Re: [Fwd: Nautilus]

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2005-12-22 at 01:00 +0100, Tomasz Janowitz wrote:
> "So, this gets to the heart of the question.  In spatial mode this
> situation can only occur if the user commonly uses lots of directories, or
> deeply nested ones.
> Is this the most common scenario for our target user?"
> 
>    Designing a behaviour of file manager assuming that it won't manage many
> files/folders and deeply nested ones (which is what the filesystem was
> designed for) isn't the best approach IMHO.
> 
> "I think it is not.  I observe people saving files to the default save
> location for the application (web browsers, office tools, etc).  And
> leaving them there."
> 
>    I don't know one such person. Maybe it's just friends I've got are such
> a pedantic puritans. Or maybe organizing files in deeply nested trees is
> normal way of dealing with lot's of files. I've got over 3 thousand mp3's.
> Putting them in one location is a joke. Hundreds of documents, books and
> other stuff has to be managed with directories. It helps, not stands in the
> way.

All right, I'll bite.  I'm an audiophile and a music
addict.  I buy tons of music nobody's even heard of.
I record concerts.  My ~/Music folder has roughly
8000 oggs and flacs, totalling about 120 GB.

I never used Mac or Amiga much.  I used Windows long
ago, back in the mid-90s.  Then a professor showed
me GNU/Linux, and I never looked back.

I'm a programmer.  For my programming tasks, I don't
touch the file manager.  Not because the file manager
isn't useful, but because I don't use many other GUI
tools.  I'm just going to call emacs and make anyway,
so I might as well be at a shell.

Outside of programming, I'm very big on dogfooding.
So I use GUI tools pretty much exclusively, except
on the off occasion where automating something with
a shell script would save me hours.  It's not some
masochistic endeavor either.  I generally prefer
using GUI applications.

Now, with all that background on me, I'm telling
you that I love spatial.  And I especially love it
on my very large music collection.  Everything just
feels natural.  I just always have a clear sense of
where I am and what I'm doing.

Do I have to manually set some folder positions and
sizes?  Yeah.  And hey, if somebody put some code
into Nautilus to do some heuristics on the initial
folder size and position, that could be cool, if it
worked well.

But I add maybe nine or ten folders a month.  Nine
or ten times a month, I take five seconds out of
my day to put a folder where I want it.  Just like
nine or ten times a month, I spend five seconds
finding the right place for a CD on my shelf.  And
that five seconds makes my life simpler the rest
of the time.

--
Shaun