So the notification windows have their close icons on the right?! And they’re X-shaped.
Likewise the tabs in WebPositive.
fur stands up on end as he has flashbacks of Windows 95
Okay, I can forgive the X-shape because RiscOS did that first. But why on earth are they on the wrong side?
I find my mouse going to the left side every single time, only to be met with empty space.
Also on WebPositive tabs, something even worse happens: I instinctively want to bring a tab into focus by clicking somewhere between the middle of the tab and the far right to stay as far away from the close icon as possible. Unfortunately this plants my mouse right in the middle of the close icon and the tab is gone in a flash. No “undo close tab” to save me either…
If favicon placement is a problem in WebPositive, may I suggest the following: when a tab is not in focus, display its favicon on the left where close would be. Clicking this area only brings the tab into focus, it does not close it.
For a tab that’s focused, a close icon is displayed on the left instead of a favicon. No need for a favicon, it’s already being displayed in the URL box.
Also this same technique can be used if and when WebPositive uses stack and tile for its tabbing system, to get the favicons onto the tabs in place of the close icon.
Alternatively the favicon could be on the right, or next to close on the left, but it might look weird. Both of these would work for stack and tile too (no need to zoom a tab that’s not in focus, so it would go in place of the zoom icon)
I can think of only two downsides to multiplexing the favicon and close, can anyone think of any others?
You can no longer click a non-focused tab’s close icon to close it. This is both an advantage and disadvantage. Workaround: make it so that when you hold option, the close icons appear in place of the favicons and option+click closes the non-focused tabs. Or just get into the habit of double-clicking the favicon to quickly focus-then-close it.
It will upset Windows users who are conditioned to expect close on the right. **** 'em. Practically every other OS ever puts the close on the left, where it truly belongs.
I saw a few days ago a fix was done to WebPositive where the find bar close was moved to the left. I hope this is considered a related issue? ^^
“Fitts’ law […] predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target.”
With the notifications on the right it’s faster and easier to reach this way, because you can “throw” the mouse to the top-right screen corner and then move to the close button.
I can’t even understand what your problem with the favicons is or whatever. The tab is about 200px wide and you accidently click the close button that is 10px wide and to the far right? I’m really hard trying to not judge …
Also, your argumentation can be reversed very easliy by anybody who expects the close button on the other side.
“every other OS ever puts the close on the left, where it truly belongs.”
Please back that “where it truly belongs” up. I don’t know a passage in the bible that says so.
The ‘x’ shape to mean close appears on a bunch of applications and OS’s at this point, not just Windows 95. Perhaps RISC OS used it first but besides Windows 95 it also appears in Mac OS X, Gnome, KDE, and is also used on iOS, and Android. It is a common user interface element that is recognizable to many users.
Whether the ‘x’ button should go on the left or right side of the tab is debatable. Clearly the developers who build the notification pop-ups and WebPositive thought that they should go on the right. I don’t know their reasoning, maybe you should ask them to explain.
If you extend the window close box metaphor being on the left to tabs then I can see how an argument could be made that the tab close box should be on the left too. I don’t see how the close ‘x’ being on the left would make the button any less likely to be clicked accidentally though. An undo close tab feature would be nice.
As far as the favicon placement goes, you could just have the close ‘x’, then the favicon, and then the title title. There is no reason to move the favicon to the right and it would look weird there IMHO.
“I saw a few days ago a fix was done to WebPositive where the find bar close was moved to the left. I hope this is considered a related issue?”
I am the one who made this fix and I’m in hot water now over tool tips. I don’t consider these two to be directly related, tangentially perhaps. I’m okay with the ‘x’ button being on the left in some cases and on the right in others.
If you feel strongly about this, explain your reasoning on the mailing list, get others to explain their reasoning, and perhaps some good will come out of the discussion. I’ve got other dragons to slay so I won’t be fighting this battle. Good luck!
It’s not intrinsically harder to be accidentally clicked, it’s simply muscle memory at work. Since the late 90s I’ve been using BeOS and Haiku nearly full-time, so whenever I see a tab on the screen I automatically know to close it on the left.
Browser tabs aren’t a lot different from a user interface standpoint (they sort of represent windows inside windows) so the part of my brain that drives the interface is looking to close the tab there. Even in a harmless situation (no accidental closure of windows) it causes the conscious part of my brain to become involved. When someone has to think about what they’re clicking, the interface breaks. The perfect interface just “gets out of the way” so much the user never has to give it a second thought!
That sounds reasonable. I just thought it might look strange having the close followed by the favicon on the same side, but I haven’t tried a mockup in Wonderbrush yet.
