Re: Gnome 2.6: What were you thinking?

[jamie <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

On Thu, 2004-05-13 at 21:33, John (J5) Palmieri wrote:

> > 
> > Well, quite a few people don't think that was a 'very good idea'.
> And quite a few people do.  Really any change like this is going to have
> people who love it and people who hate it.  Thats just life.  Should we
> just freeze the desktop where it is right now and never make a single
> change?  The thing I don't get is what the argument is about.  

The big problem is that spatial mode is on by default and the default
left click pops up new windows. Therefore for your Joe average user who
only left clicks at things he/she will quickly end up with a cluttered
mess of windows on the screen. 

It would have been safer to make browse the default and spatial as
optional cause I'm quite concerned that companies who are looking at
Gnome to replace their windows boxes might be put off by spatial mode's
heavy clutter (and after all the negative press they are bound to look
very closely at this feature). Using spatial in an efficient manner to
avoid this problem is not intuitive for most such users (and they would
need some training to use it right).

Then using it correctly also has problems. If I middle click folders
then I sometimes get very disorientating results. By not reusing the
existing window and instead popping up a window on the other side of the
screen with a different size and shape I find It less efficient cause my
focus, attention and mouse pointer is located over the window that gets
closed and having to readjust wastes time and annoys me. A browser view
would always be more efficient in this regard. 

As for ease of use, I dont see anything in spatial mode which makes
things easier. If tree views in browser mode are a problem for some
users then my tabbed nautilus proposal would solve that (the tabs in
nautilus would represent the directory hierarchy of the current
directory so allowing fast navigation up and down the directory tree).

jamie.