On 07.12.2005, at 16:43, Jamal Johnson wrote:
i understand that the apple ui guidlines discourage this kind of paradigm and being an interface engineer myself, in most cases i agree that if you have to have multiple rows of tabs you should try to organize your information in a more efficient way. but these are _guidlines_, not laws to follow. for instance a preference pane should not have multiple rows of tabs (which are the examples of windows apps most people have used as bad design decisions). i've used both windows and linux machines for a long time, before switching to a mac a year and a half ago, and they both offer multiple lines of rows in most cases. but i don't think that just because it's evil microsoft and apple says it's a "bad way to do it" that it's true in all use cases. for text document like applications i definitely don't think it's a bad design decision for the use case of being able to see ALL my documents that i have open with a quick glance. i work on many files in parrallel all the time, and leave files open i know i have things to do in. i'm a neurotic user of Cmd-T to open files, but if the file is already open i'd like to see that it is and not have to jump thru the hoops of opening the "find file" dialog, typing the name of the file and choosing it. it's simply much faster / easier to glance at the tabs and click the one i want, imho.
To maximize the amount of open files you can see at a glance, it is IMHO much better to put the files not in a horizontal list (tabs, see max. 15 files), but in a vertical list (see ~40 files). Of course you can't have vertical tabs, as this probably comes right after having multiple lines of tabs, design-wise.
But wouldn't it be cool to have the very list that Cmd-T gives you in the drawer? So you can switch the drawer between project view and open files view, or maybe have 2 drawers (with the possibility to see them both?). Cmd-T would focus the open files drawer (if its visible, otherwise bring up this small window) and work as it does now. But instead of it disappearing, you could have this list open all time. It would be sorted by name, and if you focus it by pressing Cmd-T, it would be sorted as a history (current behaviour). Is this worth thinking about, Allan?
Jonas