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

[Alan <alan ufies org>]

[snip]
> There is no real benefit to viewing a text file or image in nautilus
> AFAICT, but there are definately drawbacks, and as that usability
> study shows, it causes user frustration and confusion.
> 
> I don't want to start another holy war. But I would love to get a
> response from the nautilus maints for or against this. The rest of us
> can argue to we go blue in the face, but if the maints aren't listening
> then there is no point.

Personally I agree with most of this, but there are a couple of things
that I do use the nautilus internal views for.

Image viewing.  While I do 99% of my file maintenance on the command
line, any sort of organization of images is made 1000x easier with the
thumbnail view, and by extension, the ability to view the "full" image
within nautilus (lets call it "zoom" for now).  If I just want a bit
closer look at my random_wallpaper.png I don't want to have to deal with
popping up the gimp or eog each time, I just want it in the same window. 

The other thing is for viewing of text files.  Nautilus already provides
the ability to see a bit of the text file, so I'd expect it to be able
to view it all (maybe, "zoom" it).  Text files are again, fast and quick 
to view, and don't require special programs to process them, unlike 
abiword/.doc, etc.

Maybe instead of having internal viewers nautilus could have a "zoom"
function.  If the visual representation of this zoom was done right it
could be obvious or more obvious to the end user that they weren't
getting the full deal, just a close up look at the file they wanted to
see.  If done right maybe all the internal views could be kept (I'm sure
that there are people that organize abiword docs like I do images that
would love the abilty to not have to open AW each time they want to see
a doc), but just re-skinned in such a way that it's easier for the end
user to understand that the file manager is just zooming into their
file read only, not actually editing it.

IIRC the way that os/x does it is to give you file information in the
multi-pane view, or open up the preview program each time for files that
aren't registered with an app (ie: .doc) but are registered with the
preview program (ie: images, etc), and also provides an "open with..."
option in the menu.

Regards,

Alan

-- 
Alan <alan ufies org> - http://arcterex.net
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