Fair enough, thanks for your thoughts ^^
[quote=foobear]“Fitts’ law […] predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target.”
With the notifications on the right it’s faster and easier to reach this way, because you can “throw” the mouse to the top-right screen corner and then move to the close button.
[/quote]
It’s a fair argument, but I believe there are some other things that must be considered:
Time-to-target is some kind of logarithm. When you have to move to the corner of the screen and then move the width of the deskbar to reach the notifications area, the additional time needed to move to the other side of the notifications window is rather small. Compare to reaching the Deskbar which is quite fast (funneled to the corner by the ruler-like edges of the screen) and moving to an application’s menu bar which the mouse is already quite close to, which on a large monitor is actually faster than reaching the Deskbar.
When there are other objects in close vicinity which you risk clicking, the level of care taken with the mouse increases, and correspondingly the time increases. If an aiming error occurs and the wrong item is clicked, the time required for the operation goes through the roof. In this case, when close is on the right for the notifications window, there is a risk of clicking the Deskbar itself, either the Haiku menu or items very close to it such as ProcessController or Tracker’s application listing. Conversely on the left side, it’s dangling in free space. Unless you put an icon in that area of the screen , it’s a free-space target with no repercussions if the target is missed. Even windows on the screen generally keep clear of that area, the tab ends long before the notifications window begins (which is why the top-right is the perfect place for Deskbar.)
You can only develop muscle memory to automatically close a window if the close icon is always on the same side. It doesn’t take many applications or special-cases where this doesn’t work for the muscle memory to fail completely. When this happens, again the conscious brain has to get involved. The operation takes consequentially longer, and the user feels like the interface is more of a chore to work with even if they can’t pinpoint why.
I encountered this problem when Windows 95 was released. Previously, pretty much all operating systems, including Windows 3.1, had the close on the left. Thoughtfully, Microsoft made the application icon on the left of a window behave exactly like Windows 3.1’s close button. Initially I used this feature extensively, but from time to time I’d run across applications or even Windows dialogues which did not have an icon on the left. Worse, double-clicking the title bar maximises the window. So windows were refusing to close and some were unexpectedly blowing up to full screen when I wanted them to close.
Of course a little extra care fixed the problem, but I often still hesitated with the mouse on the left side before carefully thinking and correcting. Operation wasn’t as fast or smooth as it was under Windows 3.1. I was using the platform for nearly two years before abandoning Windows, and I don’t think the left-side-hesitation habit ever really went away in that time. Maybe if I had stuck with it all this time…
I have seen Windows users do the left-side-hesitation thing when using Mac OS, I’m sure they don’t really give it any thought but there is no doubt that those extra mouse miles and milliseconds are going somewhere. However because it’s reasonably consistent, they will learn to adapt if they had to use the platform full-time. When close can be found on either the left or the right, I just don’t see that happening.
I have a very small screen, and a few tabs open. I also never full-screen windows, I like to leverage the full benefits of a windowing system. This puts the browser window typically in the 600-800 pixel wide range at its absolute widest.
Like this, the tabs aren’t very wide, even with five tabs open they’re narrower than the Deskbar. And the target-distance factor comes into play as well, there is a greater chance of error when moving the mouse quickly over a fair distance to reach it.
Some people do have larger screens, but then some people open more tabs. I tend to top out at 10 tabs before opening more windows, but I know some people will keep up to 200 tabs open in Firefox. They seem to be using tabs like bookmarks.
Increasing the minimum width of a tab would help, but this isn’t what this post is about. Even if they were so wide that only one tab were visible at a time, the muscle memory problem doesn’t go away. The fact might be that I’m just exceptionally bad at using the mouse, and interfaces in general. And indeed there is a lot of truth to this, I hate software for a reason after all. But there are people who are even worse (think granny checking her e-mails and using “the google”) and they could stand to benefit from an extremely-consistent interface even more than I could.
But at least they will be right half the time! And never be able to adapt to close being on the left because it’s sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other…
I can see it being offered as an option in the Web browser, simply because so many browsers shove the close on the right even under other platforms like MacOS. But the notifications window? I don’t see why it’s any different from any other window. If anything it would be better to do away with close and make it click-to-close, and make the window type bordered like a dialogue so they know it’s a “special window.”
As it stands I’m more worried about the influence it will have on developers coming to the platform, more than I am about absolute usability. I don’t even have notifications turned on, they’re annoying. You could put the close icon on the back of the window for all I care, I still wouldn’t use them! If one comes up, I don’t click close, I click “turn the bloody things off forever.”
