Mozilla Tab Candy: Notes Workspace revisited - again!

So, the latest cool Mozilla/Firefox extension is called Tab Candy. Tab Candy addresses the problem of run-away tab inflation in Mozilla. The idea is that you can allocate tabs to ad-hoc arbitrary groupings and view them as tiles in a single flat pane. I'd strongly recommend having a look at the Vimeo presentation on the site (6m40s).

The big pluses of Tab Candy include the following:

• Keeps tabs manageable (instead of having 35 different tabs from a day of browsing you might have 5 or 6 "groups" of tabs according to topics).
• Group related tabs by topic.
• Makes use of Spatial memory - e.g. you always find your Comms tabs (say Gmail, Twitter, Facebook) in a consistent location (e.g. top-left).
• Stackable tabs within a grouping.

Tab Candy does look very cool and I hope someone comes up with an equivalent for Chrome (currently my browser of choice). The interface is very intuitive with plenty of drag-and-drop and nice resizing features (you can shrink a grouping and cause the icons to stack - the vid demo proposes doing that with a set of tabs called "Procrastination" ;-). Other concepts include "Persistent" groupings (for - say - web mail, web apps, commonly visited pages) and there are other great ideas in the pipeline (e.g. semantic assessment of Tab Content to facilitate "intelligent" browsing).

However, the thing that struck me from a Notes / Domino perspective was that this is another case where something analagous to the original Notes workspace is resurfacing again. Tab Candy is way slicker than the current Workspace (which is - what? - 18 years old?). However, the key characteristics are very similar:

• Flat 2-dimensional space to place tiles that link through to pages/
• Arbitrary groupings of tiles.
• Drag-and-drop between the groupings.
• Use of "Spatial Memory" to facilitate quick access.

So, just like the iPad/iPhone interface we see this concept rising again in another new place. I suspect that there's a lot of the capabilities of Tab Candy (both current and proposed) that could add value to a re-vamped Notes workspace. Things that come to mind include:

• Flexible re-sizing of groupings.
• Tiles being actual representations of the pages rather than simple icons.
• Relating grouping properties (e.g. size of grouping) to importance.
• (I'm sure there are others but I want to draw this to a close).

I know that the topic of "reinventing" and "rediscovering" the workspace is something that surfaces regularly in the Yellowverse and Mary-beth Raven and the Notes Design Team have definitely had a bunch of feedback in the past suggesting stuff for the Workspace. So, I guess my key points here are:

1. Tab Candy provides (yet more) vindication for some of the fundamental principles that can be seen in the Notes Workspace.
2. But it also shows how much more can be done with this visual approach to grouping links into information.
3. Both Notes Workspace and Tab Candy have some growing to do but they can definitely make for a great interface into work and browsing.