2009/2/25 Philip Ganchev wrote: > "What if you want three levels" of organization (tabs, windows, > workspaces)? Well, I tend to think that having more levels complicates > the mental model and also requires more time for habituation.
It can be done without those problems, though. Have you seen the interface in MS Office's OneNote? It has a hierarchy of three levels of tabs. Those on the left are for notebooks - akin to documents. Each notebook contains several sections (tabs on top), conceptually similar to tabs in a spreadsheet. Tabs on the right are "pages" inside the current section. This model is simple to understand and quick to learn, since each level has a corresponding metaphor. And it provides a really good navigation structure, much better than a flat list (which requires you to scan the whole list or resort to keyword search) or a full-blown recursive tree (which doesn't offer any distinction between different levels). So there *are* some advantages to a controlled hierarchical classification. For me, right now, a windowing system that didn't allow for window grouping and/or placing tabs inside a group, would feel broken. As for the solution given by Steve (using virtual desktops as the top hierarchical level, and window lists to retrieve open documents) it has a severe drawback with respect to tabs, which is that of visibility. I never use virtual desktops because, for me, a window in another workspace is "lost". I rely on the persistent visual cues of open windows to remind me of ongoing tasks. Tabs enhance this for particular documents; it allows me to juxtapose the tab list in several windows at once, giving me the chance to quickly find where a recent document is placed and to which task it does belong. All this is lost with a single unified list of everything, or with tasks distributed among several desktops. As for the other reasons stated, none of this is relevant about a tab interface *per se*. They exist because current implementations of tabs only allow to share tabs from the same application. A tabbed interface allowing to group tabs from different applications would allow placing all documents related to a single task together, while keeping all the spatial advantages that I stated above. _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
