More on Leopard, Windows, and Tabs
A long time ago, before the Internet, you could only run one application at a time, usually with one window.
Eventually you could run several applications at the same time. You still only needed one window per application most of the time, because you were creating things like pictures and documents, and you were focusing on your creations.
Then the Internet arrived. As you surfed and talked to others, you opened more browser windows, more e-mail windows, more IM windows.
After a while windows started getting out of hand, so tabs were introduced in browsers and IM apps to help organize things.
This worked great! Soon tabs started appearing in more applications.
Now tabs are getting out of hand. But who will help organize the tabs? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
(Oh, you don’t have a problem with tabs? Try getting to the fourth tab in your third open browser window. Now try it from the keyboard.)
In addition to the growing problem of navigation, there’s the issue of increased complexity, of information overload. You’re managing more and more applications and windows and tabs to see ever more information. Usually, complexity like this rises until overload threatens, at which time something changes to accommodate even more complexity gracefully.
It’s reasonably safe to assume that Apple is aware that tabs have a problem: they break the window paradigm. Tabs don’t appear in Exposé. You can’t minimize them. And so on.
We already know Leopard will be adding more tabs to iChat and Terminal, so we know Apple is aware of the growing complexity and is working to combat it.
Chances seem good that Leopard will try to fix the broken window paradigm too, perhaps by something as simple as enhancing Exposé to support tabs, but perhaps something more sweeping.
Actually, as a long-time Mac user, I have a crazy idea. Forget tabs and use multiple windows! These windows can be minimized down to the dock when not in use and called back with a simple mouse click!
I know, I know, silly Mac user. All you folks who came over from Windows and have this idea of an “Application Window” know better. I shouldn’t have brought it up…
Actually, I would like to mention my horrific setup:
1. I use Firefox (quite un-MAC-y at the moment)
2. I use Firefox tabs
3. I downloaded an add-on called ‘Tab Groups’
What do you think this add-on does?
If you replied ‘It allows the user to group tabs under parent tabs’, you guessed right!
Maybe piles or stacks?….
http://homepage.mac.com/rdas7/stacks.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/04/23/deep_inside_apples_piles/
or this?….
http://www.macsimumnews.com/index.php/archive/apple_files_patent_for_techniques_for_displaying_digital_images_on_a_displa/
Petrock, your last llink points to a patent Apple filed for ideas it ended up using in Aperture, I believe. Doesn’t mean it couldn’t use them elsewhere too, of course, but that patent was sufficiently narrowly defined that to do so might require addtional patent protection if so.
Apple’s work on stacks and piles remains interesting and may yet surface if Finder is ever significantly overhauled. Good point about them, though. They could conceivably help with tabs too!
Peter, I too am a long-time Mac user and have used Windows only when necessary throughout the years, but I disagree that tabs are have no merit, and that they hail from Windows.
You open enough windows, you start to want them grouped conceptually. Say you have 20 windows open: 7 relating to Apple, 8 of them news blogs, 3 mainstream news sites, and 2 about the latest developments in interstellar travel. At some level, you think of those windows as 4 groups, and that’s what tabs indirectly model. The window becomes the grouping element, with the tabs as sub-elements within that group. With 20 windows you had undifferentiated noise already creeping in, but 4 groups you can handle easily.
The real problem happens when you scale up from there. Bump it up to 20 groups and you encounter the same problems you did with 20 windows.
So tabs aren’t evil. They’re just not yet gracefully integrated into the OS. They are integrated at the application level only, not the OS. Apple must be aware of this, and can be expected to give developers a standardized way to offer tabs to their users, at which time those tabs can be presented in new and exciting ways, like Expose and minimizing to the Dock.
How about using drawers to organise collections of tabs? When doing work or research I frequently open a unique window to accomodate a particular subject, and then open tabs specific to that subject within the window. If I can do all this within one window by having the “mini windows” stashed away in drawers until I need them, that would be good.
Would be good if I can also cmd-tab through all the tabs, which I can’t do right now. But I don’t see how this would work with drawers, either. I’m sure/hope Apple designers will come up with a totally new paradigm that hits the ball right out of the ballpark.