Inline Autocompletion

Inline autocompletion is a common part of search bars, but for the longest time, autocompletion was anchored to the beginning of the URL in a web browser address bar. In the middle of last year, Firefox included an "awesome bar" in version 3, which allowed us to type: "lunar" to bring up a past history or bookmark of "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penumbral_lunar_eclipse", whereas other browsers required typing, "en.wiki..." (not even flexible enough to allow "wikipedia" to yield results). Over a year onward, and this still hasn't spread to other browsers.

Inline autocompletion

Anchored autocompletion

Seeing as most web browsers haven't integrated their search and URL bars entirely as Chrome has, this is one handicap of most browsers that maintain discreet address bars, as they miss out on one of the top usability benefits of unanchored autocompletion - lessening the requirement on the user to remember URLs.

Browser Sniffing on the Mobile Web

Browser sniffing holds a level of stigma in the web development/design world, as we have been spending years and years creating cross-platform, cross-browser sites that use more robust techniques of singling out browsers, rendering engines, or platforms as a last resort through our knowledge of what's supported - CSS conditional comments, JS object detection, and various tricks and (if needed) hacks both client and server side. It has long been our practice to create a solid separation of presentation, content, and functionality in a way that degraded gracefully (or more recently, progressively enhanced).

This has worked well on the desktop platform, from desktop workstations to notebooks to tablets.

The Age of Rich Mobile Computing

So the question becomes, what to do with the mobile platform. For years, there have been very basic mobile-specific pages for basic phones with tiny viewports and browsers that couldn't handle much more beyond HTML, with notable omissions of support in areas like CSS and Javascript.

But ever since the iPhone brought fully-featured mobile browsers to the mainstream, there has been this huge trend of companies creating iPhone-tailored sites designed for the width of their viewports, and guaranteed to work on W3C standards-compliant browsers, including Webkit-based ones like MobileSafari, and soon after the ones on the Android and webOS platforms, which currently also have devices with similar viewports. Consequently, these iPhone-tailored sites generally automatically work well with most modern smartphones with full browsers, effectively creating a second tier of mobile sites for smartphones.

For the iPhone initially, it seemed both sensible and insensible simultaneously that people were creating sites that fixed themselves to a specific viewport width. One of the great abilities of MobileSafari on the iPhone was that zooming on small screens was finally easy with the pinch gestures, so coupled with the full HTML/CSS/JS browser, there would be little reason not to experience the same full website used on the desktop platform. Even considering this, however, people still designed sites that negated the pinch zooming.

Still, with a smartphone version of the site, you would ideally be served the same information you need in a way that didn't require any zooming at all, because the user is still otherwise pinching his way into a zoomed out preview of the page that he can't initially read. But sometimes smartphone sites aren't thought out as well, and information or features end up missing.

In some cases though, desktop versions of sites are so mobile-unfriendly (Facebook desktop site) that we pretty much have to rely on mobile sites or native applications to access them on mobile devices.

But there's a lingering question that we may all face in the coming years - at what point is a device considered a "mobile" device and not a desktop computing device?

Drawing the Line at "Mobile"

In late 2008, I had this discussion in an iPhone development forum where I wanted to know how to allow a user to use a link to exit a mobile page back to the full desktop site, without cookies and without having the desktop site's mobile browser detection causing an infinite cycle between the desktop and mobile sites. In other words, just as many sites were doing, I was automatically directing all appropriate mobile devices to the mobile site, but wanted to offer an option to return and remain at the original version.

We came up with a solution, but not before having a heated discussion over whether browser sniffing on the mobile platform was a forgivable exception. My point was that most phones beyond the iPhone did not possess easy pinch zooming, and magnifying with a trackball one square block at a time was not a pleasant experience. Beyond that, there were functions most mobile devices could not yet handle so smoothly, such as click and drag, and general mobile-specific features like data detection (phone numbers, addresses for maps, etc).

But the best counter argument I heard that makes me reconsider is that the line between desktop and mobile computing is not as clearly defined as we think, especially if you think about the smaller 7" netbooks in the middle of the spectrum with screen resolutions in the 800x480 pixels.

It's possible this gap could shorten and fill over time with in-the-middle devices like these and other devices with smaller resolutions. For comparison, the iPhone family of devices sports a 3.5" 480x320 pixels screen.

