151093 - Move tab-set bookmarking UI to Bookmarks menu

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Camino Graveyard :: Bookmarks, enhancement)

Description

[Ian Thompson]

The UI for creating a tab set should be moved into the Bookmark menu as a
separate menu item: "Bookmark All Tabs..." or something to that effect. Right
now, the user will only stumble onto the functionality by chance; it's a
checkbox in the dialog for "Add Page [singular] To Bookmarks...". Judging by the
number of requests for tab sets (even though they're already implemented) on the
newsgroup/mailing list, the current location is not intuitive. 


The menu item should be disabled when only one page is loaded in the current
window. It should probably also be assigned the shortcut cmd-option-D
(shift-cmd-D conflicts with Mozilla).

Comment 1

[saari (gone)]

->pinkerton

Comment 2

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

bryner, is this what you were asking me about last night on irc?

i'm still not certain if this is something we really want to pollute the UI
with. it's a fairly complicated feature and requires a large understanding of
tabbed browsing, etc. i'm a little surprised hyatt did it to begin with.

Comment 3

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

simon just looooooooves bookmarks -> smfr

my previous comment stands, i'm not certain we really want to expose this too
prominently

Comment 4

[Jasper]

I think it's a good idea to ad such a menu item "Bookmark all tabs...". Most
browser users are quite familira with tabs at the moment. And people not using
tabs won't even be able to use this menu item as it will be disabled for them.
Also note that it's just a menu item (being very small) and that it's a non
destructive feature which even has a cancel button!

We either create a new sheet, as it would allow us to give a more specific
explanation to users what they will be doing. Or we have to make sure that the
"bookmark all tabs" option is selected in the current sheet. I'd go for the
fisrt example.

Comment 5

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

With the advent of modern browsers, more people are becoming aware of features
like this. Like Jasper, I agree, we should place this in the bookmarks menu.

Targetting for Future.

Comment 6

[Martin Girschick]

Cmd-option-d would be a great suggestion but is (sadly) already reserved for
system wide hide and show of the Dock.

Solving this issue with a separate dialog probably also solves my newly filed
bug #304035.

Comment 7

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Cmd-shift-D and cmd-opt-D are both out, which really sucks, because they're the only intuitive shortcuts for this IMO. (Cmd-shift-D is currently taken by Show Download Manager, which IMO could be changed if we had to.)

If we can decide on a shortcut for this, I can probably patch it over the next couple weeks, although my 'net access will be pretty sporadic starting Wednesday.

cl

Comment 8

[Ben Fowler]

Does 'Downloads' need a shortcut at all? I have never used that shortcut. 
I would have guessed that the Menu Item (under Windows) is sufficent.

Cmd-Shift-D is a good fit for 'Bookmark Tabset' Unless Cmd-Shift-D would
be better as: 

* Bookmark All Tabs in all Windows
* Bookmark These Tabs and Close This Window
* Either of the above with 'and omit already bookmarked pages'

Also the bookmark menu is defective in that even when we only want to
'Do' something with the bookmarks (such as Create a new bookmark), we 
have to wait for the menu to be created.

I would like to separate the concepts of a bookmark = the place where
I was last reading (or the current state of the browser's windows and
tabs = where I was) with the maintenance of one's knowledge base = a 
lexicon of places with good info, or = a list of contacts. The latter,
which IMHO is very necessary is partially implemented as an iTunes/iMovie
like browser for bookmarks, jammed onto an existing bookmarks UI.

Personally, I would like a mini-Google / mini-Social rating of all pages
I have visited. If I could easily 'rate' every page I have ever visited
by:

Last visited, or
Most Visted, or
keyword, or
full text index

et cetera

I wouldn't need the Bookmark menu to Show bookmarks at all. I would have
a working Bayes-type system to find again information that I had seen
before and was looking for again.

The latter is a very common use case for a browser and no browser that I
have used has significant support for it. The nearest to a work-around
is to have a low threshold for bookmarking, but whilst this plan starts
out well it doesn't scale at all - many of us have two thousand or more
bookmarks in the bookmarks file, and it is therefore a requirement on
any code that reads the bookmarks file and any UI for it that it should
handle effortlessly up to three or four thousand bookmarks and
presumably is also capable of handling five or ten times that number
(with, I guess, some slowdowns or other glitches acceptable) to give
some headroom for the really heavy users of the bookmarks system.

