Re: [Usability] Tab Glow States

[Calum Benson <calum benson oracle com>]

On 16 Sep 2010, at 08:41, Allan Caeg wrote:

> Here are mockups of how they could appear:
> http://www.stephenhorlander.com/images/tab-indicators/pulsing-tab.png ,
> http://www.stephenhorlander.com/images/tab-indicators/pulsing-app-tab.png ,
> http://www.stephenhorlander.com/images/tab-indicators/textured-tab.png
> 
> I'm not aware of any GTK+ app that has tab glow states due to notifications.

We don't use animation anywhere AFAIK, but we do of course do more visually primitive things like indicating that a new IM has arrived by changing the tab text colour (Pidgin, xchat), or that a document has changes that need saving (usually indicated by appending/prepending an asterisk to the tab text).

> Whether they already exist or not, what do you think should be the
> convention for tab glow states? Let's come up with something that we can put
> on the UI Pattern Library so Firefox can follow our convention for this and
> other GTK+ apps can also take advantage of it.

Indeed, tabs are certainly something I can see us having quite a few patterns for.  This is an area Allan Day did quite a bit of research into a year or two back ago:
<http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject/Whiteboard/TabImplementation>

In fact there's been a bug open for a long time about standardising tab and indicator usage in GNOME, and it's even already marked with the 'uipattern' keyword :)  Would certainly be great to see some concrete action on it if anybody wants to take it on:
<https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72101>

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Interaction Designer     Oracle Corporation Ireland Ltd.
mailto:calum benson oracle com         Solaris Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Oracle Corp.