Re: [Usability]A Challenge: Describe the GNOME 4.0 interface.

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Fri, 2002-11-08 at 16:10, Joshua Adam Ginsberg wrote:

> Forget applications... put everything within Nautilus... make everything
> embeddable... you use the Nautilus file manager to navigate your tree
> (somehow as much as database held file solutions may seem cool, I
> imagine you'll have to pry my file tree out of my cold dead hands) and
> then open a document with a specified view/editor... that component is
> then embedded within that Nautilus window... so Abiword, for example,
> becomes a view within Nautilus... Nautilus itself only has a single menu
> for navigational purposes...and Abiword merges its menu items into the
> Nautilus menu bar... and below the Navigation toolbar Abiword registers
> a view specific toolbar...

<devil's advocate>
One question I always ask myself when people tout this idea is...
"what's the advantage"?  I can see it's potentially useful if you're
working on documents that contain (say) pictures, text and sound, all of
which you could possibly edit in the same window provided the editing
components weren't too complex, but I doubt that most people need to do
that very often, really.

One of the main advantages people claim is that you don't have to care
about which app to open, but the chances are you will anyway.  There are
still going to be umpteen competing graphics components out there with
different features, and even if you could load them all into the same
view at the same time so you could pick-and-choose whichever combination
of features you needed, the GUI would probably be too complex to be
worth the bother :)

Otherwise, you're probably still going to want to open different windows
to work on different tasks anyway, or even just to enable you to drag
and drop things between views.  So what would be the difference between
a Nautilus shell with a text editor embedded in it, and say, gedit? 
Very little, you would hope, which brings me back to my original
question :)

</devil's advocate>

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems