Langsung ke konten utama

Tab-Modality and You

Years ago, I remember watching a webcast of the introduction of the Aqua user interface when Mac OS X Public Beta was first demoed. The part I distinctly remember was realizing the brilliance of sheets. Like many great innovations, they were simple in retrospect and solved a problem you didn't realize you had: the modality problem — the fact that dialog boxes blocked interacting with the whole application even though only one window needed the information that you, as the user, had to provide. I watched in wonder as a save dialog blocked only the one window that needed saving, leaving all the other windows free. Finally, a solution to limit the modality.

Because modality sucks.

Back in 2000, sheets worked well because the smallest unit of user interaction with an application was a window. Soon after, though, things started to change. Web browsers in particular were among the first to start using tabs to put more than one document in a window.
This caused a snag. A web page can require modal interaction from the user: picking a file, or supplying a username and password. Yet we don't want to prevent the user from switching to a different tab and continuing to interact with other websites. If the finest-grained modality control we have is per-window, how can we achieve that outcome?

Komentar

POPULAR

Kerajaan Jeumpa, Kerajaan Islam Pertama Nusantara

Teori tentang kerajaan Islam pertama di Nusantara sampai saat ini masih banyak diperdebatkan oleh para peneliti, baik cendekiawan Muslim maupun non Muslim. Umumnya perbedaan pendapat tentang teori ini didasarkan pada teori awal mula masuknya Islam ke Nusantara. Mengenai teori Islamisasi di Nusantara, para ahli sejarah terbagi menjadi 3 kelompok besar, yaitu pendukung (i) Teori Gujarat (ii) Teori Parsia dan (iii) Teori Mekah (Arab). Bukan maksud tulisan ini untuk membahas teori-teori tersebut secara mendetil, namun dari penelitian yang penulis lakukan, maka dapat disimpulkan bahwa Teori Mekkah (Arab) lebih mendekati kebenaran dengan fakta-fakta yang dikemukakan. Teori Mekkah (Arab) hakikatnya adalah koreksi terhadap teori Gujarat dan bantahan terhadap teori Persia. Di antara para ahli yang menganut teori ini adalah T.W. Arnold, Crawfurd, Keijzer, Niemann, De Holander, SMN. Al-Attas, A. Hasymi, dan Hamka. i Arnold menyatakan para pedagang Arab menyebarkan Islam ketika mereka mendo...

MyWare: Personalized Service or Invasion of Privacy?

There's a fine line between what is considered a knowledge database and an invasion of privacy, and that line is likely to be determined by marketing. This week we wrote an article about Please Rob Me - a service that identifies Foursquare and Gowalla check-ins on Twitter and lets others know that a person is not home. While location-based services are often touted for their social and recommendation-based benefits, the realization that they can be used negatively have many questioning the responsibility of those groups that collect the data. In mid January Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stated that the age of privacy had come to an end and we responded that evolving preferences were not a valid justification of the elimination of privacy preferences . Nevertheless, between cookie tracking and browser identifiers like those shown in the EFF's Panopticlick and the fact that it only takes your zip code, gender and birthdate to identify you, it's hard to ensure to...

Johnny Depp Meninggal Hanya Hoax

Aktor Johnny Depp jadi trending topic di situs jejaring sosial, Twitter. Penyebabnya karena Depp disebut-sebut telah meninggal dunia. Benarkah? Ternyata tidak. Bahan perbincangan para pengguna Twitter didasarkan dari screenshot situs berita CNN yang disebutkan dimuat tahun 2004 silam. Screenshot berita itu pun sebenarnya telah dinyatakan sebagai kesalahan teknis oleh CNN. CNN ketika itu mengaku telah lalai dalam memuat nama korban kecelakaan lalu lintas menjadi Johnny Depp. Padahal yang menjadi korban saat itu bukan aktor top Johnny Depp. Sejumlah situs berita asing yang selama ini dikenal memiliki keakuratan dan kecepatan berita pun tidak memuat mengenai meninggalnya Depp. Situs BBC, Reuters, Contact Music, Female First, Daily Mail, The Sun hingga CNN tidak melansir berita meninggalnya pemain film 'Donnie Brasco' tersebut pada Minggu (24/1/2010).