It's also possible this gap might remain as sparse as it is today, if we assume that the 7" netbooks are roughly the smallest non-niche form factor the mainstream is willing to bear on a desktop platform with a two-handed QWERTY keyboard, and that today's smartphones with thumb-based QWERTY keyboards (hard and touch-based) are in the upper bound for mobile to remain pocket-friendly.

Ideally, we do want our fluid layout pages to scale down well to the current mobile category of devices, and not to serve and maintain special mobile versions of our sites. As it stands, the gap still holds, and for the sake of the user experience in the present day, this is how many of us will approach it. We'll see where the future takes us from there.

Thoughtful Charts and Real-Time UI Feedback in Google Finance

I'll have to admit that I've never been a frequent user of the advanced options of Yahoo! Finance, so the information that Google Finance provides is just right for finance users like me who just want the fundamentals, and Google Finance has provided excellent usability for that.

One of my favorite features that came out of Google Finance was the extended hours trading on charts of logged in users. Real time quotes in after hours trading was already common in both Yahoo!'s and Google's finance products, but visually displaying the pre-market and after-market movements diagrammatically was important because it displayed the history of the price movement per share of a stock, whereas beforehand, you only had the current trading price during active after-hours, or the last price after that session had ended. It has also been a particularly useful way to guess the trend to be at the opening bell.



A couple days ago, they introduced a tiny detail that I believe users will find helpful - any digits changing in the displayed price will flash green or red momentarily, depending on whether it's an upward or downward change. To put it in perspective, the norm before this was to only color-code the difference in points or percentages, not any part of the price itself. This is a small step, but it reminds me of the days in the late 90's when CNBC turned their navy blue change indicators and values to color-coded green and red values, a novelty that has long since become a standard.



Beyond that, still among my past favorite interface details are - showing news indicators on the charts at the point where news was announced, and transactions tracking to monitor gains and losses. The next step would be to somehow make this site scalable on a mobile viewport, the Flash support on various mobile devices notwithstanding.

Window Maximize and Zoom

The other day, my friend Eugene and I were discussing zooming and maximizing with regards to window management, as he was looking around for workarounds to maximize windows in OS X. The zooming function in OS X, represented by the green orb button, is the counterpart to the maximizing function in Windows, represented by the maximized square. Yet unlike the parallel "close" and "minimize" functions, "zoom" and "maximize" are not equivalents of each other.

The "maximize" button in Windows expands the current window to fill the entire screen.

Whereas the green "zoom" button on the top left corner of every OS X window toggles between two window sizes. One is set by the developer, most commonly fit-to-content (e.g. Apple applications and most programs), but also fit-to-screen (e.g. Firefox). The other is defined by the user, so if you resize the window to 800 pixels wide and 600 pixels tall, that will be the saved setting whenever you toggle back to the user zoom.

Zoom 1: User-Defined Dimensions

Zoom 2: Fit to Content

This was one of my own habit adjustment hurdles when switching from Windows to OS X, and apparently, it was also one of the most common adjustments users migrating from Windows had to make. Coming from years on the Windows platform, we liked to maximize, maximize, maximize, and apparently it was a common complaint of those migrating from Windows.

And it made sense to me at the time when common screen resolutions were 640x480 or 800x600 or 1024x720, with average webpage widths keeping up with the accepted lowest common denominator of resolutions - less than 640, less than 800...

But as the average screen resolution in the mainstream grew beyond this point, especially with the transition to widescreen aspect ratios, webpage and document widths weren't keeping pace anymore because paragraphs of text become difficult to read after roughly 70 to 80 characters on a single line.

Maximizing a single document to fill a 1920x1200 would mean huge margins of whitespace, which is clearly a waste of screen real estate, which is why the zoom function in OS X I used to dislike has grown on me, as I do find myself frequently wanting to resize windows just enough to see the content before making room for another window on its side.

This is not to say that there won't be times that I'll still want to fill a window to the edges of the screen. Movies may have a full screen mode, but images in Photoshop or lines of code in an IDE are areas where that option would have utility.

User-Defined

Fit to Content

Maximized on a Modern Screen Resolution

Oddly, the pervasiveness of tabbed interfaces in recent years has meant more utility with wider windows, which goes against the grain of maintaining a limited width for readability in a document.

Oh, and if you're wondering what our conclusion was, we liked a third party application RightZoom for OS X, which provided the option to maintain a hybrid zoom/maximize function where one is accessible with an extra modifier key.

