Re: [Usability] Saving to open Nautilus windows

[Phil Bull <philbull gmail com>]

On Tue, 2006-01-03 at 12:37 +0100, Sven Jaborek wrote:

> I would really like to drag drop the save icon from the toolbar to a
> nautilus window [1], and then beeing in the rename-mode there. One could
> show this gtk save icon inside the save dialog as well for drag drop
> possibility there. [2]

Hmm, this might seem a little strange to the user (dragging an action,
'save', into nautilus rather than a document). Maybe better to drag the
document's icon from somewhere? Or if this isn't practical, when you
drag from the 'Save' button, you get the document's icon show up during
the drag?

> Problems turn up if users have lots of windows opened.
> >From a usability point of view all opened nautilus windows should be in
> the list, because the feature turns to be useless if users cant rely
> they will find the opened folder there.
> This requirement conflicts with the recommondation to not have more than
> 7 items in a list (due to human brain limit), but if you define a limit
> - from what criterion would you decide witch one to drop?

With spatial nautilus, to get to /home/phil/documents/2005, I'll have
the following windows open:

1. /home/phil
2. /home/phil/documents
3. /home/phil/documents/2005

Normally, I won't use 1) and 2), because they were just locations I had
to go through to get to my intended destination, 3). So this drop-down
should just show the final location(s) maybe? Then after that, order and
truncate the list by most recently opened. This runs into problems when
you DO want to use 1) and 2) though.

> My idea for this conflict would be to _not_ add the list with the
> currently opened nautilus paths, _if_ there are more than 7 nautilus
> windows opened. Completly disable the feature if there would be to much
> items.

I'm pretty sure this would confuse the hell out of everybody. 'Where's
that handy drop-down gone?' or 'why is it disabled?' etc. Not everyone
will see the '>7 nautilus windows open' logic. Why not just add the
first six items to the drop-down then have a 'More locations...' item at
the bottom. By selecting this you can pop up a full list.

-- 
Phil Bull
http://www.livejournal.com/users/philbull