[Sugar-devel] Home button in browse - toolbar images

[Bernie Innocenti]

On Tue, 2010-10-19 at 03:01 +0100, Gary Martin wrote:
> > Alternatively, the "new tab" button could become a small plus on the tab
> > bar, which could be made visible at all times. For how long would it
> > remain invisible during a normal session?
> 
> Hmmm -1 from me as that would require showing the tab strip at all
> times, even if only one tab is in use, making the default UI more
> complicated and eating back into canvas space.

But you missed my rhetoric question: "for how long would it remain
invisible during a normal session?".

All UI designers seem to abhor tabs. They call them complicated and
unnecessary, but all users love them, including UI designers themselves!

Ok, but our users are children. Well, have you actually seen a child use
Firefox? Children aren't stupid, they use tabs for browsing just like
adults. Actually even *more* than adults, 'cause they get bored of
waiting for pages to load much sooner. In the real world, after the
first few minutes there will be so many tabs open that they won't fit
horizontally.

Tabbed browsing is the #1 reason why Nepal and other deployments
replaced Browse with the Firefox activity.


> 1) Just because in your builds you decided to disable the
> screen hot corners from triggering the frame doesn't mean
> that it is now free space up for grabs ;)

Ouch... Forgot about that. (still, we have way too much space on the
sides. It could fit an entire button.


> 2) Corners are used by the notification system. 

Ok, but those last only a few seconds.


> 3) Using that space for more buttons does not solve
> the feature creep, and spiral towards complexity.  

If we were to remove the least useful feature, I'd pick the home
button :-)

Even if we don't add any button, we could use the extra space just to
enlarge the URL bar...

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/