Thoughtfulness Zen of the Moment 3

Probably one of the underrated parts of the third generation iPhone (3GS) is its digital compass, which may evoke questions about its utility until a user actually uses it on the road. The potential utility of this compass gave me some excitement when I saw the iPhone GPS navigation app demo by TomTom the day the iPhone 3GS was announced, because it completed the last requirement necessary to make turn-by-turn GPS work seamlessly - your car's heading.

Now, with location-aware devices coupled with a map like Google Maps, it was already possible to navigate with steps of directions and your currently tracked location. But as anyone who has tried driving with any navigational aid knows, knowing the orientation of the streets grid relative to your direction is immensely more useful than driving with north fixed as upward.

Unfortunately, the TomTom GPS navigation app is not yet released, but one of the most accessible sample implementations right now is in the bundled Google Maps application, which cleverly displays heading in the form of car headlight beams. Moment of zen.

30 Favorite Usability Aspects and Features of Gmail

Five years ago, I finally received my invite to sign up for Google's new email service, Gmail. It was 2004, and I was loyal to Yahoo! Mail at the time for having the relatively cleanest UI and largest storage space (a whopping 6 megabytes) for a free major webmail provider.

There were plenty of gripes I had sent to the Yahoo! Mail feedback teams over the years - everything from the loss of free POP access since April 2002, to the extra step of having a forced home page before the inbox, to the little things like the promo tags appended to every outbound message ("Do you Yahoo!?" or one line ads for various services for Yahoo! or MSN in Hotmail).

Gmail addressed all of those, for free and immediately, and on top of that exhibited a friendly user interface and excellent usability. It seemed that everyone was falling head over heels over the 1 GB of space for a free webmail service, unheard of at the time, which was important too because with Yahoo! Mail at 6 MB and Hotmail at 2 MB, we were bound to be forced into deleting messages instead of keeping online archives. (This is largely why I no longer have my emails from 1998 in Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail.)

Ultimately, it's the little things that count, and Gmail was and remains the most well thought out webmail application out there. To celebrate my half decade as a happy user, here's a list of 30 reasons, one for every other month in the past five years, of what made me enamored with Gmail at its launch and thereafter. (There are more features than just these, but these were and are the ones that hold importance to me and won me over.)

1. threaded conversations
2. snippets previews of messages
3. labels (as opposed to folders, and color-coded) and advanced filters (and archive)
4. sending as custom address for outgoing messages
5. no promo tag lines appended to outbound messages
6. login goes straight to inbox, no home screen
7. no display ads, unobtrusive text ads
8. clickable textarea to reply in that part of the threaded conversation, without page reload
9. auto saving drafts as composing email
10. arrow indicators for which messages are directly to me, and which are mailing lists
11. search operators (is:unread, has:attachment)
12. attachments downloadable as a batch zip file with a folder
13. attachment previews for images and documents
14. single click to download attachment, instead of having to save as from browser
15. attachments upload in background as composing email
16. attachment upload progress bar
17. online viewing of documents via integration with google docs (doc, xls, ppt, pdf)
18. built-in chat (and later with AIM support and group chat)
19. server side chat logs (even when accessing via Jabber with clients or Meebo)
20. free POP access, including sent mail (later free IMAP, seamless with the labels)
21. POP fetching from other mail accounts
22. https
23. history details of IPs and method of access, and ability to sign off other sessions
24. notifications of live updates in threaded conversation while viewing/composing
25. unobtrusive confirmations/warnings as bars at the page top that gracefully disappear
26. mute conversations
27. google gears offline access
28. excellent spam filters (empirically far ahead of other webmail clients)
29. full css-based themes (as opposed to basic color switches), potential user contributions
30. drag-and-drop to move messages

It also had some behavioral side effects. I no longer used custom creative subject headers in replies, since we were maintaing RE: subject headers to keep messages organized in their appropriate threads. And because of their auto-reload of data and that they displayed the actual inbox count in the titlebar of the browser, I developed the habit of keeping my Gmail open, which made me spend far more time in webmail than ever before. This multiplied with built-in chat arrived in 2006 with sounds and flashing notifications. Meanwhile, the labels/filters/archives combined with the ability to send out as a different email address led to me sending and receiving all my Berkeley email through Gmail, and I soon expanded that to all my other email accounts until I had a central Gmail inbox with a vast collection of filters and labels doing all the sorting heavylifting for me. The GB+ of space also meant that I no longer had to delete email letters with large attachments, and could now keep all email online.

