On Mon, 26 Mar 2007, Jon A. Cruz wrote:
On Mar 26, 2007, at 5:02 PM, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Anyway, it seems there's a number of approaches for handling multiple pages that don't rely on tabs,
So something like a pages dialog as there is a layers dialog, or I suppose things could end up rather resembling an Integrated development enviroment like Anjuta?
In all, I've seen that tabs work well for "documents" and not for "pages".
The most "successful" use of tabs has been Firefox, a web browser, or to put it another way a viewer rather than an editor. Integrated Development Enviroments like Anjuta do have tabbed interfaces, do many other editing applications offer tabbed interfaces such as these
so I would think that the multi-page feature would not interfere with a choice of using tabs for multi-document selection.
I see you are all pretty enthusiastic about using Tabs and having multiple documents open at once. I would not be so enthusiastic, Tabbed MDI is better than MDI but it still has many of the same problems of MDI. Aware of the limitations the default case in applications like Firefox do a good job keeping tabs out of the way of user who are less likely to benefit from them (as opposed to gedit which has tabs for everyone, like it or not).
While I'm sure most people here have many documents open at once, I really wish I could show you the type of users who ask "where did my documents go?" when they have more than one window open and the first window is hidden obscured by the second.
I guess the stated goal of Inkscape wanting to attract "contributor users" raises the bar quite high and implies usability in terms of efficiency for frequent technical users over learnability for artists with less techincal skills. Which is fair enough so long as it is clearly understood and users (and evangelists) are expecting the learning curve.
Yeah I'm a big sceptic of Tabs and that puts me out of the mainstream. Sure they get the job done but Window and document workflow management is still a great big mess of a problem.