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by Darkelve on Thursday 10/May/2007, @12:20

Are vertical tabs on the list too?

Don't know if these are infringing, but they DO annoy me to no end!

And the worst of it is that they show up in all of my favorite applications such as Amarok (left pane) or Konqueror (left 'sidebar') and there is no way to have a horizontal layout!

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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whomever posted them.
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To clear something up:
by Darkelve on Thursday 10/May/2007, @12:21

By 'vertical tabs' I'm referring to these -usually narrow- tabs with vertical text in them.

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Re: To clear something up:
by zonk on Thursday 10/May/2007, @12:40

There are people (like me) that like them very much, and wish that they were used in more places! Though given your opinion, I think in most places there should be an option to switch to other layout...

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Re: To clear something up:
by anonymous on Thursday 10/May/2007, @22:29

Sophie book uses vertical text tabs intensively -> see attached screenshot

sophie_screenshot.png
48KB (50128 bytes)

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Re: To clear something up:
by Moltonel on Friday 11/May/2007, @03:54

Obviously some people (like me) have no trouble reading vertical text (or struggle once and thereafter simply remember the position or the icon of the tab) and really appreciate the improved layout it allows.

Other people (I've seen that complain many times) find it hard to read however, so there should be an alternative solution for them. An option to use horizontal tabs ? A horizontal tooltip ? Write horizontal letters, one above the other ? Text at a 45 degree angle ? Apple-dock-style zooming icons, showing the horizontal text only when zoomed ?

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Re: To clear something up:
by kill an app on Thursday 10/May/2007, @13:15

I think this is a very good initiative!

I agree about the tabs, and the worst thing about them is that (afaik) you can't use the keyboard to navigate between side tabs.

This is also the reason I don't use Amarok, you need five clicks with the mouse just to show your collection in the playlist.

I hope those accessibility issues will also be solved.

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Re: To clear something up:
by Horizontal tab on Friday 11/May/2007, @00:52

vertical tab is a nightmare to read (like in Amarok).

Look at Windows Media Player (see attach), and you will see that horizontal tab makes things crystal clear.

wmp.jpg
6KB (6440 bytes)

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Re: To clear something up:
by Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen on Friday 11/May/2007, @02:13

Well, it's not really the idea in something like Amarok that you should know what it says (that is simply a hint for the first and second time user to spark the memory) - the position of the tabs is what is important. As their relative position on the program's interface is always the same, your muscle memory will remember for you what the tabs say.

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Re: To clear something up:
by Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen on Friday 11/May/2007, @02:11

There's a pretty simple reason you need that many clicks with the mouse to make Amarok work like iTunes and XMMS (collection-is-playlist). This is NOT how you are supposed to be using Amarok, so obviously it's not easy :) That is how you're supposed to use JuK, so well... you'll find that more to your liking i suspect.

We have spent a HUGE amount of time researching the sidebar tab system, active research with the people in #amarok on freenode back around the 1.2 release cycle. We tried just about every option available to us, and the current solution (text shown, tabs taking up an equal amount of height of the sidebar, the colour animation designed to show what will happen if you click somewhere and so on) is the best thing we could come up with.

To reply to your comment on keyboard navigation - this is not in fact true in all apps. In some it is, sure (report bug on those), but taking your own example of Amarok again you can use the same shortcuts as you would in Kontact (that is, [ctrl] plus number of tab in top-down order) to switch between the browsers.

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