Re: Special folders in gnome

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2006-01-13 at 14:56 +0100, Murray Cumming wrote:
> > > But if an application's (non-GTK+, non-Qt) file chooser doesn't
> > > translate it, the effect is only that a Chinese person sees an English
> > > folder name. Not the end of the world.
> > 
> > I don't agree with you. I think it is very problematic if we want to be
> > credible on the desktop outside the english world. It is a matter of
> > polish or fixing the rough edges. Without this, people will always say
> > "look, it sucks, blabla". One of the reason of Apple success is IMHO
> > their sense of the polish.
> 
> But translating the UI gives us a way to make this happen. Non GTK+ and
> non-Qt apps are always going to be strange in all kinds of other ways
> anyway.

End of the world?  No, probably not.  But I'd call it a stopper.
Lots of people *do* have "foreign" applications on their system.
I know we all like to talk about dear old Aunt Tilly, but one of
the places we've made inroads is the old UNIX workstation market.
In those markets, the third-party software is the computer.  It's
not just some extra application, it's the whole reason you've
even logged in to the computer.

Having a different name isn't like having a different color or
a different icon.  We could live with color or icon differences.
But the name is the single distinguishing characteristic of the
folder.

Say my file manager shows me "Bilder" and my expensive vertical
application shows me "Pictures".  Am I going to shrug my shoulders
and say "Oh, expensive vertical application didn't translate that
folder name."?  I doubt it.  Even if I speak both languages, I'd
assume they're different folders, and I'd be very confused as to
why different folders disappear in different applications.

This *will* happen.  Your argument against Matthias's suggestion
was that applications *might* put things into Pictures instead
of $PICTURES.  Even if we turn that "might" into a "will", all
that happens is that some files are in weird different places.
But all of those weird different places are visible, always, in
all applications.  No funny disappearing folders.

--
Shaun