Re: Gnome 2.6: What were you thinking?

["Franco Catrin L." <fcatrin tuxpan com>]

El jue, 13-05-2004 a las 17:18, jamie escribió:
> On Thu, 2004-05-13 at 21:33, John (J5) Palmieri wrote:
> 
> > > 
> > > Well, quite a few people don't think that was a 'very good idea'.
> > And quite a few people do.  Really any change like this is going to have
> > people who love it and people who hate it.  Thats just life.  Should we
> > just freeze the desktop where it is right now and never make a single
> > change?  The thing I don't get is what the argument is about.  
> 
> The big problem is that spatial mode is on by default and the default
> left click pops up new windows. Therefore for your Joe average user who
> only left clicks at things he/she will quickly end up with a cluttered
> mess of windows on the screen. 

Only and only if he/she has a deep directory hierarchy

An average user just need to go to Documents, Music, Network, CDrom, DVD
and that sort of _places_.  In that case  browsing to /mnt/cdrom or
browsing to /home/user/download/thisweek/music doesn't make sense

If you think about open a lot of windows because of the need of
traversing directories then you are thinking about browsing and not
about spatial mode.  Most advanced users use deep folders, like a the
file organization of a software proyect for example, but for an average
user, that level of organization is only noise.

> It would have been safer to make browse the default and spatial as
> optional cause I'm quite concerned that companies who are looking at
> Gnome to replace their windows boxes might be put off by spatial mode's
> heavy clutter (and after all the negative press they are bound to look
> very closely at this feature).

A new user will have an empty desktop and home directory and will put
his/her things in appropiate _places_ as he/she wants.  No need for deep
hierarchies.

Have you seen that most windows users put a lot of files/folders in
their desktop?

>  Using spatial in an efficient manner to
> avoid this problem is not intuitive for most such users (and they would
> need some training to use it right).

I don't think so.  Just think of putting things here and there.  Higher
level of classifications, or locating things like /mnt/cdrom may need
training instead

> Then using it correctly also has problems. If I middle click folders
> then I sometimes get very disorientating results. By not reusing the
> existing window and instead popping up a window on the other side of the
> screen with a different size and shape I find It less efficient cause my
> focus, attention and mouse pointer is located over the window that gets
> closed and having to readjust wastes time and annoys me. 

It's because you are used to browser your files, not to open/activate
them.

What if I say that I get very disoriented when my documents contents are
replaced by the thrash contents in the same window?

> A browser view
> would always be more efficient in this regard. 
> 
> As for ease of use, I dont see anything in spatial mode which makes
> things easier.

So you should use browse mode instead

>  If tree views in browser mode are a problem for some
> users then my tabbed nautilus proposal would solve that (the tabs in
> nautilus would represent the directory hierarchy of the current
> directory so allowing fast navigation up and down the directory tree).

Read that: directory hierarchy.  Spatial mode is a metaphor of objects
and places.

What I agree in all this discussion is that there should be an easy way
to touch the browser mode gconf key.  But not with a label like "open in
the same window", but "use browsing mode"

-- 
Franco Catrin L. TUXPAN
http://www.tuxpan.com/fcatrin