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

[Gregory Merchan <merchan phys lsu edu>]

On Mon, Jun 02, 2003 at 05:04:30PM +0200, Murray Cumming Comneon com wrote:
> > The other way always pops up new windows for each item, placing them
> > semingly randomly on screen having you micro-managing their 
> > position and
> > size, etc. That could also be seen as irritating and unexpected.
> 
> Showing them always in the same separate "Preview Window" would solve this
> problem. (This is Jeff's preview application idea). Of course, it could give
> other problems, and I can't think of any previous example of this.

If Nautilus would claim an X selection listing selected files, we could
have an previewer independent of Nautilus. The user would just run the
previewer if he wants such a thing.  Assuming the X selection data is in the
order of selection, the previewer could always show the most recently
selected file. It would probably be best for rubber band selection to
update as files are included in the band. Shift-click selection should
just update once, so that there isn't too much X or CPU traffic with the
previewer updating for many files at once. Maybe the previewer could do
something interesting with an unordered file list too.

Having this same X selection available, one could write a property inspector
for multiple files. No more would one need to use the command line to
change ownership of a group of files.

This X selection would follow the same ownership rules as PRIMARY, but it
should be a different selection, IMO. Perhaps, "_NAUTILUS_FILES".
(Note: I'm not suggesting supporting anything like middle-click paste.)

Cheers,
Greg