Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Some implementation images (at last I hear Mike say!)

Less tabs than the width of the tab bar

More tabs than the width of the tab bar

This is what happens when you resize Camino

You will be using the buttons at either side to direct the tab bar to the tab you want to be at. I plan to implement scroll all the way if you double-click a scroll button.

When you resize the Camino window these scroll buttons appear and disappear automatically.

Obviously we will need somebody like Jasper to make this look as beautiful as we all expect from OS X applications.

I need to get back to work on making the tab bar scroll in a more elegant manner because it is really ugly at the moment! I have until Friday to get his done because my Mentor needs to start filing a report that is due on 30th June.

Just wanted to share these screenshots with everybody :)

Edit: I made some implementation changes based on feedback from Camino developers.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

You will be using the buttons at either side to direct the tab bar to the tab you want to be at. I plan to implement scroll all the way if you double-click a scroll button.

How does this help heavy users of tabs (say, n*3 or more tabs, where n is the number of tabs that fit in a window) get to a tab somewhere in the middle? It's no easier scrolling tab-by-tab to the middle from one end than from the other end....

Anonymous said...

You know, not that I want to dismiss what you're doing here... but I still kinda prefer the way Opera does it, without scrolling tabs. I like tabs cos they speed things up. Scrolling tabs slows things down.

Desmond Elliott said...

jerome,

I used Opera the other day to see exactly how it did things and I noticed tabs seem to become infinitely small.

I'm no expert on UI, but having 50 tabs that are smaller than the size of a keyboard key doesn't seem to be very productive.

And yes, some people do use that many tabs. Samuel always bugs me with questions like "How can I scroll to tab 157?" and he is serious.

He gives me a headache!

Anonymous said...

As long as the mouse scroll wheel is hooked up to the tab bar scrolling, I think it would be a pretty efficient way to navigate a bunch of tabs. Considering all new Macs have this feature (whether it's the MightyMouse or two-fingered trackpad), it's probably a good, universal way to implement it.