Re: GNOME 2.0 feedback

[mike <mike redtux demon co uk>]

On Thu, 2002-07-18 at 16:07, bordoley msu edu wrote:
> I got sometime to comment on these so why not :)
> 
> Calum Benson <calum benson sun com> said:
> 
> > "Nautilus isn't a terribly good file manager. It's slow and hard to
> > use. It doesn't offer a tree view. Its visible appearance is dull, and
> > it's not especially quick. It doesn't have any real shortcuts or
> > accelerators. While it does have a couple of nifty features that look
> > good in demos, I think I'm going to have a hard time selling this to
> > our users, who are used to the (superior based on what I've seen so
> > far) CDE file manager.
> 
> 
> By doesn't have a tree view, is the sun tester refering to a macos style list 
> view. I would love to see this in nautilus, and it also has some nice 
> usability pluses for drag and drop.
> 
> > "If it hasn't got a viewer application, it should ask you what you want
> > to use (just like windows does).

(and like gmc did)

> 
> This is a really good point. Someone should file a bug on this :)

I asked about this in #75620 (the tracker bug)

> > 
> > "Even when I get to the configuration by right-clicking on an icon, it's
> > an incomprehensible dialog box. But once you've configured an
> > application you still get the 'no application/viewer for filename.xls'
> > dialog box when you right-click.
> > 
> > "The whole mime-type registry thing needs a good going over.
> > 

I have annotated bug #75620 on this subject, but I will repeat hear.

What seems to happen is mime-type data gets put into .gnome/ and this
blocks the editing in gnome2, after I wiped out these files everything
works properly.

Cant say whether this is inherited from a gnome 1 install or is done by
gnome2


> The way we handle mime types in general is pretty confusing. I find it pretty 
> annoying that in order to open a file that I know is text, but nautilus 
> doesn't I have to explicitly launched gedit from the menus and then use the 
> file selector instead of just opening it from within nautilus. Kind of going 
> back to the previous comment I like how in windows It lets you explicitly 
> pick an app from a list of all known apps to open a file.
> 
> > "In nautilus, how do you adjust the size of the text and icon for a file
> > independently? (So you get small icons but readable text.)
> 
> Well the answer is to change the default icon settings. Maybe text size 
> shouldn't scale with icon zoom. I can definately see the confusion the 
> current ui causes. One note, I would like to see nautilus draw text on the 
> right for small icons (50% or 25%) like mac os does (very similar to the 
> simple list view in explorer too).
> 
> > 
> > "Tooltips in the menus are below the cursor, so obscure the menu item
> > below. Especially irritating as the menu drops from the top of the
> > screen.
> 
> Perhaps tooltips are not really all the necessary in the applications menu 
> now that we are using terms like "text editor" for our app names.
> 
> > 
> > "The main application menu has changed from the bottom to the top
> > panel. This might please some Mac addicts, but is a poor choice for
> > everyone else. (The default should surely be to work like the Windows,
> > KDE, and old gnome - the start button is bottom left. And then have an
> > option to do it the other way.
> 
> This is an issue of learnability. There are clear usability pluses to our 
> menu setup and I would be quite upset if we even considered changing it. I'm 
> sort of sad that redhat has chosen too ignore this usability plus in their 
> version of gnome2 (based on screenshots i've seen correct me if i'm wrong on 
> this one).
> 
> > 
> > "Dialogs have help and close buttons. This is daft. What happened to
> > cancel and OK? (If I hit close, does it apply the changes I've made or
> > not? What if I shut a window from the window manager? In fact, I tried
> > this and the behaviour is downright dangerous - closing via the window
> > manager applies the changes, which isn't at all what I would expect.)
> 
> Auspex had made a point about this during the whole debate over close buttons 
> on instant apply dialogs. I won't restart the discussion but perhaps he had a 
> point. 
> 
> > 
> > "Eye of Gnome has close on the toolbar, which is odd. I would have liked
> > to see "save as..." there instead, if it did image format
> > conversion. (And it's really pointless if it doesn't, as ImageMagick
> > and a host of other tools are much better image display tools.)
> > 
> 
> I'm pretty sure that the close button on the toolbar is a bug. gedit has this 
> as well which is probably there because it uses an mdi interface, but i still 
> consider it a bug.
> 
> 
> > 
> > "How to edit terminal preferences? You can't, because it refers to them
> > as "profiles" which will simply confuse users.
> >
> 
> This is a good point. Personally I find the whole profiles thing confusing, 
> but I am not a terminal power user either. I guess I don't see the benefit of 
> being able to have multiple setups for the terminal, but I imagine they exist 
> for a reason.

one reason would be if you need to use different shells for different
purposes (eg: C,bash)
___________________________
> desktop-devel-list mailing list
> desktop-devel-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list