Visual appearance of a Tab control

[Ward]

I'm pleased the FileMaker Pro 8 demo allows me to play with the new Tab Control.

I'm less pleased with the simplistic visual appearance of the tab panels -- style-less/bland tabs, tab width controlled by label width, no space between tabs, permanent black shadows, ...

I've been experimenting with overlaying the FM 8 tabs with graphic elements copied from an existing FM 7 layout. It appears I'll be able to mimic the visual appearance of my current FM 7 layouts as follows:

1. Create a Tab control with several tabs.

2. For each Tab panel, overlay all tabs with graphic tabs of my own design.

3. Carefully size the FM 8 tabs to correspond to the overlaid graphics.

My current visual design was modeled after the tabs in many of FM 7 sample databases.

Since my tabs are indented from the left edge of the layout, the graphic overlay includes a block of background color to hide the left portion of the left-most FM 8 tab. Likewise, there is a narrow background filler between each tab because I don't want the tabs to touch. Of course, this means the filler areas are clickable. I'm hoping users won't be confused if they happen to click to the left of the first tab.

It's disappointing to have to resort to this hackery to produce an attractive layout.

-- Ward

[comment]

Step 3 is very problematic. As you correctly state, the tab width is controlled by the label text - and similarly, the tab height is dictated by font size (a really poor design decision by FMI). As a result, there's no way to be sure your painstaking adjustments will be correctly displayed on another computer.

If you fully justify the tabs, the width at least becomes a constant, given by the width of the entire tab control object divided into the number of panels.

---

BTW, tab control is not one of Advanced features.

Edited September 7, 2005 by Guest

[Raybaudi]

Hi, Ward

I'm experimenting something, as you do...

Can you post your result ?

[Ward]

Step 3 is very problematic. As you correctly state, the tab width is controlled by the label text - and similarly, the tab height is dictated by font size (a really poor design decision by FMI). As a result, there's no way to be sure your painstaking adjustments will be correctly displayed on another computer.

Since the visible tab captions/names will be in the overlay graphics, I can use any text & font to establish the tab size. I hope to find a built-in OS font face & size that measures the same on Mac OS X and Windows XP, which I imagine will take some trial and error.

I'll post a sample layout when I have something that works on both platforms.

BTW, tab control is not one of Advanced features.

When I first wrote the opening note, I thought I was looking at the FM Advanced new features page. A few minutes later, I realized I had the FM Pro page and edited that note to remove the reference to FM Advanced.

-- Ward

[Ward]

After experimenting more with the new Tab control, I've decided I don't want to give up its flexibility (e.g., variable number of tabs, automatic tab sizing, easy reordering of tabs) simply for aesthetics.

I've opened a new topic, Tab Control with Form & List layouts, to describe my latest experiment (including a database prototype).

-- Ward