As a more or less loyal Yahoo! user from 1997 to 2004ish/2005, I anxiously waited for the invite-based Yahoo! Mail Beta and kept sending improvement requests such as #5, #6, and #9. Most of the requests I made never happened, and my invite arrived over a year after I had told all my contacts I had moved to my Gmail address. In contrast, #12 was one I sent to Gmail's feedback team, and maybe by coincidence, the feature appeared within a week. To give them the benefit of the doubt, they seemed like they were listening to their customers and were prolific with their continuous improvements of their product. It's worth noting that some of these were features at various points of Yahoo! Mail's heyday, such as #16 and the first part of #20. But as long as the Gmail team keeps this up, Gmail will remain the most useful and usable web application I've ever encountered in my online experiences.

The Global Inbox versus the Distinct Inboxes

When it comes to organizing multiple accounts on an email client, there are two major approaches - one is to send them all to a shared inbox, generally called a global inbox. How emails get filtered or sorted at that point varies, whether by folders or by labels. The other approach is to keep separate inboxes and sent/outbox/junk/trash folders for each mail account set up in the application.

Most desktop email clients offer the option of both inboxes global and separate, but it gets trickier with the constraints of the small viewports on mobile screens.

The way the iPhone OS has been doing it these past couple years seems to be consistent with the way the original iPods menus were done - you start a root level menu, and drill your way down (visually to the right) until you reach the level you wanted to visit. For example, on the original iPods, playing a song from the main screen involved: Music > Artists > Jack Johnson > All Songs > Upside Down, and going back (up one level) was done by the menu button (or the equivalent home button on the iPhone OS devices).

This was part of the foundation of the famed ease-of-use menu/clickwheel navigation of the iPods, and to the extent of the menu/home UI breadcrumbs, the iPhones and iPod touches. However, for tasks where switching quickly between two children-level items, heavily nested levels can hinder that. For example, one classic task is to switch between folders in two separate email accounts. From the first inbox, this requires going back two levels up emailone@someprovider.com > Accounts > emailtoo@someprovider.com > Inbox. That's four steps.



Now try this on the Palm Pre's webOS. For those maintaining separate inboxes, the accounts are listed in collapsed folder lists, so if both accounts's lists weren't expanded already, two taps for expanding both are required, after which both inboxes are just a scroll away from each other, and one tap for going back to the accounts list. If that's not enough, this mail client allows adding folders from various mail accounts into a global favorites list on the accounts list page, reducing even the need for a scroll.



The fact that there's a global inbox view while preserving the separate nature of the accounts ("All inboxes" on webOS) is a huge side perk, and actually excels beyond what many desktop applications offer. This is a shining example of a solid mail client implementation for both global/distinct inbox camps that scales well onto the mobile platform.

The Case for Too Many Mobile Apps

One point of contention with my usage of the iPhone is that I'm one of those people with so many apps, to the point of reaching the nine screens limit characteristic of the OS prior to the version 3.0 release last week.

One of the common rhetorical questions laid about before me was whether I actually use all the applications on my smartphone. This is a fair question, and the answer remains that it indeed comes down to a handful of applications I can honestly categorize under frequent usage.

The Desktop Analogy and Occasional Use

But that's the thing - frequency of use. Users like myself like to treat their smartphones more as portable computers than just powerful phones. That is, people like me want all the occasional-use applications on the phone, just in case. It would be analogous to the myriad of applications installed on a Windows, Mac, or Linux desktop environment. I may not burn DVDs or CDs on a daily basis, but I'm not going to reinstall Nero Burning ROM every other month for each time I need to burn an optical disc. Likewise, I'm not going to reinstall an ATM Hunter app or Starmap app every time I occasionally need it.

The last thing a user wants to do the moment a task needs to be done is to install and configure settings. (In general, desktop software and mobile apps lose some or all customizations and data upon removal.) Essentially, it's all about the convenience of having the tools and resources you need available to you, even if you only use them once in a while.

It can seem overwhelming to an observer seeing a user swipe across eight or nine screens of apps on an iPhone, and it's certainly valid that it can look like a random mess. It requires relying on memory of where a particular app sits (turns out to be easy for the primary user, but slower for guest users), as well as reorganization of their icon order on the pages. For example, there seems to be this trend of people sorting by a gradient of usage frequency, with the most used apps on the home screen, and gradually sorted towards the least used apps on the last screens.

