Fences 6 Suggestion

Hi btm, great suggestion. Any thoughts on how you'd expect the selected (or unselected) tab to appear?

I just think that the color of the tab button should reflect the color of the tab itself even when not selected.  It could still be a little brighter like they are in a selected tab.  

And maybe outline the tabs just a bit to define the edges? 

Another idea:  add a "pop out" option to the tab menu.  This would be temporary and not a permanent "undock" function.  If the popped out tab is closed, it would revert back to the tab group.  

Thanks for the feedback.

So in your screenshot, the Fence has the mouse over it – so the titlebars are at 100% opacity.

Would you expect the titlebars to be at 100% opacity always, even when the mouse isn't over it (as to show the color the strongest), or simply do the existing appearance when the mouse is not over it except that the other tabs also would get a background.

Hmm,  I had not thought about varying opacity.  I guess it would be OK to vary the entire group, titles and all according to the opacity setting.  Or make them both separately adjustable, but that also adds complexity to both the GUI and code.  

Maybe others can chime in on that.

I think 100 percent opacity is the way to go here. Tabs look good so why not. (But I will never say no to more customizations none the less)

You will probably still need a hover indicator of course so opacity could go down to 80 - 90 percent on mouse hover only

As for active tab indicator, keep the faded font for inactive tabs. This works pretty good for me. That and color coded fences should make navigating tabs pretty easy.

Here's another variant.... an option to wrap an outline around both the active tab area and the active title:

I agree that being able to set the Tab color independent of the background color would be a good idea, like ObjectDock 3.0.

Looking at the screen shot I can tell having an outline for a tab does look good and this would include segmented tabs style as well.

Aside from doing borders or changing opacity perhaps an easier approach (that would also look good) is simply making the inactive tabs lighter in color similarly to how "darken tittle bar" looks and functions. That way tabs that are all the same color would stick out and an active tab would be darker and more pronounced and all the colored tabs are still visible to their color but just slightly lighter

Of course this already works when transparency is active in the segmented style so the change would be more to the actual color. So it would also work for solid colors and independent of transparency effects.

Got you thinking, right? 🙂

Yeah I suppose the basic premise is to better define tabs.  So far "segmented style" with "transparency" set to "on" nails it. 

But the challenge is bringing that to the other styles. It will be fun to see what the developer thinks

I think the team is going to keep it simple first 😆 But I can confirm this feature is coming! More or less the new option, which is on by default, is to show colors on all tabs if multiple colors are used within a tab group. So, customize a tab's color and they'll all get visible tabs. We can see where-to from there 👍 Thanks for raising, btm!

Fences 6 Beta 2 is now available for download.

https://forums.stardock.com/535816/page/1/#3967308