The Tabs on Top thing is still a bit irksome to me. It seems like a good idea but it just feels a little odd, IMO.
If I could just get Safari 4 to actually remember my passwords or at the very least keep me logged in, I would switch from Firefox 3 this second. Is there something I can do about those issues or do I have to wait for the final version?
Here's a mockup design of what I think could be the new look of the Finder in Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Has tabbed interface like Safari 4 beta and other interface elements from iTunes 8. I think this look could be used across all Apple applications too.
Looks interesting and promising. At first glance it actually reminds me a little of OS 9's Launcher, with it's tabbed groupings. I suppose that if this is the direction apple goes in, those tabs will have to be spring-loaded, so you can drag 'n' drop stuff in-between tabs and windows.
All this tabs on top complaining about mousing distance is lame.
ctrl+tab & ctrl+shift+tab switches between tabs. use it and stop whining.
there is more mouse movement when it comes to re-arranging tabs though, or dragging them into new windows. you can't dismiss that issue, and I use that feature (dragging of tabs) a lot.
not to mention that the visual queue of "I've opened a new tab" is far less dramatic with tabs on top.
I like the tabs on top, but honestly, in the last 24 hours I've thought at least 5 times "wait a minute, I just clicked that link but where the hell is my new tab? ooooooh, right.". Hopefully the new clue will become ingrained with practice.
uhm... no. tabs are useful for organizing thoughts and keeping tasks separated from one another.
if one were to just use expose or spaces, there would be a lot MORE mouse movement and it would be much harder to keep things organized (moreover you'd end up with a LOT more spaces.
And those of us stuck using PCs at work would be totally screwed... There's a reason one of the biggest reasons people loved FF over IE was because of tabbed browsing...
I really enjoyed working with Safari 4 yesterday, but for some reason, my main email host started failing to connect via IMAP after the install. I don't know if part of web kit was updated, etc. but as I couldn't get mail I uninstalled 4 and went back to 3 and all is well with mail.
Could be a coincidence, but it makes me nervous about moving forward with this app. Having said that, the new feature, interface and speed were impressive.
My mail keeps quitting on me as well. There must be something in Safari 4 that causes it. I did redo the Mail server info after I could no longer send mails. That is now fixed, but the quitting continues.
Absolutely no way that the scroll bar will be hidden until you mouse over it. That breaks it's functionality. You'd move your mouse over it then have to move it to find the draggable bar itself, rather than moving straight to where the bar is...
I agree it wont be hidden but for a different reason. Knowing how much of the page you are seeing and how much you have left to scroll through is a wonderful visual queue. there would need to be a suitable replacement for that queue before they got rid of it.
The changes are quite impressive. I particularly like "tabs on top" and the possibility that applications can have scroll bars that hide themselves until mouse over. Scrivener already has that in full-page view, and it's marvelous. Making other elements of the UI appear and disappear (if the user wants), would be a good idea. Just be sure and make it optional. At times I use the scroll bar to tell me where I am in a long document.
Suggestions:
1. Make the selected tab in "tabs on top" extremely obvious. Tired, I misread tabs in the current interface. This doesn't fix that problem. Enhance the contrast between the two or at least let us select enhanced contrast as a UI option.
2. Make implementing full-featured tabs so easy, every application developer will want to include tabs. Ditto the other UI changes, so the changes begin to appear across all applications. Apple should never forget that they get more bang for their buck when they make improvements available to every programmer and not just in one Apple application.
3. Give us more full-screen, hide-the-clutter abilities.
4. Integrate Growl-like notifications into OS X. You've waited far to long to do that.
5.. OS-X's text-to-speech is clumsy. It only lets us choose to read an entire document starting at the beginning or selected text. Read starting at the cursor and stop on command would be very useful. Read displaying what is being read in a large-text pop-up window would help those with visual problems and make proofing much smoother. And a real plus would be the ability to read either to a file or into iTunes for later listening.
