Pinned tabs and Split-Screen

Since widescreen format in monitors gets more and more common, how about a twist to the classic tabbed windows UI?

Imagine being able to pin a tab and have it move to a side-view area in the same window. That are would keep the pinned tabs separated from the rest using a splitter / split-view UI. The pinned pages area could also be configurable by user to be at left or right or even at top or bottom of the window. It could maybe even be dragable to dock to the wished for side of the window or to make the pinned pages area float as a separate window (that one can even move to another display if they have multiple monitors attached) if we wish to have maximum flexibility.

That way for example in a web browser that uses tabbed navigation, when you would click on a link that would open in a new tab (as requested by the respective anchor tag in the HTML page, or as configured in browser settings for all links that don’t specify a target, or as overridden by the user using SHIFT+click or right click and “Open in a new tab” action), if the page you were at was pinned, the new tab would open at the non-pinned tabs area on the side and you would keep having both the page you were reading visible and the new page visible at the same time to check it out.

Such a design would be very handy when you want to checkout a news stream like that in Twitter, Facebook etc. without opening and closing or navigation between tabs all the time.

So how about some browser maker or plugin author to go for it? Feel free to give just the due credit for the idea if nobody else has come up with this before.

Dissemination vs Impact

A nice quote from ClipFlair project’s (http://clipflair.net) internal mailing list (the formatting is mine for your convenience):

…difference between Dissemination and Impact:

Impact is the measure of dissemintation.

For example:

- Organising a conference is dissemintation. 
- Number of people attending the conference is impact.

- Dissemination is how many e-mails you send. 
- Impact is how many replies you receive.

Κοινόχρηστο Ημερολόγιο (Group Calendar) με Microsoft Outlook ή Hotmail

1) Δημιουργείς ένα Windows Live Group:

http://explore.live.com/windows-live-groups-help-center

Επιλέγοντας να εγκρίνεις ποιοι γράφονται (να μην μπαίνουν στο group αυτόματα) αν έχει τέτοια επιλογή.  Μπορείς μετά να στείλεις προσκλήσεις εγγραφής στο group μέσω e-mail.

Στη συνέχεια φτιάχνουν Windows Live ID όσοι είναι να συμμετέχουν στο group για να βλέπουν το group calendar. Μπορούν να χρησιμοποιήσουν μια διεύθυνση @hotmail.com, @hotmail.gr κλπ. που παρέχει το Windows Live Hotmail δωρεάν ή το δικό τους e-mail συνδέοντας το με Windows Live ID στο http://www.passport.net (αν δεν έχουν ή δε θέλουν Hotmail αλλά μόνο Windows Live ID για να εισέρχονται σε υπηρεσίες της Microsoft όπως τα Windows Live Groups).

Έπειτα εγγράφονται στο group με το Windows Live ID τους

2) Όσοι έχουν hotmail μπορούν να το βλέπουν εναλλακτικά στο web στο ημερολόγιο του hotmail όπου δείχνει και τα ημερολόγια των group όπου είσαι εγγεγραμμένος.

3) Για όσους έχουν πρόσφατο Outlook (2007 και άνω), μπορούν να βλέπουν τοπικά το κοινόχρηστο ημερολόγιο εγκαθιστώντας το Outlook Social Connector

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=7985

Αφού εγκατασταθεί το ρυθμίζεις με το e-mail που χρησιμοποίησες για να εγγραφείς στο Windows Live Group και στην περιοχή Calendar του Outlook έχει δυνατότητα να επιλέξεις να βλέπεις και το κοινόχρηστο Calendar (ή μόνο αυτό).

 

Αν πάλι διαθέτεις Windows Exchange Server μπορείς να χρησιμοποιήσεις αυτόν:

http://www.outlookipedia.com/outlook/group-calendar.aspx

ή κάποιες άλλες λύσεις τρίτων (εμπορικές)

http://www.outlookipedia.com/outlook/share-calendar.aspx#Group_Calendar_Solutions_for_Outlook

 

Τέλος, το παρακάτω δείχνει έναν τρόπο να κάνεις Group/Team Calendars χωρίς Exchange (π.χ. με κάποιο δικό σου web server):

http://www.commodore.ca/windows/shared_calendar/share_outlook_calendar.htm

Internet Explorer 9 and Windows 7 taskbar previews, a broken story

Hello Microsoft, can you count? In the image above you can see the Windows 7 taskbar showing THREE (merged) icons/instances of Internet Explorer, although I only have ONE windows open (they seem to use multiple processes internally when you have many tabs, but why should the user care?). More importantly, in the popup shown when left-clicking the pinned Internet Explorer button, you can count 18 entries for open tabs, however in the Internet Explorer window there are many-many more open tabs.

This occurs both in Classic Windows theme and in Aero theme (using Windows 7 Ultimate – a courtesy of Microsoft to active testers of Windows 7 beta) and shows both when you see a list of titles (for many tabs) and when you’d see previews (shown when that bug makes it “THINK” you have few tabs – you might have lots more of course as shown above)

This brings to the surface the bad practice of some Microsoft teams on Microsoft Connect (former Product Feedback Center). They tend to close bug submissions very easily without checking who I the submitter (e.g. a current or former Microsoft MVP like me) and what is their past record of bug submission resolutions in all Microsoft products over the years.

I had submitted this issue in the past (sadly I currently can’t Connect to Microsoft Connect to locate it), only to see it soon closed as non reproducible without much effort to think why it might be happening (update: since I can’t find that feedback now that I made it to connect again – probably was together with some other tab-related feedback – I submitted it separately at https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/details/725397/ie9-bad-behaviour-with-multiple-tabs). For example, I believe IE chokes upon a frozen tab – e.g. one with some heavy JavaScript or Flash – and stops polling the other tabs for their title/preview etc., showing only some few as a result. Also it seems that counting IE processes as separate apps and merging them as three IE9 icons (when you only have one window with many tabs open) might play a role (might it be showing tab previews from only one of the IE9 processes?). Have they checked their source code if it is robust enough against such a scenario? Why do they feel they need to reproduce every bad software behavior reported first, instead of proactively act to be shielded against similar software behaviors?

Especially the many open tabs scenario that really makes IE9 crawl to its knees both in performance and usability, which is really sad given the effort Microsoft has spent on it. Not to speak of the many-many favorites (gathered over several years or from many synced machines – e.g via Windows Live Mesh) scenario and the very poorly designed, folder-based Favorites dialog which takes a long-long time to open up and has a miserable scrolling UI with no embedded Search filter.

Speaking of multiple tabs, in Mozilla Firefox you can set an option to remember tabs that were open at last application run so that you can shut down your PC and continue later. With IE9 only if it crashes it suggests to reopen previous tabs at next run, so unless you use the Add Current Tabs to Favorites (Folder) option of the very-very slow (if you have many favs like me) IE9 Favorites tab, you are forced to keep IE9 and your PC running if you want to checkout those multiple tabs you’ve opened, but don’t have the time to do it all in one go.

Can’t connect to Microsoft Connect

Ahem, Microsoft Connect says I can’t Connect (sign-in) to it for the moment. The Microsoft bug reporting site probably came upon some bug itself?

#LOL