Re: [Usability] Spatiality does not mean that navigational facilities cannot exist

[Maurizio Colucci <seguso forever tin it>]

Kalle Vahlman wrote:
> On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 23:26:45 +0100, Maurizio Colucci
> <seguso forever tin it> wrote:
>
> > But the point I want to make is: WHY DO I HAVE TO RENOUNCE TO THOSE
> > FACILITIES WHEN I USE SPATIAL NAUTILUS? It seems to me there is no
> > reason for this; that you are interpreting the spatial metaphor in a
> > uselessly restrictive way: the spatial metaphor only means that a
> > nautilus window must represent a folder. So, INSIDE the window you
> > cannot have, say, a list of recent places, or a list of bookmarks, which
> > have no relation with the folder. So far so good. But this does NOT
> > imply that a global sidebar with recent places must not be available!
>
>
> Why should it be a sidebar? 


Look at it this way. Do you use tabbed browsing? I suppose so. Would you 
like it if the tab-bar became a popup list? I guess not: the popup list 
would become a "bottleneck": a small clickable area by which you have to 
pass each time you want to switch window. But switching windows is too 
*frequent* an operation for the list to be popup.

And IMO this would be even worse for switching between folders: 
switching folder is an even more frequent operation that switching web 
page. So it is even more necessary that the folder list be always on screen.

Secondly, as someone who regularly uses the history sidebar in 
nonspatial nautilus, I am of the opinion that the space the sidebar 
takes is not missed, since the sidebar is only visible when you are 
browsing files. This is of crucial importance. I would not like to see 
the sidebar when, say, I am checking mail. Also, I would not like to 
have to hide the taskbar each time I activate Evolution.



> ("whip up" is a relaxed way to say "desing a good algorithm to find
> out which visited folders are actually worth to keep in the list" ;)

IMHO, every folder should be in the list. Then you sort it by recent 
usage, and you truncate it at, say, 30 elements.

Maurizio