[Handycam]

Sorry, I'm a bit spoiled on a 17" PB. I didn't notice your size constraint.

I suppose a solution like Opera's is nice, then. Small tabs that show a thumbnail on hover. Tab exposé is a nice option, too, I suppose.

[Forrest]

Originally Posted by Bob Williams

and there are still a *lot* of 1024x768 screens out there

I'm curious if that's really the case. Most Macs made in the OS X era did not come with an option for such a small screen - but bigger. The 12" & 14" iBooks and the 12" PB's are the only Macs to ship in that timeframe that would support OS X.

You also brought up an interesting point about OW being more for power users. I tend to agree with that. With only a small minority of Macs having such a small screen, I wonder how many power users still use such a small screen.

And if the OW was to implement an Exposé type feature, the hardware requirements for that alone with exclude most Macs that have such a small screen.

One simple solution may be an option for the tabs to go along the bottom of the window.

Alas, I'm about ready to dump my 12" PB and get a MBP.

[Handycam]

Good points.

FWIW, here's Opera's implementation if you haven't tried it yet:

[Bob Williams]

Originally Posted by Forrest

I'm curious if that's really the case. Most Macs made in the OS X era did not come with an option for such a small screen - but bigger. The 12" & 14" iBooks and the 12" PB's are the only Macs to ship in that timeframe that would support OS X.

I believe all the CRT iMacs had the same resolution, and I think those weren't replaced until late '02 or early '03. What about eMacs, which were just replaced in the last few days? I don't know how many of these machines are running OW, but they are OS X-era machines.

Also, don't discount the iBooks and 12" PBs. There are a ton of them out there. Just follow discussions on sites like MacInTouch, and you'll see that there's a pent-up power-user desire for compact, lightweight laptops, and these machines are the closest Apple's gotten since the 2400 era.

And let's not forget people who don't want their browser window to be full-screen.

You also brought up an interesting point about OW being more for power users. I tend to agree with that. With only a small minority of Macs having such a small screen, I wonder how many power users still use such a small screen.

Ah, but it's also the power users who would tend to want their windows smaller than full-screen, especially when they only have one screen (as when out-and-about on the PB/MB). Say you're tweaking a page's HTML in the source editor or in BBEdit and trying to see the effects of your tweaks. Or referring to some other document as you enter data into a web form. Or just about anything else where you're doing multiple tasks that tie together and include web browsing.

Also, with Apple's move to wide screens, even the bigger screens don't have much more vertical resolution than smaller screens from the past. For instance, the MBs, including the hot-selling black one, only offer an additional 32 pixels of vertical space over my 12" PB. When you make your tabs bigger, you're not only making them horizontally bigger, but also vertically bigger. Thus, you can make them bigger to take better advantage of your extra horizontal space, but you're going to be quickly eating up your more limited vertical space and will end up doing more scrolling. The more you can minimize scrolling, the more effective the tabs are. In this way, both dimensions are important and must be considered.

(This need to consider both dimensions is why I really don't care for Apple's move to wider screens. Most of what we do on computers is far more efficient with extra vertical space, not extra horizontal space, Apple's somewhat failed attempts to design the UI of their recent apps to widescreen not withstanding. And the one thing that the extra width *is* really good for--watching movies--is also compromised because the aspect ratio still isn't wide enough, being 16:10 instead of the video-standard 16:9. All around, a bunch of comprises for the sake of coolness that brings little real benefit and plenty of real downsides.)

And if the OW was to implement an Exposé type feature, the hardware requirements for that alone with exclude most Macs that have such a small screen.

I don't think we need anything so fancy and hardware-draining as an Exposé-type feature. What I'm envisioning is that you can hold down a modifier, mouse-over a tab, and see it full-size in the content area. Move the mouse down over another tab and you'll see that one at full size. A click, which intuitively makes sense following a mouse-over, would bring full focus to the currently visible tab. That's it. There are no extra UI controls to clutter things up, no fancy graphical effects to require Core Image or lots of coding by Omni, and the feature doesn't get in the way of those who don't need it. It's a perfect example of feature evolution and a very nice refinement of OW's excellent tabs.

I can even see folks starting to expand their use of the feature for new ways of doing things. For instance, say you want to keep an eye on a regularly updating status web page of some sort. Instead of periodically switching to it and switching back, you can just mouse over the appropriate tab real quick to get a glance at what's happening, then mouse back to return to what you were doing. It's less intrusive - sort of like what Dashboard offers, but purely within the context of the browser.

One simple solution may be an option for the tabs to go along the bottom of the window.

I think this would exasperate the problem for widescreen users, since their vertical space is already tight.

That does illustrate the need, however, to better address different sizes and shapes of screens with more options for the tab drawer. OW makes some concessions now, but just not enough. I think that's why complaints related to its tabs and screen space are the most common complaints I see levied against OW even in otherwise positively glowing discussion.

[zottel]

Just an idea for this problem:

Maybe OW could check if there are several tabs the titles of which start with the same string - and if so, put that string to the end of the title. I.e. change "Wikipedia: foo" and "Wikipedia: bar" to "foo - Wikipedia:" and "bar - Wikipedia:". Only for the tabs, not for the actual page titles shown on top of the window. (The colon at the end in this example, or maybe " - " at the end etc. isn't too nice, but you won't see this in most cases, anyway, and it would be too much of a hassle to try to do that nicely. :-) )

Thus, the title could tell more of he actual page underneath for tabs.

