File Chooser UI Discussion [was: 2.4 meeting summary (2004-02-23)]

[Ryan McDougall <ryan mcdougall telusplanet net>]

On Tue, 2004-02-24 at 19:29 +0100, Sven Neumann wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Jonathan Blandford <jrb redhat com> writes:
> 
> > Sven Neumann <sven gimp org> writes:
> > 
> > > Has this new design been discussed here? In my opinion it's even worse
> > > than what we had in CVS a week ago. This new design with the lack of a
> > > folder view is completely unusable. I would even go so far to say that
> > > apps should better stay with the current GtkFileSelection dialog.
> > > My main concern is however that I find it very frustrating that such
> > > decisions are made completely off-list.
> > 
> > Do you mean folder_mode?  That view isn't specified in the design doc,
> > and is a little broken in the current implementation.  But it hasn't
> > gone away.
> 
> Actually I was trying to write "the lack of an entry widget" but at
> the same time I was time thinking how I liked the old folder pane and
> my fingers typed that then. I am aware that there's a folder mode and
> I think I can live with the mixed folder/file view so that's not my
> point. I do miss the entry however and I don't think that the very
> well hidden Ctrl-L feature is an acceptable solution.
> 
> 
> Sven

Although I very much like the new UI (and despite Owen's disparaging of
the 500 email discussion, I'm pretty sure some of the ideas from that
fest ended up in this design), I am concerned with the general lack of
discover-ability in some of GNOME's features. Specifically Im not sure a
new arrival to GNOME would have any clue that there is even a entry
widget, let alone guess that Ctrl-l gets you there. Hopefully there will
be a comment in the 2.6 user's guide, but honestly how many people want
to read a manual just to open files without carpel tunnel syndrome?

There are other examples, like what protocol:// will work in VFS, the
ability to drag and drop windows via the desktop pager, etc. I hope we
can work to bring some of these features "out into the open" a bit more.

Just some 2 cents.

Cheers,
Ryan