But because of this, it’s clearly “OK” to put the close on the right sometimes… so we then get a soundplayer, or two, with close on the right. It’s a weird custom skinned interface (as these things so often are) so it’s sort of OK. Then we get a few more apps, some of which use closeable panes with X on the right. Then finally, developers start popping up windows with close on the right. We will have mayhem!
[quote=foobear]
Please back that “where it truly belongs” up. I don’t know a passage in the bible that says so.[/quote]
You’re right, the BeOS Bible never talked much about which side close was on. It was, after all, obvious: always on the left!
Can anyone think of a non-Windows OS (and by extension OS/2) that put close on the right? Discounting anything that is a more-or-less copy of Windows (thus most Linux desktops) and discounting mobile OSs: they’re all over the place right now with no stable standards in GUI design.
I would not be surprised if Microsoft stole that idea too, even if it was an extremely, unbelievably poor fit for the user interface conventions they’d already established.
I think I can agree with you that for consistency the close button should be on the left on the notification window. In fact I also like the click to close idea, with no close button at all (assuming that doesn’t currently work.)
Overall though the notification window needs to be completely redesigned, or made skinnable (probably both.) I’m on Mac OS X now and looking at Growl it seems the notification window interfaces are plugins and the settings interface for them reminds me very much of the Haiku Screensaver preferences applet. That might be a fun little project, and fairly easy. There isn’t too much that the notification window needs to show itself, and we could just design a simple BMessage protocol.
Anyhow, back to your topic, I see your muscle memory argument regarding the browser tabs. Again looking on this Mac OS X system, Chrome has the close button on the right, Safari has it on the left (when you mouse over the tab.) But Chrome is really a multi-platform application that tries to be consistent between operating systems, so it isn’t a good example. I personally don’t like Safari and hate how it does not have favicons in the tabs. I can only assume they don’t have them because having a close button and a favicon next to each other might look weird. But that is a crappy compromise.
I would have to do a mock-up to see how it would look to have a favicon and a close button next to each other on a WebPositive tab. If we were do do that, I’d consider making it look more like the close button in the default decorator (though the argument could be made that since the decorator can change, we shouldn’t necessarily use that as an example of elements to use in the UI.) But BezillaBrowser has a theme which uses close buttons which look like the decorator, but they are on the right!
Your compromise of showing a close button on the left of the current tab and favicons otherwise might be OK. I tend to want to see what is in a tab before closing it myself. Plus we really need to add a right-click menu to the Web+ tabs, and that could also allow closing another tab more quickly if things were changed this way.
Lastly if Stack and Tile support is added in to WebPositive (as far as using the API more automatically), we will probably need to resolve this problem there anyhow. I definitely want to see favicons in the decorators in this case, so again we would need to see how it looks with a close button and a favicon next to each other.
BeZillaBrowser is not a good example either. (first for the same reason as chrome – Firefox is designed to be consistent across multiple platforms) The appearance of its UI being Haiku is all smoke and mirrors – the theme is a jar full of small PNG clippings of Haiku’s existing GUI.
[quote=jscipione]Just to add a little fuel to the fire…
The Midori Browser on Elementary OS (a Linux distribution) puts its close X’s on the left of the tabs. They moved the favicons to the right, which, actually doesn’t look as terrible as I initially thought it would.
John that is hilarious I was JUST about to post that screenshot as I just noticed it too.
Yeah it really isn’t that bad. It is definitely worth experimenting with in WebPositive.
If it weren’t for the long history and interest I have in Haiku, I would seriously consider putting development time into elementary OS, as I think it is the most cohesive and well-designed of the Linux distros I’ve seen.
The Midori Browser on Elementary OS (a Linux distribution) puts its close X’s on the left of the tabs. They moved the favicons to the right, which, actually doesn’t look as terrible as I initially thought it would.
If it weren't for the long history and interest I have in Haiku, I would seriously consider putting development time into elementary OS, as I think it is the most cohesive and well-designed of the Linux distros I've seen.
I also appreciate some of the work the people over at Elementary OS are doing. I read up on Vala and it looks like a pretty interesting language with a lot of the power of C++ but on top of C and without some of the cruft of C++. The Elementary OS guys appear to be bringing a lot of ideas from Mac OS X over to Linux which is awesome.
It would be nice if we could get some equivalent applications on Haiku like a Dictionary, a Calendar, a Jukebox, a photo management app, etc.
For the a Calendar, we are half way there with Eventual(sourceforge.net/projects/eventual/), which is under the MIT licence. We are in need of someone to create a bep file for it, plus it seems to not work with R1A4.
And for the photo management app we have Album (http://users.volja.net/mkovac1/proj/album/), which is also under the MIT licence. It can be installed with Haiku Porter.
