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Cadaver · Aug 24, 2006, 10:57 PM

Originally Posted by Franz

An easier way IMO is to make an Automator workflow with just the one action "Set Desktop Picture" and save it as a Finder plug in. Then just right click on the file to set it as your desktop.

Yep. I did this in Tiger, and its much easier than going to the control panel.

DeathMan · Aug 25, 2006, 01:35 PM

I'm excited for draggable/tear-offable tabs in safari. It might be the thing I most often find myself wishing I could do. In particular when I'm trying to load two files (movie trailers, for example) each in a tab, and I find only the front one wants to load, but if they were in separte windows, they'd both load. I'm wondering when/if Apple will include tabs as part of an SDK, to make it dead simple to implement consistent tabs across applications? Or have they already?

OAW · Aug 28, 2006, 02:36 PM

What's the deal on the new Movie Widget in Leopard? It was mentioned in the keynote but I can't find any detailed info on it. Just wondering what it looks like and what kind of functionality it supports. Especially interested in how it compares to the Movie channel in Sherlock.

OAW

Obi Wan's Ghost · Aug 28, 2006, 03:30 PM

Is Sherlock dead and never coming back in Leopard?

Moose · Aug 28, 2006, 03:51 PM

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost

Is Sherlock dead and never coming back in Leopard?

We should hope for such luck.

Catfish_Man · Aug 28, 2006, 04:44 PM

Originally Posted by DeathMan

I'm wondering when/if Apple will include tabs as part of an SDK, to make it dead simple to implement consistent tabs across applications? Or have they already?

PSMTabBarControl - ChatKit - Trac

Not Apple, but (in my rather biased opinion) somewhat better than Apple's implementation, and BSD licensed so any app can use it.

Franz · Aug 28, 2006, 05:00 PM

Originally Posted by OAW

What's the deal on the new Movie Widget in Leopard? It was mentioned in the keynote but I can't find any detailed info on it. Just wondering what it looks like and what kind of functionality it supports. Especially interested in how it compares to the Movie channel in Sherlock.

OAW

The movie widget is not in the betas yet. Just the Core Image Filter widget and DashClip or whatever its called...

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost

Is Sherlock dead and never coming back in Leopard?

Sherlock is not included in the Leopard beta... so I think it is finally dead. With the new movie widget all of its functionality is now in dashboard and there is no need for it.

DeathMan · Aug 28, 2006, 05:49 PM

Originally Posted by Catfish_Man

PSMTabBarControl - ChatKit - Trac

Not Apple, but (in my rather biased opinion) somewhat better than Apple's implementation, and BSD licensed so any app can use it.

I read about this project a while back, and wondered if maybe Apple used it for the safari tabs. It would be cool to see something bundled with the official apple kit, and interface builder, so we could just expect good, usable tabs in applications.

Horsepoo!!! · Aug 28, 2006, 06:12 PM

I don't think Apple wants to promote the use of tabs. Just like drawers, tabs are being misused everywhere...I know this is almost insulting to those who love tabs but it's da truth.

Suck it up and accept the fact that horizontal (document) tabs are a terrible UI practice. Vertical tabs are better...but the even then, the general idea fails. Especially with Exposé around...and *ESPECIALLY* with Exposé+Spaces.

CharlesS · Aug 28, 2006, 08:09 PM

Originally Posted by Horsepoo!!!

I don't think Apple wants to promote the use of tabs. Just like drawers, tabs are being misused everywhere...I know this is almost insulting to those who love tabs but it's da truth.

Suck it up and accept the fact that horizontal (document) tabs are a terrible UI practice. Vertical tabs are better...but the even then, the general idea fails. Especially with Exposé around...and *ESPECIALLY* with Exposé+Spaces.

Um, how about you tell us why horizontal tabs are a horrible UI practice. I certainly don't see any problem with them...

TETENAL · Aug 28, 2006, 09:14 PM

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Um, how about you tell us why horizontal tabs are a horrible UI practice. I certainly don't see any problem with them...

The problem is that there is a pretty early limit. Add many tabs in Safari and the text in them shrinks down into something non-discerning pretty soon. A few more and Safari hast to resort to the overflow menu. You can't add a scrollbar under them since that would disconnect them from their document. Adding a scrollbar on top would be profoundly weird.

Vertical tabs (like the iLife Source column) work better. Text runs from left to right so more tabs fit from top to bottom. The tabs area can be freely resized to show more or less text. And you can more easily add a scrollbar.

ghporter · Aug 28, 2006, 09:52 PM

Wouldn't that depend on how the tabs were arranged? I mean all the vertical tabs I've seen (if I understand your usage of the term-like the tabs in Firefox?) are all on the same horizontal line, so the tab's window is not much compressed. Or are you talking about tabs down the side? Confused...

Catfish_Man · Aug 28, 2006, 09:59 PM

Originally Posted by Horsepoo!!!

Suck it up and accept the fact that horizontal (document) tabs are a terrible UI practice. Vertical tabs are better...but the even then, the general idea fails. Especially with Exposé around...and *ESPECIALLY* with Exposé+Spaces.

Speaking as someone with a relatively small screen, you're wrong. Horizontal tabs definitely have their flaws, but for a *compact* way of displaying multiple documents, I have yet to run across anything nearly as efficient. Expose and spaces fail because I can't see the status of individual documents at a glance (75% of the tabs I use are for chatting, so being able to see which have new messages is absolutely essential). Vertical tabs use a lot more space, although I agree they're otherwise better.