Search versus Browse, and Low-Use Applications

In the case of this phone, there's no function to sort all apps by name or any attribute, but the default behavior is that any new app gets placed at the end, or in the first gap on a screen's icon grid. That effectively sorts by last added. If you're installing all applications in a huge batch, such as if syncing for the very first time with apps all sync-ready in iTunes, then they install in alphabetical order by name. Beyond that though, it's all manual sorting.

So when version 3.0 released with its Spotlight global search feature and removal of the cap on number of apps, the iPhone OS seemed to step closer to this desktop computing behavior. The search versus browse mentality is very much like the live global search on a desktop platform, such as with Spotlight on the OS X menu bar and Windows Search in the Windows Vista/7 taskbar. You still browse for applications (and anything else from emails to calendar events), but for anything further out of reach, such as low-usage applications, the search part of the hybrid system comes in handy.

Linear Browsing versus Planar Browsing

It's also worth noting that another suggestion I've come across is to allow vertical swipes for vertical pages/screens, whereas the iPhone OS maintains a horizontal row of pages that only move left and right, with dot indicators at the bottom to show the current position. This is a linear approach. It has its cons, but it's arguably easier to keep track. Typically, most other phones offer a single tall vertical page with scrolling for all applications, and movement is also linear, with the scrollbar being the indicator of position.

The Palm Pre takes a different approach with a grid of screens of icon grids. This could potentially mean less swipes when browsing, provided the user can keep track of position. There are stick indicators showing where you are on the grid. This remotely like organizing by workspaces in Linux or Spaces in OS X, and its only limit is how much the user can remember about the position of a specific app in a cartesian plane instead of a linear. The question then becomes what the threshold is for how much we can handle - 2x2, 3x3, 4x4? Will a user remember that the Pandora app was on the Marsha part of the Brady Bunch grid? Or was it the Cindy part of the grid? We risk confusion, but it's an expense for the gain of quicker movement on a 2D plane. In some ways, this kind of planar browsing is much like that of desktop computing, except with a much more limited screen size to do it, so we'll see how that plays out.

Convergence

For years and years, people and the media alike have been talking about the convergence of many different kinds of devices into one, for better or worse. In the case of the mobile devices, its evolution towards becoming more desktop-like is one part of this continual convergence, not necessarily towards one single device for all, but certainly towards the further blurring of the lines between them all.

Blast from the Past: Oversights in the Motorola Razr V3 Interface

Before any organized effort like Bleuprints, I wrote these scattered design muses under the label "blurbs".
Here is one I wrote in 2007, towards the end of my experience with the Motorola Razr V3, and prior to owning the Razr V3xx (a future device that would finally fix some of the issues I mentioned). The iPhone solved many of the gripes I had with mobile phone UI's in general, which was largely why I loved it so much. Its announcement prompted me to write out what had been frustrating me about the status quo during my ownership of the Razr's.

"Oversights in the Motorola Razr V3 Interface"
August 3, 2007, from yours truly, Gordon

The following are some highlighted interface oversights I noticed when I first got the now widespread Motorola Razr V3 back in 2005. I've upgraded my firmware multiple times with the hope that perhaps Moto developers had addressed these issues since then, but to no avail. I've contacted Motorola directly, and they respond as though they don't see these as shortcomings.

Why is this important? Well, first off, Motorola clearly isn't listening, and hasn't provided easy feedback channels to their developers, and that's a shame because the shape of this anodized aluminum exterior and its keypad design are absolutely gorgeous. Yet more importantly, this mobile operating system appears to be used on most other Motorola phones, like the clamshell V551 that my sister owns.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Above: Clock hidden from view during phone call

During a phone call, someone might ask you if you can meet them at 4pm. You check down at your phone, your sole time piece nowadays, only to discover that the "Calling" half-screen is blocking the clock from view. Yet Motorola does not allow you the option to move the clock anywhere beyond the lower right hand corner. With all that space at the top, they could have allowed the time to be positioned anywhere at the top, where the date currently sits.

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

Above and Below: Inconsistency - Inability to rename pictures in viewing mode menu

You've taken some photos with your camera phone, and you want to name them. Yet sometimes the tiny thumbnails in the main pictures gallery (Fig. 3) are unidentifiable for naming, so you select a picture and "View". Now that it's clearer what this photo was (Fig. 5), you access this individual photo's menu (Fig. 6), only to realize that there's no "Rename" option. In order to name this photo, you must select "Back" twice, access the menu, and rename from this main menu (Fig. 4). That's two extra steps every time. If you're naming the last ten photos you just took, that amounts to a lot of wasted time and finger movements.

