like windows, but inside of them” is inherently
tabs done wrong, but it _is_ a kludgey design as it is, and
inconsistent with how tabs are used elsewhere. Right now both designs,
even though they are completely different, go through the GTK Notebook
widget. Maybe that could be reconsidered. A new widget that
semantically and visually represents a separate document inside a
toplevel window may be worth exploring.

I think becoming consistent with tabs will be difficult when we have
some applications (like Firefox) that treat tabs as features by
themselves that the user needs to think about directly; and other
applications (Reinteract, most configuration dialogs :/) where a tab -
as in, that exact same GTK widget - represents a section, or some
other unique and tactile thing where the important part is what it
represents, not the tab itself.



Dylan