6.. It's not UI, but the GREP search and replace Adobe added to InDesign is so useful, the same features need to be available in every OS X text application. The basic code must be open source, so it shouldn't take that long. Add it to the text features of OS X and do it cleverly. Build in some useful text clean-up routines, add the ability for users to exchange S&R routines, and include the ability of one S&R to call the next in a series. Given how much computer work is done with text, that'd be a big timesaver and leave hundreds of Windows applications looking impoverished and feature-poor.
The reason why tabs on top was never done before today isn't because nobody had thought of it before and that Apple was the first to think about it. No, it's because it's a shitty idea that doesn't work well in practice.
Couple that on top with the notion that tabs is a solution in search for a problem (on the Mac with Spaces and Exposé) and you've got a mess on your hands.
Tabs are already unnecessary to begin with. They don't scale well beyond a certain number of tabs. They offer hardly any visuals to someone that would want to switch to a web page quickly. And when they replace the titlebar, they cause a handful of new problems.
So is it safe to assume you open a new window for every single website in Safari?
Well where the heck is the menu bar then??? There is no menu bar in the windows version and it's frustrating. I don't know if there's a menu bar for the Mac version or not (I'd imagine there is since Apple always keeps the menu bar on top of everything).
It's still more mouse miles but I'm fine with that - it's the absence of the Menu bar that's frustrating (again, this might be windows only)
EDIT: And you shouldn't have to select a corner to drag the tab around - you should be able to drag from anywhere, why else would you be clicking in the tab bar anyway?? (other than to close which already has it's own button)
Are you clueless because you're a windows user, or a windows user because you're clueless? hmmmm.....
The removal of menu bar in Windows is part of the "looks like Windows" "feature," it's following the new MS paradigm as you can see in Media Player, IE8, the new Office, Vista's explorer, etc. Chrome has also adopted this.
Obviously, the other reason you'd be clicking in the tab bar is to move the window around- oh wait, I'm guessing you probably like to use things in "Maximize" mode. :'/ Hence, the need for the corner in this new implementation.
Agreed, kills me that Apple still refuses to build in full screen capabilities. I had a plugin called Glims for Safari 3 that did both full screen & max window, sadly no worky with 4 beta.
I really think the full screen being left out is just a stubbornness to not carry over anything that Microsoft pioneered. They will borrow from others but Apple really doesn't like borrowing from MS, especially since they like to bash MS for borrowing so much from them.
Mac USERS don't like full screen apps because we're so used to drag and drop. I want my other windows and my desktop to be visible at all times, so I can move items between apps. Full screen makes this impossible.
In some cases, full screen makes sense, but most of the time it's a tremendous waste of space.
I think Tabs on Top could be problematic as it's currently implemented if it spreads to all other Apple apps. It just seems too cluttered and makes it more difficult to grab and move the entire window. The handle on the Tabs to move them around also looks like a resize control. Tabs on Top serves it's purpose saving space, but I'm not sure the trade-off in compacting everything together is worth it. Hopefully, like Leopard's dock and the transparent menu bar, it's a work-in-progress that'll see further refinement before release.
Do people really feel the need to move windows around that much? I tend to set my windows in one place, and then they stay there forever. Between Exposé and Spaces, there's almost never any need to actually move a window, particularly not a browser window, unless some lame site decides to resize my whole window without my permission.
What happened to the 'go back to the original page' button? (I forget what it was called). I use that all the time!!!
The browser itself is definitely faster but I not sure about 'Tabs on Top' yet. There's something unintuitive about it and greater mousing distance is required. The developer tools however are totally awesome.
Control + Tab will switch tabs for you. No need for the mouse.
Are you clueless because you're a windows user, or a windows user because you're clueless? hmmmm.....
The removal of menu bar in Windows is part of the "looks like Windows" "feature," it's following the new MS paradigm as you can see in Media Player, IE8, the new Office, Vista's explorer, etc. Chrome has also adopted this.
