GNOME 3.0
July 13, 2008So, like, GNOME was on its way to irrelevance, simply because they had no plan for the future, no direction, no leadership, no vision, no nothing.
Then came GUADEC, and at GUADEC, they came up with a vision for GNOME 3.0. And it’s all about tabs.
This basically means no more GNOME for me. Tabs suck balls in just about every implementation except settings panels. Tabs are bad because they constrain you. Tabbing is all the shizzle in web browsers, but all it does is stop you from having differently sized windows, having websites side by side - and to make it all even worse, tabbed programs introduce a new place to manage windows: the application window itself. So, users have to think about where to switch to a certain window - do we switch using the panel, or via an application? Wait, we have to switch to the application via the panel first, and then switch to the particular window we want inside the application? And what about closing documents versus closing windows? What about having 15 scientific .pdf’s loaded in a tabbed Evince? Can I still read the tabs, or are they shortened to only the first few letters of the filename?
What do you mean, pointless clicks?
We have been trying for ages now to move away from an application-centric world, towards a document-centric world, and Mac OS X is doing really, really well in that regard (Quick Look!), and GNOME itself was not doing bad either. By focussing efforts on tabbed applications, all that work has been in vain. They are setting the clock back, I don’t know, 15 years?
I’m happy that GNOME has a vision, but sadly, it’s one step forward, three billion steps back. I mean, vertical damn tabs? Why don’t you start eating babies while you’re at it?
Well, I think tabs are the best thing since sliced bread :)
I don’t know if you’re some kind of super human but I’d be in _so_ much pain if I had no multiple desktops, system tray, apps with tabs, you get the picture.
The amount of alt-tabbing required would simply be too much for me.
I mean, 20 tabs in Konqueror + 10 tabs in Kate + 1x Kile + 2xKpdf + 4 friends in Kopete + 1x Amarok + Kontact (1x mail + calender mainly) + System Monitor would be about 40 windows! That’s nowhere near the amount of windows that a single window managing technique (say alt-tab) can handle. That’d be about 10 alt-tabs on average. But if you combine several methods, it becomes quite manageable:
1. change desktop: 0-1 keypress/click
2. change program: 0-2 keypresses/clicks
3. change tab: 0-10 keypresses
This is on average 7 keypresses, in practical use more like 4.
And the difference gets bigger as the number of windows increases…
So, would you tell me how you handle so many windows?
PS:
Meh, I want my preview option!
Comment by RandomGuy — July 13, 2008 @ 7:30 pm
OSX does a terrible job of the document centric model, especially in comparison with OS 9 or earlier, or even earlier versions of itself.
Comment by Spike Burch — July 13, 2008 @ 7:37 pm
Uhm, you do realize that the whole tab frenzy is a running joke, don’t you?
Comment by Werekitten — July 13, 2008 @ 8:04 pm
Of course it’s a joke, it just gave me the excellent opportunity to rant about my hatred towards tabs :).
Comment by Administrator — July 13, 2008 @ 8:34 pm
Exposé + Quick Look.
Comment by Administrator — July 13, 2008 @ 8:35 pm
As much as I find tabs quite conveniant I do indeed think overusing them might make things worse, and for instance in Banshee it just seems stupid.
However, one thing caught my attention: “Simplified tabbing support in Gtk+” ( http://blogs.gnome.org/johan/2008/07/12/simplified-tabbing-support-in-gtk/ )
If I understand correctly, you can make your app a tabbed app in one line. How about taking that concept futher, and having tab-manegement to be a desktop-centring thing, rather than a application-centric thing.
This way you could have it to simply be a setting wheter apps should be using tabs or not.
Personally I think tabs works great where there’s too much information to be usefull to view at once. For instance it makes sense that TextMate have tabs(when using projects) since it won’t help me all that much to have the text next to eachother. However, if I’m working in Photoshop I might want to compare photos, so there it should definetely *not* be tabs.
Another tab-model that is really interesting I think is the one of Opera. Opera is actually a true MDI-app in the sense that it contains windows. The tabs are simply a chooser for the windows, but to most it seems like normal tabs because they are maximized inside Opera by default.
“Exposé + Quick Look. ”
Quick-look only *views* documents. It is great, but does not help when you are working with them. (Though quick-look is great for it’s purpose!)
Exposé is usefull for finding “that lost window” you can’t figure out where is, but if you’re working with alot of apps and windows it soon becomes a inefficient way to switch stuff. (I once borrowed a colleages compuer, hit expose to find something and… well, it’s looses it’s usefullness when you hit 30-40 windows.)
Anyway, at least great to see Gnome planning ahead! It’s by far my favorite Linux-enviroment. Hope the future will bring good things here. :)
Comment by TLZ — July 13, 2008 @ 9:31 pm
The Wikipedia entry about Expose sounds nice but I guess I’ll still have to find a Mac store and try this for myself to believe that this method actually scales ;)
Anyway, thanks!
Comment by RandomGuy — July 13, 2008 @ 9:35 pm
Interesting assertion, considering I have this page in one window (the last of 5 tabs), and the GNOME blog in another, differently-sized window (all by itself).
Care to try again?
Comment by gus3 — July 14, 2008 @ 3:31 am
Thom,
According to this blog post it seems that tab mania was nothing more than a joke played upon the GNOME community.
Comment by Saad — July 14, 2008 @ 6:14 pm
Saad,
Read my comment a few posts above yours. Of course this was a joke :).
Comment by Administrator — July 14, 2008 @ 6:59 pm
So I’m guessing you’re not a fan of Microsoft OneNote? :-)
Comment by John S. — July 20, 2008 @ 6:02 pm