[Usability] Tab Glow States

[Allan Caeg <allancaeg ubuntu com>]

Hello,

There's a discussion on Mozilla's Usability team regarding how Firefox app tab glow states are going to be rendered. They'll have 2 kinds of notifications: synchronous and asynchronous. Alex Faaborg said
> -Asynchronous notifications: you want to look directly at the app tab to see
> if it contains new information (web feeds, twitter).  You ping it.
> -Synchronous notifications: the app tab actually needs to get your attention
> (im chat incoming, calendar event about to occur).  it pings you.
>
> ...
>
> The more noticeable glow state should be used to draw the user's attention
> to the existence of tab modal dialog boxes (like how google calendar popups
> up a _javascript_ alert for appointments).
>
> In the future we can add a notification API that exposes invoking both types
> of glow states to Web apps, along with a recommendation of when to use
> each.  For instance:
>
> new gmail message: very light style change (assynchronous)
> new gchat message: full tab glow (synchronous)

Here are mockups of how they could appear: http://www.stephenhorlander.com/images/tab-indicators/pulsing-tab.png , http://www.stephenhorlander.com/images/tab-indicators/pulsing-app-tab.png , http://www.stephenhorlander.com/images/tab-indicators/textured-tab.png

I'm not aware of any GTK+ app that has tab glow states due to notifications. Whether they already exist or not, what do you think should be the convention for tab glow states? Let's come up with something that we can put on the UI Pattern Library so Firefox can follow our convention for this and other GTK+ apps can also take advantage of it.

-- 
Regards,
Allan
http://www.google.com/profiles/allancaeg#about
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