At least in IE7, you can still access the menu bar if you need it by pressing the ALT-F key combination to pull up the File menu (or whatever other ALT-x combination you'd normally use to reach the relevant menu). Alternately, you can just press the ALT key by itself to bring the keyboard cursor focus up to the menu bar without opening any individual menu.
Either way, the window reconfigures itself to make the menu bar visible.
All this is consistent with Microsoft's longstanding user interface conventions for accessing Windows (and MS-DOS) menu bars via the keyboard. The only difference is that now the menus are hidden by default whereas they weren't before.
I notice that Safari has the same behaviour - the menu bar is hidden by default, but the ALT key reveals it.
EDIT:
Pleased to see that when you switch the Windows theme over to the Classic (Windows 98) mode, Safari still fits in quite nicely. The toolbar and address bar still stick out though - not quite the right shade of grey. It should use the background colour selection from the Windows control panel. I don't like that the name Safari doesn't appear anywhere in the title bar or the task bar.
All this tabs on top complaining about mousing distance is lame.
ctrl+tab & ctrl+shift+tab switches between tabs. use it and stop whining.
--
So I've noticed the removal of the pill button in the top right corner. Usually you could cmd+opt click on it and edit the toolbar. Maybe this function will be removed in 10.6? I sure wouldn't like to see it gone, I like making my icons smaller and removing the text from below them in third party applications. It just saves space and cleans things up a little.
I applaud Apple on UI simplification and unity, but changing OSX to be MORE like iPhone's OSX is a big mistake. If the scroll bars disappear or fade away once a page opens that requires them, new users of the OS could be put off by how vastly different and inherently confusing life without scroll bars could be.
I think changing all the aqua to the iTunes style is a good step forward.
You can right click on any toolbar and select "Customize Toolbar." No need for the pill button to do that.
Also, worth a note: that moving of the "refresh" button is gonna kill me. I mean, I like it and all... but my brain needs rewiring.
Yeah, I really don't like that either. Usually, I had to access the button to *stop* a refresh, in which case (at least on my installation), it was a small "X" button to the immediate left of the address window. Now there is a small "+" button in the same place, that can't be moved and makes the bookmark. I keep hitting the + instead of the X. It's just way too visually similar.
If Apple just gave us the option to have a separate refresh button, a proper progress indicator, and the ability to remove the ugly "make a tab" button, I'd be happy. In other words, if one could actually just use the customise toolbar dialogue to actually *do* some customisation.
If you remember, in earlier versions of Safari there were a lot more options in that dialogue, now there are just a few extra buttons to add in, and one giant button that is five things mushed into one. The "default set" on the bottom is getting to be almost identical to simply moving that one "button" that is now the address field, search field, refresh button and bookmark button in one, and the "add tab" button is not even a choice.
I know Apple is all about intelligently limiting choice to provide a better experience but this is getting a bit ridiculous IMO. Sticking the bookmark button in there as a mandatory thing has no reason behind it at all, it's not like there isn't yards of space in the toolbar. This is iPhone thinking being applied to the desktop me thinks.
The Tabs on Top thing is still a bit irksome to me. It seems like a good idea but it just feels a little odd, IMO.
If I could just get Safari 4 to actually remember my passwords or at the very least keep me logged in, I would switch from Firefox 3 this second. Is there something I can do about those issues or do I have to wait for the final version?
Looks interesting and promising. At first glance it actually reminds me a little of OS 9's Launcher, with it's tabbed groupings. I suppose that if this is the direction apple goes in, those tabs will have to be spring-loaded, so you can drag 'n' drop stuff in-between tabs and windows.
I seriously recommend 1password to free yourself from the tyranny of passwords and user logins forever - it uses keychain so it's not gonna stuff your mac ever! Works with Safari 4 beta as well...
