Re: Speaking of NSTabView...

[Riccardo Mottola]

on 11/20/03 7:48 AM, Jeff Teunissen at deek@d2dc.net wrote:

> That's actually _extremely_ non-NeXTish. In a NeXTish UI, anything that can
> potentially be scrollable must always have a scroll area displayed, even
> when there isn't enough content to make a scrollbar appear.
> 
> That's actually a Windows-ish thing, where the text in a text area must be
> reflowed if it becomes long enough to have a scrollbar. No such thing
> happens in NeXT-like UIs, because the scrollbar appears in the area that has
> been designated for it.

I agree fully, I find it really anti-ergonomic and anti-intuitive to have to
"scroll" for my tabs. Also what is there first should be remain later and
viceversa. The "morphing" interfaces of Windows are bullshit.

Tabs are a strange thing, I hate and love.

I think tabs make only sense when there are a few of them they all fit one
beneath the other and you can have a fast  overview of them. Think about the
average windows control panel with 3 layes of 4 different-sized tabs and
this is NIGHTMARE.

Tabbed browsing is humm.... unhandy if there are more than 3-4 tabs open
(depenending on the size of your window).

Thinking about browsers... well you can start shrinking of reducing the
titles, but this isn't a viable solution for standard UI and even with
browsers it makes little sense if the title remains "Homep..." and no mor
characters.
So I would never design an interface where tabs overflow but if that has to
happen like in browsers I would suggest the system that apple has used in
the finder buttons: overflowing items get grouped in a pop-up menu at the
extreme right (I think Safari does that too, but I never oopene so many
tabs, I often do not open tabs at all). This solution is not that ergonomic,
but it is unobtrusive in the aethetic view and doesn't ruin the visible
tabs. On the other hand it discoruages opening too many tabs since it is not
handy to use. And this is good.

My 1 cent.

-Ric