Posts from — June 2009

On Monday we submitted this 5 minute video to the Mozilla Summer Design Challenge:

TabViz from Liz Blankenship on Vimeo.

Our final presentation from class is now also available on Deep Blue. It is a large .mp4 file that contains just over 12 minutes of us talking in more detail about the project. Although the demonstration didn’t go as smoothly as planned, you’ll want to catch this video if you’re highly interested in our project.

That’s all for now!

I’m excited to announce (a bit belatedly) that Mozilla is having a summer design challenge about tabs: “Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?”

Check out their site for more information if you’d like to try your hand at entering the challenge, or skip right to the submissions page if you want to see the ideas people have been submitting.

I’ve been looking at the videos that have been submitted (there are 40!). One that I particularly liked for its simplicity is FaviTabs. This submission touches on two common themes throughout many of the submissions I viewed: ordering of tabs and grouping. I think having an easy way to change the sort-order of tabs would be great, and in fact, I discovered there’s an extension for that. So many extensions to try, so little time! Maybe extensions should require video demonstrations, too, because I’ve really enjoyed seeing what everyone put together without having to install things to see for myself.

Ahem, anyhow, the other theme I mentioned was grouping. Many of the videos show the creators dragging and dropping tab objects around in some sort of workspace or tab area. I would love this, so long as the effort required by the user is minimal enough. I don’t want to have to specify which group a tab belongs to every time I open a new one, for instance. But several submissions pointed out that you can, by default, place a tab into the group that the parent tab belonged to. I create more brand new tabs than I care to admit, so this wouldn’t be ideal for me personally, but it’s certainly a partial solution.

I also noticed that a number of the submissions completely removed the tab bar or any contextual information about other “tabs” being open from the visible display. My gut instinct is to dislike these ideas because I like having at least some form of visual representation of what’s available to me, but it’s possible that using a keyboard command or clicking on something to open the view of open tabs might become as second-nature to me as my eyes flicking up to the tab bar is now.

At this point, we’ll be creating a video describing our project including a demo to submit it to the challenge as well, so come back soon and we’ll have it posted!