Re: Baobab

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Hi Jeff;

On Thu, 2006-07-27 at 02:44 -0700, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Emmanuele Bassi">
> 
> > The user goal is stated in the part you snipped out:
> > 
> > +++
> > 
> > >  What are our users trying to achieve?
> > 
> > They are trying to see how their files are big, and where their disk space
> > went, especially when a notification popup tells them that they have 88%
> > of their disk full.
> > 
> > +++
> 
> Surely their goal is closer to "make more room on my disk for stuff I care
> about" rather than "see how their files are big and where their disk space
> went". :-)

I concede that one of the reasons behind looking "where the fuck my
space went" is "I was ripping The Lord of the Rings extended edition
DVDs and I ran out of space".

But another reason is that tiny little notification icon that says
"dude, you have nearly no space left on the device", which by the way
would be cool if had a link saying "run the disk usage tool to see if
the porn folder is out of control".

> > Since this commonly is a "one shot operation" (I don't spend my entire
> > session time doing that, for instance) a "one shot application" fits the
> > operation profile.
> > 
> > Everything descends from this point forward.
> 
> Different point of view: I know an Ubuntu community member is working on an
> app to help a user clean up big stuff (and known things that take up a lot
> of room) on their disk. So instead of telling them to go run the weird app
> that makes them browse a graph of their disk and find stuff themselves, it
> suggests things based on its knowledge of GNOME disk usage and analysis of
> other large directories.
> 
> Which user experience do you think is most helpful and/or delightful?

Let's see.

Is more helpful a distribution-dependent tool that, for what we know,
may well be ready for GNOME 4.0, in a distant future where we all have
flying cars, the stable Debian release is 5.0 and GNOME runs on an
artificial intelligence that periodically scans my folders and tells me
I be better off copying my Music folder on my portable holographic mass
storage; or is more helpful something that works right now, albeit with
some rough edges that can be smoothed?

Okay, that's a rhetorical question for me and for you, but I'd like
someone else to comment on this, because frankly this is turning up
surreal and I think both of us exposed our own reasons; my task is to
maintain gnome-utils at my best and explain my choices, not convince
everyone that I have the Ultimate Truth about design principles and
software management.  I leave this task to others more fitted.

> Before saying "we don't have this functionality therefore we must put it
> in", we really need to analyse what the actual problems are for our users,
> and think critically about how to solve them in helpful and/or delightful
> ways. I'm not suggesting that's easy, of course. :-)

I'm thinking of the *actual* problems, and I see a solution that fits
well what our users need now; a solution that can be improved from an
already working code base.

+++

Anyway, we are really going off track - and I don't want another
mono-like thread.  If the release team decides that baobab does not fit
with gnome-utils and the core desktop packages, I'll remove it starting
from the next release.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
Emmanuele Bassi,  E: ebassi gmail com
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.net
B: http://log.emmanuelebassi.net