Comments
If I could just get Safari 4 to actually remember my passwords or at the very least keep me logged in, I would switch from Firefox 3 this second. Is there something I can do about those issues or do I have to wait for the final version?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/35835860@N08/3308614371/
Here's a mockup design of what I think could be the new look of the Finder in Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Has tabbed interface like Safari 4 beta and other interface elements from iTunes 8. I think this look could be used across all Apple applications too.
Looks interesting and promising. At first glance it actually reminds me a little of OS 9's Launcher, with it's tabbed groupings. I suppose that if this is the direction apple goes in, those tabs will have to be spring-loaded, so you can drag 'n' drop stuff in-between tabs and windows.
All this tabs on top complaining about mousing distance is lame.
ctrl+tab & ctrl+shift+tab switches between tabs. use it and stop whining.
there is more mouse movement when it comes to re-arranging tabs though, or dragging them into new windows. you can't dismiss that issue, and I use that feature (dragging of tabs) a lot.
not to mention that the visual queue of "I've opened a new tab" is far less dramatic with tabs on top.
I like the tabs on top, but honestly, in the last 24 hours I've thought at least 5 times "wait a minute, I just clicked that link but where the hell is my new tab? ooooooh, right.". Hopefully the new clue will become ingrained with practice.
uhm... no. tabs are useful for organizing thoughts and keeping tasks separated from one another.
if one were to just use expose or spaces, there would be a lot MORE mouse movement and it would be much harder to keep things organized (moreover you'd end up with a LOT more spaces.
And those of us stuck using PCs at work would be totally screwed... There's a reason one of the biggest reasons people loved FF over IE was because of tabbed browsing...
I really enjoyed working with Safari 4 yesterday, but for some reason, my main email host started failing to connect via IMAP after the install. I don't know if part of web kit was updated, etc. but as I couldn't get mail I uninstalled 4 and went back to 3 and all is well with mail.
Could be a coincidence, but it makes me nervous about moving forward with this app. Having said that, the new feature, interface and speed were impressive.
My mail keeps quitting on me as well. There must be something in Safari 4 that causes it. I did redo the Mail server info after I could no longer send mails. That is now fixed, but the quitting continues.
Tabs...offer hardly any visuals to someone that would want to switch to a web page quickly.
Agreed. What we need is a "Tabs Exposé" feature to show us thumbnails of all currently opened tabs, allowing us to click one and be taken to that tab.
I've already sent this in as a suggestion to Apple. If you agree, please do the same.
Absolutely no way that the scroll bar will be hidden until you mouse over it. That breaks it's functionality. You'd move your mouse over it then have to move it to find the draggable bar itself, rather than moving straight to where the bar is...
I agree it wont be hidden but for a different reason. Knowing how much of the page you are seeing and how much you have left to scroll through is a wonderful visual queue. there would need to be a suitable replacement for that queue before they got rid of it.
Suggestions:
1. Make the selected tab in "tabs on top" extremely obvious. Tired, I misread tabs in the current interface. This doesn't fix that problem. Enhance the contrast between the two or at least let us select enhanced contrast as a UI option.
2. Make implementing full-featured tabs so easy, every application developer will want to include tabs. Ditto the other UI changes, so the changes begin to appear across all applications. Apple should never forget that they get more bang for their buck when they make improvements available to every programmer and not just in one Apple application.
3. Give us more full-screen, hide-the-clutter abilities.
4. Integrate Growl-like notifications into OS X. You've waited far to long to do that.
5.. OS-X's text-to-speech is clumsy. It only lets us choose to read an entire document starting at the beginning or selected text. Read starting at the cursor and stop on command would be very useful. Read displaying what is being read in a large-text pop-up window would help those with visual problems and make proofing much smoother. And a real plus would be the ability to read either to a file or into iTunes for later listening.
6.. It's not UI, but the GREP search and replace Adobe added to InDesign is so useful, the same features need to be available in every OS X text application. The basic code must be open source, so it shouldn't take that long. Add it to the text features of OS X and do it cleverly. Build in some useful text clean-up routines, add the ability for users to exchange S&R routines, and include the ability of one S&R to call the next in a series. Given how much computer work is done with text, that'd be a big timesaver and leave hundreds of Windows applications looking impoverished and feature-poor.
