Re: [Usability] Re: Killing Views Part 2 - The return of the Usabilty study

["Curtis C. Hovey" <sinzui cox net>]

On Mon, 2003-06-02 at 05:50, Alexander Larsson wrote:

> There are many opinions on this. Some people like it, some don't. I
> personally like viewers for filetypes that are predominantly consumed,
> as opposed to created/edited. This means things like html, images, text,
> pdf documents, etc. However, some people like to open an editor to read
> READMEs. That should of course be possible for the user to configure,
> and it is (although the UI for this sucks ass).

The viewers are fine, taking over the window that was my means of
navigating to a file is not.  Views that organize and present files
belong in the nautilus window.  Views that display a document should be
in another window.  This allows the user to easily inspect other files
in the directory, and doesn't disorient him or her.

I've spent hours disabling document views that I want to use because the
navigation metaphor I use to interact with my documents is broken. 
Worse the view is broken; the window is sized to show file content, note
document content.  Often the only good solution to working with a good
number of files is to keep a window to a directory open on the side of
the desktop an using DnD to a window to a viewer (noting that the lousy
file selector is a contributor to this habit). 

I do agree that the default action (I may mean the default default
action) should be a view/preview.  I was shocked to see gtksourceview
let me edit my file--I didn't ask for gtksourceeditor.  Mering the
views/ggv/gpdf/eog into a nautilus shell is fine, so long as views are
just that, views.  Copy, zoom, and print are the only features needed in
a document viewer. Back and forward are only needed in multi-page or
linked documents.  The new nautilus window should be correctly sized to
show the content, and if that isn't possible, the zoom should
automatically be applied so there isn't a horizontal scroll bar.  

-- 
__C U R T I S  C.  H O V E Y____________________
sinzui cox net
Guilty of stealing everything I am.