Re: [Usability] Tab implementation review

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Thu, 2009-02-12 at 17:30 +0100, Jef Driesen wrote:
> When doing software development, I usually have many files open in my 
> texteditor (gedit). With such a large amount of tabs open, the tabbar is 
> almost useless, except for tabs that are located closely together. But I 
> have to admit that I really like the gedit sidebar that shows a vertical 
> list with all open files.
> 
> Compared with the tabbar, this sidebar can show a much longer list and 
> its width is usually larger (and can be enlarged as necessary). On top 
> of that, it supports search-as-you-type. For many documents, this is a 
> much better user interface than a tabbar. I think other applications 
> could benefit from using a similar approach too.

This is really just the existing HIG guideline for tabbed dialogs, but
sensibly-applied to tabbed document windows:

        If you have more than about six tabs in a notebook, use a list
        control instead of tabs to switch between the pages of controls.
        For example:
        <http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/images/controls-notebook-list.png.en>
        
Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems