Re: taking features away (compact view removed from Nautilus)

[Adam Dingle <adam yorba org>]

On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 8:03 AM, Allan Day <allanpday gmail com> wrote:

Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
...
> The anti-pattern for both removals is like, "there's some peeling paint
> in this house - let's bulldoze the neighborhood".
...

How do you know that was the reason for the decision, if the
background hasn't been explained? The anti-pattern for that statement
is like, "assuming motivations out of ignorance".

I'll let Jon speak for himself. However, I can at least give you my
personal design opinion on the issue. First of all, I do think that
compact view is problematic, and I don't see any why we shouldn't
remove UI if it isn't of sufficiently high quality. Some issues with
compact view:

* Horizontal scrolling is unergonomic with mouse and touchpad input
* It is hard to scan multiple columns when they scroll, and it is
difficult to find a particular item in an alphabetical list if it
wraps over multiple columns
* Filenames have a tendency to become truncated, and filenames also
disappear off the side of the screen.

The other reason why I think it is good to remove compact view is that
it is inelegant as a solution to users' needs. List and icon view have
clear roles and are easy to communicate to users. Grid view
prioritises visual representation of files. List view focuses on
finding my name. With these two options we offer a clear and
straightforward choice.

Compact view doesn't fit neatly into our existing functionality. It
overlaps with the list view (since it focuses on finding by name), yet
it misses some of its advantages (such as the ability to easily
reorder the list). It also overlaps with zoom, which is the standard
way to display more items at once.

I'd much rather offer two, clearly differentiated views that work
well, rather than have three poorly distinguished options,
particularly when one of them has serious usability issues.

Allan, thanks for your thoughts.  I've responded on a new thread on nautilus-list, which seems like a good place to continue this discussion:

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2012-July/msg00005.html

adam