[gnome-love] GNOME file selector usability

[Jeramy Rutley <jrutley gmail com>]

My mom had a whale of a time trying to scan a picture and send it as
an attachment with her Yahoo! mail yesterday.

I think that the file selectors confused her.
She called me the next day saying that she double-clicked on the
picture in Nautilus (my words, not hers), thereby opening up Eye of
GNOME instead of using the "Browse..." button (embedded in Yahoo's
page) and navigating through the corresponding file dialog in Firefox.
 To her, Nautilus is where the files are.

We shouldn't really need file selectors, should we?
I had this vision of how to save a file:  name the file and drag it
straight into Nautilus (or in the case of Windows, Explorer). 
Optionally, add a button that opens Nautilus.
I'm sure this has been discussed in the past, though.  (This also has
the added effect of getting rid of the non-native GTK+ file selector
in Windows).

Wouldn't it be easier from her perspective if she could have dragged
the file from Nautilus right into the browser?  (or clicked on the
"browse" button which pops up saying "Drag the file you want to upload
here."  Since there would only be one place to drag from, she would
automatically know which one it is).

I know that this would be a Herculean effort, but it would get rid of
one of the inconsistencies in GNOME.  Is it worth it for me to make a
patch for something like that?  (or a couple of sample screenshots?)



And on a different topic, is there something in XSane that allows you
to crop a picture?  Should there not be an auto-crop or something? 
Believe it or not, I could get my mom to open up a picture in GIMP and
crop it, but not to upload her file as an e-mail attachment.

-- 
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by then it's usually too late.

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