Worse still is that actually using this system requires one to match in
one's head the information required, to the title or URL: This is precisely
what we want the browser's bookmarks manager to do! Also, there is a
steady dizzle of 'gardening' required: Fixing up poorly chosen or missing
titles, classifying or sorting bookmarks, and removing out of date or
ones found to be less relvant or not relevant at all . If we had a choice, 
would we want to have to put bookmarks into folders?

Another defect of a 'bookmark everything' policy is that we create a
'needle in haystack' problem - the more things like the one that we want,
we bookmark, the harder it is to find that one, which by definition
not only does not scale, but scales inversely - the more work we do,
the harder it becomes to do even the things that were easy before!

Does Google put its results into folders? No, it sorts by relevance.

IMHO so should the bookmarks UI.

Two questions: If an 'Info Manager' along any of the lines I propose
came a long, would it be accepted (or even tested), and more importantly
would the existing 'way in' to the bookmarks (the knowledge base) = the
long tail at the end of the bookmarks (default order = most recent last)
bottom of the bookmarks menu (most recent last) be deprecated in its
favour?

I've a feeling that the answer to the last question is No, in which
case it should not be a surprise that no superior alternative to the
bookmark system and its UI will emerge.

I would vote in favour of putting the UI for 'Bookmark Tabset' into
the bookmark menu, and finding a shortcute for it somehow.

Comment 9

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Ben, most of your comment sounds like bug 311286; let's see if we can't keep this on-topic :)

I'm still not sure how adding this as a menu item solves anything other than the "problem" of having "only" three commands at the top of my Bookmarks menu.  We already have a nice checkbox on the "Add Page to Bookmarks…" sheet that bookmarks all tabs in the active window and which is quite easy to discover.

Comment 10

[Ben Fowler]

(In reply to comment #9)
> Ben, most of your comment sounds like bug 311286; let's see if we can't keep
> this on-topic :)

Fair call. There is a little at the top, and the last sentence is, directed
at the meat of this bug, and I thought that there was one sentence in the 
middle as well, which I was going to indicate with some asterisks, but I 
couldn't find it.

The reason for wanting a menu item is to have "Add Tabset" adjacent to 
"Add Page". This would appear to be a basic HCI requirement. The origin of
this bug was a report that users thought that Bookmark Tabset was not
implemented because there was no UI for it in the menu system. (This was true
of me until a Google search found it, I forget it and had to Google for
it again).

The reason for wanting this done 'properly' is because 'Bookmark All Tabs'
is something that one does quickly, in order to shutdown the browser
and be able to get back to where one was.

It is also the case that one might want to set up an array of tabs (for example,
a collection of pages on Wikipedia that one is contributing to) and then
deliberately bookmark such a set. However, if one messes up this operation,
or merely does it less well than intended, the main "Show Bookmarks" UI can
be used to fix this up. If one messes up closing the browser, then there
is a risk of data loss.

IMHO, there is a lot wrong with the Bookmarks - there are about 100 open bugs
in bugzilla - and it would be good to take future planned features into 
account when working on any part of it.

Is Cmd-Shift-D likely to be assigned to "Bookmark Tabset" (or any alternative),
and is help needed?

Comment 11

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

cmd-shift-d is staying as the download window key. i use it all the time.

Comment 12

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Comment 9 notwithstanding, cmd-shift-opt-d, cmd-opt-t, ?

Comment 13

[Ben Fowler]

I have looked at comment 0 (2002) and comment 4 (2004) again, and I wonder whether
the goals of comment 0 can be achieved with a UI that brings up the existing
sheet with a folder name pre-filled and the check-box ticked.

Was comment 4 asking for a sheet of distinctive appearance? Or specific
text?

Comment 14

[Ben Fowler]

(In reply to comment #12)
> Comment 9 notwithstanding, cmd-shift-opt-d, cmd-opt-t, ?

