Thread: Tab Titles
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Old 09-23-2007, 09:38 AM
bkonia bkonia is online now
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Join Date: 11-23-2004
Posts: 98
Re: Re: Tab Titles

Quote:
Originally posted by janrif
Why not assign your todo list a favorite icon so it's easy to access?
Jan,

I appreciate the thought, but it makes more sense for the way I work, to have a tab permanently designated for my To Do list.

I think of tabs as "active" projects. When I'm looking at my UR screen, I like to be able to quickly flip around between the different items I'm working on using tabs. Having the To Do list in a tab keeps it in the forefront of my mind, so I actually work on the items in the list. Having it setup as a favorite would mean that I would have to remember to click on the favorite icon. The same is true of various other items that I use tabs for. Bottom line is anything I'm actively working on, I want to have open in a tab.

Even if I used your approach, it wouldn't solve the problem. After I click on the favorite, then I would have my To Do list open in a tab. Great. Now what? As soon as I click on one of the items in the list, the tab title changes to that item. Now the phone rings and it's someone asking me about some other project. I open a new tab and navigate to the information I need for that person. By the time I finish with the call, I forgot what I was originally working on, so I want to go back to my To Do list, but I can't find it because the tab title is no longer "To Do". Rather than clicking around on all my open tabs to try to find the list, I click on the favorite icon again. This opens my To Do list, but now I have two copies of the list open in two different tabs. I've tried this approach before and found that after a few hours, I would often have three or four different tabs all open for the same item. It turns into a big mess.

I find myself constantly torn between using UR and using PersonalBrain as my primary information manager. As I mentioned in another post, I'm currently leaning toward UR because of the fact that it allows for user-defined attributes/forms and because of the way it stores all information in a single database. However, I find PersonalBrain's user interface to be far more elegant and intuitive. For example, PersonalBrain allows you to create "Pins" at the top of the screen. A pin is like a tab, except that it's permanent. If you create a "To Do" pin, the title of that pin is always "To Do". You could KIND OF simulate this in UR by only using a single-tab and using favorites INSTEAD of tabs. However, favorites can only appear on the toolbar as icons. If you want to see the title of the favorite, you have to go to the favorites menu. Another problem is that this would create more confusion, because you would probably open additional tabs for other reasons, and then you would end up with another tab mess. UR allows you to use two different approaches to switch views (tabs, favorites) but neither one is well-implemented. I would much prefer to have a single method that's consistent and intuitive. The existing methods are too confusing, because you constantly have to think about which tab you're currently on and what will happen to that tab if you click on a favorite. Argh! The more I think about this, the more it makes me want to go back to PB!
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