Re: spatial stuff detail

["David Adam Bordoley" <bordoley msu edu>]

Raphael Bosshard wrote: 

> My only concern is that there will be a gap between the usual file 
> handling (like moving files from one place to the other) and opening 
> files from an application (File->Open). 
>
> Any idea how the object-oriented idea could be applied to the new file 
> picker? Else, users will still have the location-based based file 
> management around. 
>
> I like the idea though. I'm really curious how it "feels" like.


Well in a true object/document oriented ui, you would not have a file->open 
dialog, because you would only have document views (ie a one to one relation 
between a file/document and its view similar to how nautilus will handle 
folders in 2.6) applications would be an implemenation detail not exposed to 
the user at all (the exception might be tools such as the calculator). [1] 

For instance instead of opening an application to create a new text file, 
you would instead have a "New" menu item in the panel from which you could 
select New->text file. You could save this file using a file save dialog, 
but to open another text file you would open the folder that contains the 
file from the desktop and double click the file to open it. 

This is sort of pie-in-the-sky in reference to gnome 2.6, but one of the 
main goals of the spacial file manager ui design is to encourage users to 
actually use the file manager to open and manage their files. Seth has 
pointed out in other emails that windows explorer historically has not made 
this an easy task and hence windows users tend to use file->open dialogs to 
do many file management tasks. In contrast macos9 users tend to do most file 
management through the finder. 

dave 

[1] I'm not sure of the technical merit or possibility of this, but with the 
spacial ui, nautilus file views could replace applications (assuming views 
allowed you to edit the content and save/rename etc). You'd basically have 
file shell provided by nautilus and apps would add the necessary menus via 
menu merging etc.