Whilst I am not sure that this would be my first choice, using keyboard
shortcuts in the T series could be useful for doing other things with 
Tabsets, such as exporting the current Tabset as an HTML document.

It could be re-read into a drawer, sidebar or smart folder in the 
"Show All Bookmarks"/about:bookmarks page, but I was actually thinking
of exporting in a literal sense, ready for e-mailing to someone else
as a a work in progress or transferring to another computer.

I am suggesting that if you don't think that bookmarking a Tabset is a variant
of bookmarking a page then you probably do think of tabsets as specific
objects which can be saved/restored/edited and used in various ways and
there may need to be a Tabset UI standing equal with the History and 
Bookmarks UI,

Comment 15

[Ben Fowler]

(In reply to comment #13)
> I wonder whether
> the goals of comment 0 can be achieved with a UI that brings up the existing
> sheet with a folder name pre-filled and the check-box ticked.

This would seem to entail modifying 
- (void)showDialogWithLocationsAndTitles:(NSArray*)inItems isFolder:(BOOL)inIsFolder onWindow:(NSWindow*)inWindow

to take an 'isTabset' selector, and since Tabsets aren't Folders, perhaps
the isFolder selector could be modified to be an enum.

Would a patch along these lines be accepted?

Hmm. Of course sending an enum as a type code to a method is
arguably a bad smell, 
http://blog.springframework.com/arjen/index.php/archives/2004/11/27/why-enums-are-bad-for-you/
so do we want to sub-class:

AddFolderDialog...
AddPageDialog...
AddTabsetDialog...

Hmm. Is that overkill 

Can I send selectors to the existing DialogController?

Title = inTitle
statusTabCheckBox = Disabled/Default Off/Default On

In the three cases, may inTitle selector would contain

"New Folder", <the current Page Tile>, "[Folder Name]"

(the last is a literal, intended to be replaced by the name for
the Tabset).

Perhaps I need the Middle Man pattern...

Would a patch be considered?

Comment 16

[Ben Fowler]

Note that there appear to be two IBActions in Camino called addBookmark: .

If I wanted to add an IBAction for the proposed Menu Item, do you want it
in the First Responder - the 'clockwork' belongs in the 
BrowserWindowDontroller - and how to you like this done. 

It might be a 'Royal pain' 
http://www.oofile.com.au/adsother/CocoaDevFAQ.html#Q15 if one makes
a mess of this/.

Comment 17

[froodian (Ian Leue)]

If we could decide on a shortcut, we could do this very nicely with alternate menu  items now that we're 10.3+.  Not sure if that'd defeat the whole purpose (make "bookmark tab set more discoverable") though...

Comment 18

[Ben Fowler]

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060627 Minefield/3.0a1

I made a patch for this over Christmas, but have had fearful difficulties building Camino for months.

Comment 19

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

So, I'm not eager to add another item to that menu, especially a "redundant" one, but Fx 1.5 does this already and Safari 3 is rumored to be doing this.  If Apple's finally ready to implement (and expose!) tab groups, we probably should, too.

We're back to the issue of the shortcut, if we have one (it seems useful enough to have a shortcut, in my opinion).  Everything d is out except cmd-shift-opt-d, which is totally evil.  

Ian and I were talking though, about appropriating Cmd-K and Cmd-Opt-K (opt being "all", and k being the last letter of bookmark) and making them be the official shortcuts (shown in the menu) while keeping the historic Cmd-D doing what it does now for compatibility (sort of like cmd-] is the official forward, but cmd-right arrow is also forward sometimes).

Final issue is sheet/without sheet; bug 159230 wants to have the option to bookmark a single page without a sheet, and presumably people would want that here, too.  (I still think prompting to rename a tab group is useful, but it's less of an issue now that by default tab groups are "[n Tabs] title of current tab").  But moving to Cmd-K would allow us to shift-modify both of them to accomodate all four options (and Cmd-D could behave exactly as it always has, no matter whether Cmd-K or Cmd-Shift-K is the version with the sheet).

Comment 20

[froodian (Ian Leue)]

The fix for this is in Bug 275170.

Comment 21

[froodian (Ian Leue)]

Fixed