Fig. 5

Fig. 6

Fig. 7

Fig. 8

Above: Extra steps in saving freshly taken camera pics

Every time you've just snapped a photo with your camera phone, a screen (Fig. 7) pops up asking whether you want to "Store" or "Discard". This decision has some logic behind it, because you'd want to discard bad takes immediately. Some cameraphones prefer to save your snapshot right away and let you decide how to use it later, such as with Nokia. That way, you won't lose your snapshot if someone happens to call you right as you're trying to save it. Saving is not even a one-step process because Motorola assumes that you want to send every photo you take in a text/e-mail message. So to save a photo, you must "Store", arrow down to "Store In". If it's a passing moment you're trying to capture, you can forget about making the subsequent shots in time. Or let's take it up another level - about half the people I see on vacation snap photos with their phones. Imagine if you asked someone to take a photo of you, and then you wanted the conventional "one more" shot. Unless they're familiar with this Motorola interface, you're in for some extra minor hassles - "Did I take it? How do I save this?".


Exterior: Gorgeous and well thought-out

Quirks in the interface aside, this device's innards are housed in a slim exterior (finally, reduced pocket bulge), an anodized aluminum surface like the iPod Mini and iPod Nano 2G (finally, grease resistance and easier to the touch), no bulgy stick antenna on the top (finally built in as part of the look on the bottom), and a styled keypad (notice the consistent typeface usage, the green button symbolizing "talk" with a telephone icon with an emanating wave of talk, and the red button symbolizing "off" with the hung-up handset resting on the body of the phone), to name a few. Sure, there are a few decision quirks on the exterior end as well, such as the "Internet" key, which most people would find less useful than a "camera" key (later adopted on other Razr models). You can tell that the designers behind this weren't sloppy with the curves, as you can tell by how how neatly and naturally all the lines sweep and come together at the hinges/camera and battery door, and the between the top lid and bottom antenna. Nothing juts out, not even the integrated loop for string-attached decorations. This was the phone that melted away my original perception of the flip phone as a bulky, generic grease magnet of gray boredom, and I thank you Motorola for getting that part right. Now about that interface...

From Tabs to Thumbnails, and Back

The screenshots tell it all. The Opera 10 beta browser has a vertically resizable tab bar that turns into page thumbnails as they are expanded. To me, this is the most graceful approach I've seen towards representing open pages as thumbnails because it doesn't interrupt the view of the current page beyond what you control, in contrast to a full page grid of thumbs. I'm curious to see whether this takes off beyond the web browser into other tabbed applications.

Am I the only one who noticed this? Safari 4's Tabs Bar Lost Multitasking

I previously mentioned how Safari 4 Beta had stepped up their spillover tabs menu oversight by moving you to the area of the tab bar where your active tab sits, so that you could see its neighboring tabs. Suddenly, tabs that didn't fit on the visible part of the tab bar weren't segregated into an inaccessible menu.

This was what the Safari team gave us with Safari 4 Beta:


(To jog your memory, notice that wherever you are, the whiter part of the contextual menu shows which part of the tab bar is visible, and it would move you to that section of the tab bar.)

This is what happened when Safari 4 officially came out:


(Now we're back to being fixed at the front of the tab bar, and only one tab from the contextual menu can show up in the visible part of the tab bar at a time - at the very end of the tab bar. So if I selected the hidden spilled-over 16th "Flickr" tab, it would appear at the end of the visible tab section, beside the 10th "Google" tab. That misrepresents the sequence of the tabs, and reduces what we can do with it when moving tabs around.)

They quietly removed it, and while the blogosphere and media seem to be talking about the Safari 4 official release version, nobody seems to be talking about this. Am I the only one who noticed this? Surely I'm not the only detail-oriented person around here. Maybe all the designers out there just haven't noticed this yet. What a step backwards. My only redemption is that we now have access to the Chrome developer preview for OS X.

The Ballad of OS X and Windows 7 Docks

The dock is one of the major approaches for windows management and application launching, currently most well known with its usage in OS X. With its grouping of documents by application, it stood in contrast with the dominantly document-by-document system found in the taskbar approach in Windows. The taskbar evolved into a hybrid system over the years with the addition of the Quick Launch bar and the tab grouping, as I previously discussed in fuller detail, and it has again evolved with the upcoming version of the taskbar in Windows 7 - into a dock.