The reason why tabs on top was never done before today isn't because nobody had thought of it before and that Apple was the first to think about it. No, it's because it's a shitty idea that doesn't work well in practice.
Couple that on top with the notion that tabs is a solution in search for a problem (on the Mac with Spaces and Exposé) and you've got a mess on your hands.
Tabs are already unnecessary to begin with. They don't scale well beyond a certain number of tabs. They offer hardly any visuals to someone that would want to switch to a web page quickly. And when they replace the titlebar, they cause a handful of new problems.
So is it safe to assume you open a new window for every single website in Safari?
What about being able to Command-click the title bar and navigate the site's folder structure? Is that still an option?
that better come back... I love that feature in every app that it's in.
Well where the heck is the menu bar then??? There is no menu bar in the windows version and it's frustrating. I don't know if there's a menu bar for the Mac version or not (I'd imagine there is since Apple always keeps the menu bar on top of everything).
It's still more mouse miles but I'm fine with that - it's the absence of the Menu bar that's frustrating (again, this might be windows only)
EDIT: And you shouldn't have to select a corner to drag the tab around - you should be able to drag from anywhere, why else would you be clicking in the tab bar anyway?? (other than to close which already has it's own button)
Are you clueless because you're a windows user, or a windows user because you're clueless? hmmmm.....
The removal of menu bar in Windows is part of the "looks like Windows" "feature," it's following the new MS paradigm as you can see in Media Player, IE8, the new Office, Vista's explorer, etc. Chrome has also adopted this.
Obviously, the other reason you'd be clicking in the tab bar is to move the window around- oh wait, I'm guessing you probably like to use things in "Maximize" mode. :'/ Hence, the need for the corner in this new implementation.
Agreed, kills me that Apple still refuses to build in full screen capabilities. I had a plugin called Glims for Safari 3 that did both full screen & max window, sadly no worky with 4 beta.
I really think the full screen being left out is just a stubbornness to not carry over anything that Microsoft pioneered. They will borrow from others but Apple really doesn't like borrowing from MS, especially since they like to bash MS for borrowing so much from them.
Mac USERS don't like full screen apps because we're so used to drag and drop. I want my other windows and my desktop to be visible at all times, so I can move items between apps. Full screen makes this impossible.
In some cases, full screen makes sense, but most of the time it's a tremendous waste of space.
Also, worth a note: that moving of the "refresh" button is gonna kill me. I mean, I like it and all... but my brain needs rewiring.
You might consider taking this opportunity to learn the keyboard shortcut: ⌘R
Keyboard shortcuts are always faster than mousing to buttons!
I think Tabs on Top could be problematic as it's currently implemented if it spreads to all other Apple apps. It just seems too cluttered and makes it more difficult to grab and move the entire window. The handle on the Tabs to move them around also looks like a resize control. Tabs on Top serves it's purpose saving space, but I'm not sure the trade-off in compacting everything together is worth it. Hopefully, like Leopard's dock and the transparent menu bar, it's a work-in-progress that'll see further refinement before release.
Do people really feel the need to move windows around that much? I tend to set my windows in one place, and then they stay there forever. Between Exposé and Spaces, there's almost never any need to actually move a window, particularly not a browser window, unless some lame site decides to resize my whole window without my permission.
What happened to the 'go back to the original page' button? (I forget what it was called). I use that all the time!!!
The browser itself is definitely faster but I not sure about 'Tabs on Top' yet. There's something unintuitive about it and greater mousing distance is required. The developer tools however are totally awesome.
Control + Tab will switch tabs for you. No need for the mouse.
Are you clueless because you're a windows user, or a windows user because you're clueless? hmmmm.....
