Sean Egan's Blog

Reducing Tab Size

In my previous post, where I discussed some of the new UI changes we're experimenting with in Pidgin, I included a screenshot that differs in a few ways from what became 2.1.0. In that screenshot, the tabs are nothing more than text lables, and the #pidgin window in the background has no tab at all.

I claim that the sole purpose tabs have is to organize and allow quick access to multiple conversations. The most important means to this end is to show as many conversations as possible. That status icon, while useful, takes a lot of space: space that could be better used to show more tabs. Tabs are not an appropriate place for a status icon.

Of course, as I've learned many times developing Pidgin, you cannot take away information from someone easily. Regardless of how inappropriate the context might be, someone has grown to depend on that information being there. Because of the feedback we got, we put status icons back for 2.1.0.

For 2.1.1, we're experimenting with removing status icons, but replacing them with text formatting. We're hoping the benefit of more efficient use of space outweighs the cost of a slight new learning curve. And, so far, almost everyone who's seen them has been able to correctly identify what they mean. So far, people seem to agree.

In this screenshot, SmarterChild is online, Mark is away, and John is offline.

You'll also notice that the Sean Egan conversation window has no tabs. After all, if the purpose of tabs is to organize your conversations, you don't need one if there's only one conversation to organize. When we tried this before 2.1.0, the feedback I got was that the slight jitter caused in the conversation when a second conversation was added, creating tabs, was too annoying. In particular, it had a strong tendency to mess up the scrolling.

2.1.0 addded some code to ensure that if the conversation is scrolled to the bottom, it will stay there. Because of that, and the fact that the tabs are smaller, we're trying it again to see if it works any better. This won't happen if you use left tabs or right tabs, as those tabs cause a more obvious jump.

Lastly, you may notice that the close buttons are smaller. The old close buttons were buttons that contained menu-sized icons. They certainly weren't huge, but when you're optimizing for space, every pixel counts. For 2.1.0, I've changed them to actual text multiplication signs. (U+2715 MULTIPLICATION X) which guarantees they're small, sleek, and look good regardless of your theme's font size or color. Of course, you can still turn the close buttons off entirely, if you prefer to close conversations from the menu, keyboard shortcuts, or middle clicking the tabs.

These changes do make a very significant difference (on my machine, at least)! For comparision, here's a shot of Gaim 2.0.0beta3.1 (the only older build I had installed) taken at the same sizes as the conversations above. Where, Gaim 2.0.0beta3.1 could only fit one conversation at its minimum size, the current development code for Pidgin 2.1.1 can hold four (although only three are shown above).

It's too early to say if these changes will make it as-is into 2.1.1, but it seems likely that some of them will. As always, feedback is always welcome.