If someone has a proposal that meets the requirements of easy switching, compactness, and status display, without having the flaws of tabs, I'd love to hear it. My screen space is allocated down to about 2 square inches free (and I've been experimenting with ways of using that remaining space), so you don't have a lot of room to work in.

<edit>
ghporter: Firefox's tabs are horizontal ones. Look at the 10.5 iChat tabs, or Omniweb, for an example of vertical ones.
</edit>

King Bob On The Cob · Aug 29, 2006, 01:28 PM

InsanelyMac Forum > Quartz Debug Stuff

Quartz 2D not enabled by default, but did get renamed apparently.

cla · Aug 29, 2006, 06:15 PM

Originally Posted by TETENAL about tabs

The problem is that there is a pretty early limit. Add many tabs in Safari and the text in them shrinks down into something non-discerning pretty soon.

The problem with vertical tabs is the opposite.

Add one vertical tab in a rectangular window and that tab will occupy (tab's width / window's width) % of the window.
Add one horizontal tab in a rectangular window and that tab will occupy (tab's height / window's height) % of the window.

Apart from hiding the status of individual documents, I think the greatest flaw is that tabs force me to know (or guess) the title of the document I'm looking for. Especially when surfing the web, this is often not the case. A somewhat contradictory design philosophy, as Apple did what they could to design a dock that would display a thumbnail of every individual documents.

Screen real estate as usual...

JKT · Aug 29, 2006, 09:05 PM

Originally Posted by ghporter

Wouldn't that depend on how the tabs were arranged? I mean all the vertical tabs I've seen (if I understand your usage of the term-like the tabs in Firefox?) are all on the same horizontal line, so the tab's window is not much compressed. Or are you talking about tabs down the side? Confused...

He doesn't mean the window, he means the tab itself - if you add more than a few tabs, the text label in the tab becomes illegible and you end up with overflow of tabs into the stupid double arrow menu at the end of the row of tabs, which somewhat defeats the purpose of having tabs in the first place.

Simon · Aug 30, 2006, 02:39 AM

Originally Posted by cla

Apart from hiding the status of individual documents, I think the greatest flaw is that tabs force me to know (or guess) the title of the document I'm looking for. Especially when surfing the web, this is often not the case. A somewhat contradictory design philosophy, as Apple did what they could to design a dock that would display a thumbnail of every individual documents.

Omniweb has this feature.

But it takes up a lot of screen space.

JKT · Aug 30, 2006, 02:48 AM

Originally Posted by Simon

But it takes up a lot of screen space.

You can resize the drawer to significantly reduce the amount of space it takes. Although this also has the negative of reducing the legibility of the text name of the tab, you still have the thumbnail for feedback about the nature of the tab's contents which makes a big difference. Also, OmniWeb's "tooltip" notification of what a tab is about is more responsive and informative than Safari's.

Simon · Aug 30, 2006, 03:26 AM

Agreed, but once I resize my drawer to only take up as much area as Safari's tab bar, I'm not able to recognize any additional information. I think it's basically a trade-off between used screen space and additional information.

Horsepoo!!! · Aug 30, 2006, 08:39 AM

I sympathize with people that take screen estate seriously. It's very important to minimize the amount of space that a window takes up in order to maximize the number of additional windows.

But the idea is to not take it too far as to hinder the usability of the information on screen. If you find yourself in a situation where tabs titles are truncated and it makes you needlessly click a few because the names look too similar or the names just don't give you any hints of the content of the tab, you've reached the limits of tabs.

Sure...there are a few situation where horizontal tabs are better than vertical tabs. A casual browser will have 3-4 tabs open which fit perfectly within a 'normal-sized' window. Horizontal tabs are ideal for this situation. But someone that has 10 tabs open will feel like he should expand his window to expand the title of each tab (or try to makes sense of 'MacNN', 'MacNN...', 'MacNN...', 'MacCe...', 'AppleI...', 'Apple...', etc. tabs) at which point you might as well use the extra width allocated to the viewing of the horizontal tabs to view these same tabs in a vertical manner.

Of course, if you have a widescreen monitor...you can expand the browser window to its full width. But then these are not really people that care about screen estate in the first place.

Catfish_Man · Aug 30, 2006, 04:16 PM

Originally Posted by Horsepoo!!!

(or try to makes sense of 'MacNN', 'MacNN...', 'MacNN...', 'MacCe...', 'AppleI...', 'Apple...', etc. tabs) at which point you might as well use the extra width allocated to the viewing of the horizontal tabs to view these same tabs in a vertical manner.

Safari collapses common prefixes in tabs (not always a good thing, but it usually works well for me).

Horsepoo!!! · Aug 30, 2006, 05:32 PM

Originally Posted by Catfish_Man

Safari collapses common prefixes in tabs (not always a good thing, but it usually works well for me).

I'll give you that. Apple has some magical intelligent truncation algorithms. So Apple already has the upper hand on usability.

monkeybrain · Aug 30, 2006, 10:17 PM

But do they apply those magic formulas in the Finder for long file names too? I hate the current implementation of shortening names in the middle, especially in column view. I'd be great if they just wrapped it to two lines.

Catfish_Man · Aug 30, 2006, 10:28 PM

Originally Posted by monkeybrain

But do they apply those magic formulas in the Finder for long file names too? I hate the current implementation of shortening names in the middle, especially in column view. I'd be great if they just wrapped it to two lines.

Removing common prefixes from files in the Finder would be foolish. Why would I want "foobar.txt" and "foobaz.txt" to display as "bar.txt" and "baz.txt"?