DKF: We need a new type of widget: a tabbed notebook widget.

This needs to be in the core and (at least on some platforms) implemented in C so that it gets the right platform-specific look. In particular, the WinXP tab look is very different to the Win2k look. See also examples on the Mac OS X page.

Action Items:

• identify existing candidate widgets to include
• determine desired API for widget

It'd be very nice if we could configure what to do when the number of tabs gets large. I see three possible behaviours:

• make the tabbed notebook wider! (Doesn't scale, but having large numbers of tabs sucks as a UI scheme anyway IMHO)
• stack the tabs on top of each other (many Win properties dialogs do this)
• add buttons to scroll the tabs (BWidgets does this)
• add a drop-down menu structure containing the missing items (IE does this on its toolbar)

Inevitably, this spurred a discussion about (yech) Stacked Tabs.

Posted at Aug 18/2003 11:34 AM:
Jack D: Features I would like to see..

1. As already mentioned "scrollable" or "stackable" tabs.

2. A "per tab" font description. (eg/ Allow flashing of a tab to alert the user)

3. Allow tabs on top,left,bottom or right of the respective notebook. Currently only the top exists.

4. (lower priority) Allow the use of multiple tabs on any side of the widget concurrently. Consider the following example:

TOP TABS Flowers Cars Marbles

LEFT TABS Red Yellow Blue

There would be NINE pages associated with these tabs (i.e. 3x3).. you should get the idea.

Posted at Aug 18/2003 05:09 PM:
DKF: The only decent left/right tabs that I've seen also had rotated text. I'd rather have a technique like OSX uses for its bottom icon bar when it gets full (mouse-over to magnify things that are clickable) though that is thirsty in compute-power...

Posted at Aug 18/2003 05:10 PM:
DKF: Oh, and tabs should support all the kinds of display options that label widgets do of course. And if there are underlines, you should be able to use hotkeys to select the tab.

Posted at Feb 26/2004 02:42 AM:
DKF: The tile project is addressing this widget as a side-line (mostly because it should be styled specially.)