Yes, there's a dock, and that implies that many more users worldwide will be interacting day in and day out with a dock. And Windows 7's dock is likely here to stay, given that the experience in a release candidate is essentially the same as that in the final release.

Now, that statement might stir some uneasiness among some people, as the knee-jerk reaction would be to point out that it actually isn't the same as a dock. In fact, my own initial reaction was the same when I first tried the Windows 7 betas - that it possibly only looked like a dock on the surface, but behaved very differently from one. Yet, after testing the UI and behavior, I've concluded that we now have both an OS X dock and a Windows 7 dock.

I'm particularly interested for one primary reason - the OS X dock is one element that hasn't evolved as quickly as I've wanted in the past decade, so some healthy competition is entirely welcome.

I actually miss the document-by-document organization by the original taskbar, since switching between any two documents is no longer a single click away, as there's an extra step every time I want to jump across windows either within or between applications. By switching to the dock, Windows now suffers the same tricky issues as OS X, such as the lack of text labels without hovering (so the importance of clear distinguishable icons is greater), the handling of minimized windows, and the switching of tabs within one or multiple windows.

But I can see why this move to a dock was necessary, considering that I saw extremely heavy multitasking on a taskbar as unsustainable after a certain threshold number of open tasks. (Imagine rows and rows of tasks on a taskbar, even if it's double-decked.) It would reach the point where we no longer could reasonably sacrifice more screen real estate, or even read the truncated text of each taskbar task efficiently, especially if many of them shared the same task application icon. It was a wall they were going to hit at some point, and the rise of widescreen resolutions only postponed that bump by making allowing more tasks to fit on a default taskbar.

Nevertheless, now that the dock is going to be a larger part of all of our lives, let's take a look at the docks.

Remove From Dock

On the Windows 7 dock, removing an application from the dock is labeled, "Unpin this program from taskbar", the equivalent of "Remove from dock" on the OS X dock. It's a bit of a lengthy way to say, "remove from dock", but I can imagine how it might be easier for a Windows user new to docks, assuming that they're familiar with "unpinning" applications from the Windows XP/Vista start menu. It's also arguably more explicit, at the expense of brevity.

Rearranging & Rearranging/Removing Dock Items

Rearranging dock items is pretty straight forward - just drag and drop where you want it placed. On the OS X dock, dragging motion is possible in all directions of a Cartesian plane, which requires less mouse precision (think of an arc), prevents obscuring of items underneath before releasing the mouse button, and allows items to be removed from the dock by dragging and releasing them off the dock in a poof (literally). Currently, the Windows 7 dock restricts movement to horizontal dragging, but I'll assume that's an oversight that will be corrected in the future (I hope). As a side note, I find it interesting how Windows 7's dock uses cascading squares to visually represent how many windows are open per application, but the limit seems to be at three overlapping squares, after which it only tells us that multiple windows are open. However, it's a thoughtful approach I'd find useful for distinguishing between applications with single and multiple windows open.

Open Windows and Tabs

Both docks allow new windows to be opened from the menus, and list open windows in each application. Neither dock, however, provides a menu list of tabs for each of those open windows, despite the pervasiveness of tabbed applications. So I was thrilled when I saw that the Windows 7 dock had a "New Tab" item on the Internet Explorer 8 item menu. The problem is in which application window will the new tab call home. I expected it to create a new tab in the current active window, but it instead creates new tabs in the last created window regardless of whether it's out of focus or even minimized. It seems more intuitive to me to have new tabs created in the window in focus, the window I'm most likely working with currently. Still, developers on both platforms have the ability to add custom functions on the menus, so we'll probably see developers implement tab lists and creation options in their item menus.


Tab shortcomings aside, I also found a pleasant surprise in how windows could be closed directly from the item menu in Windows 7.

As far as minimized windows, they get placed in a separated section on the right side of the OS X dock, which doesn't work so well if you have several similar-looking document thumbnails (all of which are unlabeled until hovered over). Normally, Expose in OS X would save us, but minimized windows obviously don't appear in the Expose overlay. Windows 7 doesn't seem to have a minimized distinction at all - minimized windows appear with open windows, but that's about it. Neither dock visually distinguishes minimized versus open on the menu list of windows for an application, which leaves us wondering if some shade color coding is in order.

Lists: Showing Frequent & Showing All

The Windows 7 dock displays a list of frequently used options (for example, the controls of a Control Panel), whereas the OS X dock displays the entire list (for example, the panes of System Preferences). This one's a matter of preference. If you liked personalized menus from Windows, you might like the frequents display, otherwise you might prefer having the full list.


My favorite part about docks is seeing what developers provide on their application's menus - new file by language in Coda, history and favorites in Transmit, playback controls in iTunes, bookmarks toolbar links in Camino, and so on. I hope the shortcomings in all docks are addressed, and we'll see where docks take us in the future.

When Browser Tabs Spill

In the olden days, web browsers didn't provide us any real solution for tabs spilling off the edge of a tab bar filled with open tabbed pages. In the past few years, we saw multiple angles from the main Webkit/Gecko/Presto/Trident browsers. In the near future, these different approaches will likely merge, although you may be surprised by the results over which browser seems the closest there.

Safari 4 Beta: Menu of Visible and Hidden Tabs

Firefox 3.x/3.1-3.5 Beta: Scrolling Carousel Tab Bar + Menu of All Tabs

Chrome 1/2: Compact as Many Tabs in View As Possible (a.k.a. No Solution)

Opera 9/10 Alpha: Compact as Many Tabs in View As Possible (a.k.a. No Solution)

Internet Explorer 7: Scrolling Carousel Tab Bar + Menu of Visible and Hidden Tabs

Camino 1.x: Menu of Visible and Hidden Tabs

Surprisingly, Internet Explorer, the last of the current big browsers to implement tabs and generally seen as playing catchup with the rest, has shown the most complete system today for managing tabs in version 7, which naturally carries over to the recently released version 8. It allows both scrolling of tabs left and right, while distinguishing the visible and hidden portions of the tab bar in the tab list menu. Although it strikes me as odd that they decided to place the menu on the left, when tabs are created and spilled over on the right.

On top of that, it also offers a grid of thumbnails of the open pages, all out of the box. I'm not accounting for extensions or plugins for any of these browser comparisons because I'm concerned with what comes out of the box, which is generally what most users will use, and what you and I will use on a computer with restricted privileges, or a computer we're using as a guest.

Organizing Groups of Tabs in Windows

In the past few years, we saw browsers answer our micromanagement desires by finally giving us the option to drag tabs to rearrange their order. Some browsers took it a step further and allowed us to tear tabs off a window and onto another. Most mainstream browsers seem to have taken cues from each other and implemented this functionality more or less the same way.

Safari (3 and) 4 Beta: Draggable, Tearable Tabs with Preview

* The difference was that with Safari 4 Beta, the tabs could now only be dragged from the edges because of their new location at the top as both tabs and titlebar, contrary to Chrome.

Opera 9 (and 10 Alpha): Draggable, Tearable Tabs

* The behavior in version 10 Alpha is still the same. It remains to be seen whether the future beta and release versions will add previews.

Firefox 3.1/3.5 Beta: Draggable, Tearable Tabs with Preview

* Tabs could only be dragged within the same window in and before version 3.0.x.

Chrome 1 and 2: Draggable, Tearable Tabs with Preview

Internet Explorer 7: Draggable Tabs

Camino 1.x: Nothing

We'll see whether this will change with Camino 2.x Alpha.

Chrome and Firefox have the best approaches, as they allow tabs to be dragged or torn off from the full area of the tab. Safari 4 Beta introduced an oddball by doubling the tabs as a titlebar and draggable, tearable tabs. That meant that from 3 to 4 Beta, the draggable area shrunk to the right corner, leaving the us to awkwardly drag the window by the "titlebar" area in the tiny center of the tab, avoiding the drag area to the right and the [x] close button to the left. Firefox and Chrome provide distinct draggable areas to move the window alone, and to place it in and out of focus. Opera and Internet Explorer 7 are missing previews of tabs as they're being dragged, and IE 7 doesn't provide tab tearing. Camino 1.x offers nothing.

Conclusion

By now, most of the modern browsers (and probably many of the unmentioned browsers) have addressed the problem of what to do with tabs when heavily multitasking. To recap, there seems to be two major approaches - provide a contextual menu listing active tabs from left to the right, with grayed out items above or below for hidden items to the left or right respectively; or allow a carousel-like horizontal scrolling of the tabs in the bar to access the hidden tabs on either side. For moving tabs between windows, tearing off tabs (with previews) from one window to another is the most comprehensive form of a common approach.

What ever happens, the fact that we are in the middle of a second golden age of browsers with healthy competition means a lot of good for all of us users and developers.