Comments on: Do you hate splitpane views?

By: techno_adi

techno_adi — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 13:47:36 +0000

I agre,
The new Yahoo mail sucks just because in a 1Gbps connection, the scrolling hangs and its all cluttered up on the screen.
I am a great fan of YUI and specially Jacks Page http://www.jackslocum.com/blog/.
Making use of the good side of this library myself, I really feel sorry for the “New Yahoo Mail beta” and Ajax that it provides.
BTW, My yahoo account is the free one and those ads refresh so frequently that I feel GMAIL is much better on this part.
Yahoo! people, if you happen to read this, please do something, I really want to see YUI Powers in your site.

By: Andi K

Andi K — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 11:23:41 +0000

What’s this about? Everybody decides her/hisself if he/she is going to use splitpanes – if everybody hates them, nobody will use your programm. This is the simple Darwin principle. I often use splitpanes without thinking about it. Example: Firebird, and it’s good. I don’t use Dojo Toolkit splitpanes, cause they don’t work in every browser (look dodjo in opera) and often the UI reacts in a very slow way to my mouse movements.

By: drx

drx — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 11:23:14 +0000

I think email is bad in general, there is only spam arriving all the time.

By: Animal

Animal — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 10:05:09 +0000

Fuxache!

wioota is right. This whole thread is a waste of bandwidth.

By: Joeri

Joeri — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 09:33:41 +0000

The default discoverable behavior of an application, knowable without any instruction to the user, should be as close to optimal as possible. If you can only get close to optimal behavior by learning keyboard shortcuts, the design is wrong.

By: Jesse Kuhnert

Jesse Kuhnert — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 03:17:42 +0000

I dunno …..How about “d” for ajaxian don’t they make that the default view if it’s so simple? =p

By: Jared

Jared — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 02:59:21 +0000

you know you could just press the “v” key on the keyboard to turn the reading pane off, and amazingly press the “v” key again to turn it back on. what will they think of next… “r” for reply!

By: Andy

Andy — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 00:41:37 +0000

Sorry to say this but when reading this one thing comes to mind:
Fat americans that are too comfortable to do anything by themselves. I mean, c’mon. Would it kill you to drag the window frame ? Or would the effort lead to too much exhaustion and thereof lead to a swift death?

Seriously, get a grip.

By: wioota

wioota — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 23:06:49 +0000

I’d take this a step further and state objection to windowing in general. I think its a lazy paradigm which results in too much redundant information on screen at any one time. Incremental sizing thru click-and-drag is a waste of time – instead modal switching between ‘Show me enough of my email so I can read it comfortably’ and ‘Show me enough of my email headers so I can intelligently select what I want to read’ is preferable to me. Modern work in HCI is showing that alternatives exist and I certainly welcome those who challenge the dominant paradigms in search of more humanized interfaces.

By: Tommy M.

Tommy M. — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 21:02:11 +0000

The real issue, I think, is what you need to see. Split-pane isn’t *always* bad, as Doug noted, but in some cases it’s unnecessary; and unnecessary UI elements are, well, bad.
* “I donâ€™t care about seeing any one particular email at that point.”
* “I donâ€™t care about the emails anymore at that point, I just want to read the email Iâ€™ve selected.”

Or at least that’s how I see it, and that seems to be the main complaint I pick up out of reading the post. If you don’t need to see three different things at once, why do you need three different windows?

By: Jesse Kuhnert

Jesse Kuhnert — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 20:41:50 +0000

Yeah, Tom is right. Though I think the technical viewing area was advertised as being 30″ not 24″.

It’s probably just a habit I have of a peferred window size, I think if I adjusted it to be any larger it would feel to overwhelming.

By: Doug karr

Doug karr — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 20:38:54 +0000

Sizing, scrolling, and Claustrophobia have nothing to do with the application and everything to do with your monitor size and resolution. Splitpane is fantastic when doing code reviews, image comparisons, spreadsheet comparisons, folder comparisons, etc.

Get a bigger monitor or an additional monitor.

By: Tom Trenka

Tom Trenka — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 20:32:20 +0000

Andy and Markku–my understanding is that he is using a brandy spankingly new Dell 24″ widescreen monitor with the res cranked up as high as it can go. “Adjusting the resolution” is not the issue here, nor is it the issue for Jesse.

By: Andy

Andy — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 19:58:31 +0000

This guy needs to be introduced to the resolution settings.
Seriously, I don’t see what he’s complaining about

By: Dan

Dan — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 19:22:27 +0000

Val is right, Eclipse is good. Granted, I hate two Apple Cinema HD 30″ monitors and run virtue desktop…

By: Val

Val — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 19:01:26 +0000

I agree with some of the annoyances Jesse pointed out, but I find split-pane views pretty usable and efficient in spite of those things. There is a UI that does a good job at addressing them, tho: Eclipse, the Java IDE. Eclipse supports combo views that act like the split panes in Outlook — and, as mentioned, often the view you need is inconveniently sized.

But in Eclipse, each view can be maximized — it instantly takes over the whloe workspace. Restoring it instantly brings back the multi-pane layout. This lets me easily toggle between an overview, monitoring many interconnected views, and a single view in which I can concentrate only on the items at hand.

Tho Eclipse implements in Java, the idea shouldn’t be too hard to do in HTML and a bit of JavaScript…

By: Matt Smith

Matt Smith — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:49:30 +0000

I think it’s an individual thing. Me, i like to see everything on screen, together. I don’t mind scrollbars, I rarely use them because I have a mouse wheel. I have two 19″ displays and I like having everything sectioned off. Even when using photoshop and illustrator I have them positioned so they work next to each other with all the palettes next to their windows. and when I’m coding I have four browsers in four quarters of one monitor and my editor and file windows laid out on the other monitor, it’s so much easier to turn your head than use alt-tab or whatever key combo the applications use. but thats me

By: Tobias

Tobias — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:29:31 +0000

I like Outlook 2003’s right-left split view better than the old top-bottom. But I like the GMail way even more, and my current favorite is actually the Google Reader list view, where I have all the posts in a long list with one of them expanded to read. In this way I can consentrate fully on the one I am reading and still scroll up and down to view the rest.

By: Tuncay Baskan

Tuncay Baskan — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:16:30 +0000

I can’t agree with you more!

Google designed their user interface with real good innovation. On the other hand Yahoo! tried to catch-up but they copied the boring Outlook interface.

By: Richard Kimber

Richard Kimber — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:13:37 +0000

Incidently, I thought the X in AJAX stood for XMLHTTPRequest.