[Usability]Re: Nautilus Preference Proposal (screenshots too!!!!)

[Darryl Rees <rees netnam vn>]

In general this looks like a big improvement; a couple of 2c nitpicks...

bordoley msu edu wrote:

> Hi All,
> In addition, we'd like to consider moving the nautilus preferences out of 
> nautilus and into the control center. This change would make nautilus more 
> of a desktop component, similar to the panel, rather than a standalone 
> application. Also in the star trek future, some of these preferences could 
> in theory apply to a nautilus based file selector, so this is something to 
> at least consider.
Could you could have it in both, that would be fine. But to remove it 
from the nautilus app would make it more difficult for newbies to find 
the preferences, and involve more work for any user - it just makes it 
'less accessible'. Users are conditioned to be able to find an app's 
preferences inside the app, and these are unquestionably nautilus 
preferences even if they have global effects on the file selector, etc. 
Should be extremely easy to test in a useability study I guess, once 
there are working examples...

> Finally, the tree view preference, "show only folders", has been moved into 
> the new "Tree View Defaults" subcategory. It seemed to fit in well here 
> along side the other folder views.
OK, these next suggestions are a little outside of your ambit, but here 
goes anyway while we're on the subject of preferences.

Does anyone actually uses anything other than 'show only folders' on the 
treeview? Surely the treeview is a navigation aid for the main window 
and not a functional duplicate of it? Would it ultimately be possible to 
get rid of this preference?

Suggestion for a new pref - date/time format. Nautilus always uses the 
most verbose format possible, it's quite fatigueing to read...

> 4. Desktop and Trash category
> -----------------------------
> We removed this category.
>
> The "desktop" preferences are removed. These preferences seem to fall under 
> the crack options category in our opinion. While I personally am a huge fan 
> of "use home folder as desktop," from a pure usability standpoint I think 
> nautilus should only have one desktop dir (at least in the user visible 
> ui). In addition the "Use nautilus to draw the desktop" preference is really 
> a power user tweak preference that shouldn't be included in the ui (i'm not 
> aware of any other desktop shell/filemanager that includes such a 
> preference). We recommend removing these preferences from the user visible 
> ui, but retaining them as hidden gconf preferences for the power user in all 
> of us. :)
>
> The trash behavior prefs are moved to the "files and folders" categor
Actually it would be nice to be able to configure *any* folder to be 
used as your desktop - I guess I just lost all credibility with this 
comment.

> 7. Icon Captions Category
> -------------------------
> Same...
It's annoying that the 'captions' (columns?) can't be changed in the 
list view... (in general the list view always seems to get a lot less 
love than the icon view).

As I said, in general the improvements look great, hope something in my 
nitpicks helpful to you.
--
Dalong