Natalia Fisher

initial thoughts about firefox panorama

Update: Some more thoughts on the most recent nightly build here.

Panorama is a new feature that you can check out in the Firefox 4 Beta (warning: fairly buggy). In short, it is a way of visualizing and managing a number of open tabs within a single browser window. It’s kind of like an interactive version of Exposé in OS X - you get a nice overview of all your open tabs at once, but you can also move them around to form groups, and the thumbnails will always appear in the same place that you left them. Personally, I can imagine that it would eliminate my need to have so many different browser windows open, which is my current method of dealing with an overcrowded tab bar.

My off-the-cuff thoughts:

• In the Panorama view, there should be a more obvious indication of the current/last tab that the user has open. It’s very frustrating to zoom out to the Panorama and realize that you have already forgotten what you were just looking at seconds ago. Right now the current tab group and tab are being indicated through drop shadows which are so subtle that they are easy to miss. More obvious highlighting, or perhaps some kind of transparency to reveal the open tab behind the Panorama (similar to Exposé) would be nice.

• App tabs cause inconsistent behavior. An app tab is another new feature of Firefox, that is similar to the “Pin tab” functionality of Chrome. When you make a tab into an App tab, it slides all the way over to the left of the tab bar, and only the favicon is displayed so that it takes up less room. App tabs are persistent across every Tab group. Unfortunately, this special status is not clear in the Panorama view: the thumbnail of the App tab continues to show up in the Tab group that it was originally a part of before being converted from a normal tab.

Which tab did I have open last? It’s hard to tell.

As App tabs, Gmail & Facebook appear when I open the School Stuff group, even though they are part of the News and Current Stuff group.

• It would be nice to have a way of creating groups and opening tabs without leaving the Panorama view, rather than having to open a new tab in an existing Tab group first. I can imagine at the beginning of the day wanting to set up a number of different groups which I will return to later, want to necessarily wanting to first view the full zoomed-in view of each new tab.

• I love that I can reduce distractions by hiding away open tabs that I don’t need at the moment. However, I’m concerned that I will continue my tendency to forget that I already have a site open in a different tab, and end up creating duplicate tabs and tab groups. I’m not sure the best way to address this problem - a part of me would like to be reminded when I go to open a site in a new tab in one tab group, that is already open in an existing group. But that could easily get obtrusive…

• I’d like to be able to switch between Tab groups without opening up the Panorama view, maybe through keyboard shortcuts or a text dropdown menu. This seems so obvious that it might already be possible to do it and I just haven’t figured it out yet.

• Finally, I’m not sure why this is happening, but Windows 7 Aero Peek window preview displays each tab individually, rather than just indicating one open Firefox window. As I moused-over each thumbnail, suddenly (non-App) tabs from my two different tab groups start all appearing in the same tab bar!
  
  

aesthetics

My design aesthetic has always been minimalistic, partly out of personal taste and partly because I think for a long time I just didn’t get the point of visually rich graphic design. It all seemed very mushy and subjective. In college, I enjoyed reading Tufte because everything he said about eliminating chartjunk and unnecessary ornamentation seemed to validate my existing design practices. I was shocked last year when one of my professors here introduced the idea of emotional design, and pointed out that not everyone agreed with Tufte-ian aesthetic.

Ever since then, my appreciation for visually appealing design has steadily increased. So I was especially interested to read Useful Junk? The Effects of Visual Embellishment on Comprehension and Memorability of Charts a few weeks ago my info vis class, which suggests that thoughtful visual embellishment in charts can aid information recall without hampering comprehension. Although the paper leaves a lot of open questions, it is refreshing to see HCI academics recognize the importance of emotional design, even when they can’t articulate exactly what makes a particular design so effective. (My favorite part: when the authors admit that part of the reason that their own graphs for the paper are plain is because of “lack of artistic ability.” Honesty for the win!)

On a related note, I enjoyed Stacked Graphs - Geometry & Aesthetics, which is the first paper that we have read that is unapologetically how to make an infographic look as cool as possible.

ode to tiled windows

Aero Snap is by far my favorite part of Windows 7.

You can drag any window to either the left or right side of the screen, and it will automatically tile to take up exactly half of the screen. This is wonderful for doing any kind of work that involves constantly switching your attention between information found on two different windows. It’s not as good as having multiple monitors, but it still makes it a lot easier to “multitask” with a laptop screen. After awhile, you start to forgetting why you would ever want the ability to randomly place windows anywhere on the screen without any constraints. It feels much more efficient to not waste any screen real estate on distracting partially overlapped windows.

Before I got Windows 7, my primary home computer operating system was Ubuntu. A similar feature is available through the Maximumize plugin for Compiz. I had it set up to be activated via a keyboard shortcut, which is not as fun as just dragging the window to the edge of the screen. But other than that, it actually worked better than Aero Snap because it tiled the active window to take up all of the available space not taken up by existing open windows, rather than always tiling to the same 50% width by default.

I use a Mac for work, and I missed my perfectly-tiled windows. Luckily, a couple of weeks ago I came across an Aero Snap clone for OS X called Cinch, which works beautifully.

tunnel-vision email

Sparrow is “a new email client for OS X, which takes a fresh approach to displaying and managing email.”

Before I had chance to find out that it is a Tweetie-inspired email application, I thought that might be my new dream email client (rough mockups forthcoming):

• No “inbox,” at least in the sense of having one privileged folder that is always displayed at start up
• You can only view one label/folder/tag at a time.
• No persistent display of the number of unread messages in your other folders. You have to manually request this information.
• When you reply to an email, the original email shows up side-by-side next to your new message window, so you don’t have to scroll back and forth to switch between composing and re-reading the email. The list of other messages in that folder disappears until you are done with the message.

Basically, I want a email client that forces me to focus on things one at a time, just like a mobile phone email app, but that takes advantage of the extra screen real estate I have on my laptop. I’m curious about whether anyone else would find something like this useful.