Could be a problem, though, if you are looking at several forum entries with similar titles, like "I want foo" and "I want bar" - "I want" would be put to the end in that case, too.

[Handycam]

I don't see the problem here. if you hover over the tab, the full title and URL are displayed in a large tooltip.

I realize that very similar pages are hard to tell apart. But in most cases, you can tell the pages apart even in a tiny preview window in the drawer.

I always thought the tab previews are best used as a visual "reminder" of which page is which -- not really big enough to actually READ.

In the following example, I can easily see which page is which, can't you?



and if two pages look the same when tiny, a simple rollover clears things up, as in:



Where's the problem?

[Forrest]

well, then you have to actually move over your tabs. I know people who have hundreds of them, possibly thousands in different workspaces. It takes a half second or so for that popup to display.

The current window I have open has six tabs. To mouse over them and see the full names took seven seconds. To read the captions on each took two seconds. Keep in mind I do that possibly thousands a time a day... it really adds up.

That said, I'm good at knowing what tabs I have open and organizing them so I only need to look at them visually and not read them. It took me ~1 second to scan through my open tabs to see and think what each one was.

[Bob Williams]

Originally Posted by zottel

Maybe OW could check if there are several tabs the titles of which start with the same string - and if so, put that string to the end of the title. I.e. change "Wikipedia: foo" and "Wikipedia: bar" to "foo - Wikipedia:" and "bar - Wikipedia:".

Interestingly, I just noticed that OW appears to do exactly that, or at least it's doing it right now. I was specifically paying attention to the titles, and when a new tab opened that started with the same string, OW adjusted both of them to make the start unique. After 20 minutes of testing, it seems to happen every time; yet, when I posted yesterday, OW hadn't done it with the forum tabs, and I've had that problem before - so perhaps the feature is a bit buggy.

[Bob Williams]

Originally Posted by Handycam

I don't see the problem here. if you hover over the tab, the full title and URL are displayed in a large tooltip.

But as someone else pointed out, that's a slow process. In that case, it took 1.17 seconds to preview a tab. Depending on how heavy a user of tabs you are, that could add up to anything from a few minutes per day to to something approaching an hour. Plus, all of the extra mousing around takes its toll ergonomically. In my own case, the time and the mousing are even bigger penalties because I have OW set to only show the hover tag when I hover over the name of the tab, rather than the whole tab. (Otherwise, I find that I often leave the pointer over a tab when I start reading a page, and end up with that large tooltip blocking content. Cutting the hover zone down to just the name means this is a lot less likely to happen.)

I realize that very similar pages are hard to tell apart. But in most cases, you can tell the pages apart even in a tiny preview window in the drawer.

I always thought the tab previews are best used as a visual "reminder" of which page is which -- not really big enough to actually READ.

That's exactly right - they're there to serve as a visual reminder. And in cases like the one you posted, they work fine for that. But in other cases, like the one I've attached, they don't work so fine. It just depends on the contents of the tabs. The titles are helpful but not completely reliable. Plus, falling back to the title--or worse, the hover tooltip--completely defeats the whole point of having visual tabs, which means in these cases, OW might as well save the screen real estate by not offering the visual option.

Where's the problem?

I can't help but ask the same question from my own perspective. The feature I'm suggesting simply extends the visual navigation method that OW offers. When the tiny likenesses that the tabs offer are sufficient, that's great - nothing more is needed. But when those small tabs are not sufficient, you're currently forced to fall back to the old-fashioned method of using the title, and when that's insufficient, the hover pop-up. With this feature, you would never *need* to fall back out of the visual way of doing things. Further, the feature adds zero complexity for new users, and it will stay completely out of the way of power users who don't want to or don't need to use it, all of which means it shouldn't have much of an impact of Omni's support load. Finally, and this is just an educated guess from a programmer, it probably wouldn't be too difficult to implement.

Here's another idea. How about, instead of swapping the whole content area, just displaying a much larger (say 250xY or 300xY - or even adjustable via a default) image within the hover pop-up? This would let Omni avoid swapping the whole content area (even if just by temporarily mapping to a different buffer), which may have too much overhead to be quick under OS X's slow graphics engine on older machines. Combine this with a modifier check to show the pop-up immediately as the mouse is moved around--and working on the whole tab even when the auto-popup is set only for the title--and the problem is solved.

What are folks thoughts on this revised version?

[zottel]

Originally Posted by Bob Williams

Interestingly, I just noticed that OW appears to do exactly that, or at least it's doing it right now. I was specifically paying attention to the titles, and when a new tab opened that started with the same string, OW adjusted both of them to make the start unique. After 20 minutes of testing, it seems to happen every time; yet, when I posted yesterday, OW hadn't done it with the forum tabs, and I've had that problem before - so perhaps the feature is a bit buggy.

I think they changed the behaviour of the Omni Forums. Look at the page title in the window title bar - a few days ago, iirc, it was "The Omni Group Forums - <topic>", now it is "<topic> - The Omni Group Forums". Is that what you saw?