Tablane, (that is ‘Tab-Lane‘, and not ‘To-Blame‘ as I first thought), Is a rehash of the Internet Explorer browser with one amazingly useful feature called lanes!

Wimps

In consideration of the WIMP “system” of graphical user interface, ever since Microsoft copied Apple copied Xerox back in the day (or should that be photocopied, heh), and more recently on Linux, as rivals KDE and Gnome refused the opportunity to not copy flaws, there exists a huge design outrage that no one seems to have noticed or have had the courage to tackle: the fact that window management is thrust on the user.

Any type of window management is bad, but what I have in mind here is when you are doing an operation which involves two windows, such as coping files from one folder to another. Firstly, both windows have to be positioned, and then resized so that they don’t overlap, and just when you can see both source and target, you click a file in the source window, and bang.. the target window disappears, as one half of it now lies over your target window. We’ve all learned alternate methods of doing this operation, (if you’re like me, it will involve Control + C) which begs the question as to why no one has asked if mickying around resizing windows cannot be bypassed to achieve the users goals?

Another related task is reading from window, while writing in the other. Can anyone do this without getting distracted with trying to maximise usage of the screen by dragging window edges and fiddling with scroll bars?

In my opinion resizable windowing is a feature that can be expunged, purged and deleted from our interfaces.., give me unresizable tabs any day of the week.., like in Firefox (and now IE7 etc.). But wait.., now give me an easier way to achieve my goal of comparing two things on one screen.

Tab-Pane?

Tablane facilitates this goal, albeit in the limited domain of the web browser. You are given the choice to create ‘lanes’ (which in the WIMP metaphorology are more like window panes, wait… that would make the browser TabPain…), so now you can open a link in either a new tab, a new pane, or a new window. The ability to compare two web pages at once is immediately and reoccuringly useful to me. I find myself reaching for Tablane once or twice a day, when comparing two sales offerings, or when writing an email about a web page.

The choice of the (traditionally) buggy, closed source, non standards compliant Internet Explorer browser (behold the Netscape smotherer and bane of every web developers’ life) as the engine on which to build Tablane makes a bit more sense when you consider that it provides quite a bit of operating system integration on Windows.., thus you could compare an Office document in one lane, with your webmail in the other lane. Tablane’s IE nature though would preclude me from using it as my default browser.

Collections

I forgot to mention that Tablane is an Irish startup, and as this is not an open source project, you have to ask: how are they going to make money off an internet browser? Another feature of the browser is a collection. Think bookmark this group of tabs in firefox. My guess is that it that they intend to sell or otherwise make money off aggregate collection data, in a similar way that, for example, FoxMarks (dodgy privacy policy) or Google (caveat emptor) wants you to use their services to manage your firefox bookmarks. Or maybe they will charge popular e-commerce sites for specialised integration.

Download Tablane, (it’s still in beta, don’t believe them), marvel at their ad-hoc approach to introducing an excellent feature, and then give me a shout if you want to work on a Firefox extension of this functionality.

I’ve created a stem and leaf plot on wikipedia of the worlds highest mountains. I did this using a small python script, and checked it against the output generated from an online stem and leaf plotter tool. I came across stem and leaf visualisations in Edward Tufte’s wonderful book Envisioning Information. Get the gist of the book, with some nice diagrams.