The removal of menu bar in Windows is part of the "looks like Windows" "feature," it's following the new MS paradigm as you can see in Media Player, IE8, the new Office, Vista's explorer, etc. Chrome has also adopted this.
At least in IE7, you can still access the menu bar if you need it by pressing the ALT-F key combination to pull up the File menu (or whatever other ALT-x combination you'd normally use to reach the relevant menu). Alternately, you can just press the ALT key by itself to bring the keyboard cursor focus up to the menu bar without opening any individual menu.
Either way, the window reconfigures itself to make the menu bar visible.
All this is consistent with Microsoft's longstanding user interface conventions for accessing Windows (and MS-DOS) menu bars via the keyboard. The only difference is that now the menus are hidden by default whereas they weren't before.
I notice that Safari has the same behaviour - the menu bar is hidden by default, but the ALT key reveals it.
EDIT:
Pleased to see that when you switch the Windows theme over to the Classic (Windows 98) mode, Safari still fits in quite nicely. The toolbar and address bar still stick out though - not quite the right shade of grey. It should use the background colour selection from the Windows control panel. I don't like that the name Safari doesn't appear anywhere in the title bar or the task bar.
All this tabs on top complaining about mousing distance is lame.
ctrl+tab & ctrl+shift+tab switches between tabs. use it and stop whining.
--
So I've noticed the removal of the pill button in the top right corner. Usually you could cmd+opt click on it and edit the toolbar. Maybe this function will be removed in 10.6? I sure wouldn't like to see it gone, I like making my icons smaller and removing the text from below them in third party applications. It just saves space and cleans things up a little.
I applaud Apple on UI simplification and unity, but changing OSX to be MORE like iPhone's OSX is a big mistake. If the scroll bars disappear or fade away once a page opens that requires them, new users of the OS could be put off by how vastly different and inherently confusing life without scroll bars could be.
I think changing all the aqua to the iTunes style is a good step forward.
You can right click on any toolbar and select "Customize Toolbar." No need for the pill button to do that.
Also, worth a note: that moving of the "refresh" button is gonna kill me. I mean, I like it and all... but my brain needs rewiring.
Yeah, I really don't like that either. Usually, I had to access the button to *stop* a refresh, in which case (at least on my installation), it was a small "X" button to the immediate left of the address window. Now there is a small "+" button in the same place, that can't be moved and makes the bookmark. I keep hitting the + instead of the X. It's just way too visually similar.
If Apple just gave us the option to have a separate refresh button, a proper progress indicator, and the ability to remove the ugly "make a tab" button, I'd be happy. In other words, if one could actually just use the customise toolbar dialogue to actually *do* some customisation.
If you remember, in earlier versions of Safari there were a lot more options in that dialogue, now there are just a few extra buttons to add in, and one giant button that is five things mushed into one. The "default set" on the bottom is getting to be almost identical to simply moving that one "button" that is now the address field, search field, refresh button and bookmark button in one, and the "add tab" button is not even a choice.
I know Apple is all about intelligently limiting choice to provide a better experience but this is getting a bit ridiculous IMO. Sticking the bookmark button in there as a mandatory thing has no reason behind it at all, it's not like there isn't yards of space in the toolbar. This is iPhone thinking being applied to the desktop me thinks.
The Tabs on Top thing is still a bit irksome to me. It seems like a good idea but it just feels a little odd, IMO.
If I could just get Safari 4 to actually remember my passwords or at the very least keep me logged in, I would switch from Firefox 3 this second. Is there something I can do about those issues or do I have to wait for the final version?
Looks interesting and promising. At first glance it actually reminds me a little of OS 9's Launcher, with it's tabbed groupings. I suppose that if this is the direction apple goes in, those tabs will have to be spring-loaded, so you can drag 'n' drop stuff in-between tabs and windows.
I seriously recommend 1password to free yourself from the tyranny of passwords and user logins forever - it uses keychain so it's not gonna stuff your mac ever! Works with Safari 4 beta as well...