Re: [Usability] Tabs consistency in gnome applications

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Hi,

> [..]
> > 1) epiphany, firefox and nautilus have a fixed size for tabs;
> > 2) gnome-terminal and pidgin use the full width as does empathy;
> > 3) gedit uses variable size depending on the name of the edited file;
> > 4) gajim uses variable size with a Max width per tab.
> [..]
> 
> And what about if there is only one tab displayed? Should the tabs bar
> always be present? Should it be configurable by the user?
> 
> There is already a tab policy in the GUI guidelines but it may not fits
> correctly in these case where tabs may be opened/closed/moved by the
> user.
> 
> So what do you think?

I agree that tab consistency is an issue. I've been working on reviewing
the existing material regarding this issue:
http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject/Whiteboard/TabImplementation

I'm still to finish writing the summary, I'm afraid. A couple of things
I've been thinking about on this subject, though:

* Do we need to identify different types of tab usage, and create
guidelines/designs for each type (as opposed to having a single set of
guidelines)? It strikes me that there's a big difference between an app
where people tend to have a small no. of tabs open, compared to one
where they have lots of them.

* One of the main challenges is dealing with high numbers of tabs. It
would be great to have some creative design solutions here.

* Thinking about feeding back the status of individual tabs (has the
content of tab changed, etc) might require thinking about design
patterns which go across the whole desktop.

Best,

Allan