Re: Revisiting the implementation of Nautilus Views (again)

[Alan <alan ufies org>]

> If the user wants regular click-execute via mimi-type sematics, the user
> user never has to know about views -- they are effectivly dead.
> 
> If the user wants "View/Zoom" semantics, the user would toggle a
> Magnifying glass Icon which would change the cursor to a magnifying
> glass, and enable View-on-Mouseover behavior. When the cursor is held
> over a data File, a window would appear with the corresponding data View
> that would behave similar to a tool-tip window -- as seen in the
> attachment (without the extraneous metadata Konq has).
> 
> I would like to know what the senior Nautilus guys think.

How about the normal 'ol users? :)

As one, I'll throw my hat in the ring for a second or two and ask a
couple of questions and babble a bit.

I like the idea, but I don't think it'd work for everything.  Getting a
larger view of images maybe, but what about abiword docs or pdfs?  Will
they be shown big enough for the view to be useful?  
You don't like the extranious information, but IIRC the way konq works is 
it will pop up the existing thumbnail on mouse over with basic info (file 
size, date... normal stat() information that is shown already).  If the 
mouseover lasts for longer than N seconds, it gives a larger (double?  
1/3 bigger? something like that) thumbnail and more detailed information 
(exif data info grokked from abiword summary info, whatever).  The idea
of course being that the user waits a couple of seconds longer because 
they want more information about the file they are looking at.  I think
that this way of previewing works personally.

In one way I like an extra action is required of the user to see the
previews, because one thing I don't like in KDE is I can't have my mouse
cursor in the same window because of all the stupid little pop ups!
However, I think that the act of having to go into "zoom mode" might be
a bit strange and counter-intuitive, but I'm not a usability expert :)

My $0.02

alan

-- 
Alan <alan ufies org> - http://arcterex.net
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