Re: new file selector dialog?

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Fri, 2002-03-08 at 15:27, David Moles wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 2002-03-08 at 12:02, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> > 
> > That's the advantage of GNOME/Open Source.  ^,^  Yes, there probably
> > should be an option in the GNOME UI settings for turning off the
> > side-bar/whatever of the "links."  They should definitely be a standard
> > feature, tho.  While you may not use removable media at all, at work we
> > just issued 7 laptops to elected officials for, basically, no purpose
> > other than reading and dealing with board packets distributed on CD-ROM
> > (and e-mail and SupportWeb access).
> 
> That doesn't mean they should be a standard feature. :) If I had to 
> guess, I'd say that the need for removable media will continue to
> decrease over time as work becomes more network-centric. I'll bet 
> that for a lot of people a link to their email attachments folder
> would be considerably more useful than a link to their floppy drive,
> for instance.

I also don't think it should *not* be a feature because what the future
*may* hold.  Right now, e-mail isn't an option for us - attaching to the
network in their case isn't that easy (especially if they're at home),
and the only GroupWise e-mail client for Linux that supports the address
book and calendars and whatnot is a very nasty web-based system (one we
don't want to force the users to use overly much when not in the
office).  Maybe if the Evo. developers would write a Novell/Groupwise
plugin... ~,^

> 
> My vote would be for some real research into whether the majority of
> users would (a) use the direct device links, (b) be annoyed by having
> them there if they didn't use them. Then, no matter the results, the
> implementation should be configurable. If it emerges from the usability
> testing that the links should be a standard feature, I can turn them
> off. If it emerges that they don't need to be, you can add them when
> creating the system image you use to set up the laptops you're giving
> to your users.

Agreed there.  But then, some of the "usability" studies we've had don't
seem to work out quite as well as we'd have liked.  Making such a study
accurate is very hard.  You have to test a *lot* of people, in a
professional test environment (online polls aren't very accurate), with
a variety of skills levels and familiarity (look at the fights we've had
with the changing of Yes/No to No/Yes in the GTK/GNOME dialog).

> 
> > Giving them easy access was a requisite.  Thus, the laptops all have
> > KDE, which already has the simple things like usable file selectors
> > taken care of.  ~,^ 
> 
> Y'know, on gnome-devel-list that's very close to a flame, smiley or
> no smiley. :/

If a person can't so much as speak the truth here, then this isn't the
place developers should be discussing things.  We had to pick KDE
because, among other things, GNOME 1.4 just can't compare to KDE 2.x. 
With GNOME 2.2, that may be different (GNOME 2.0 looks like it is going
to have the exact same UI problems).

> 
> > I really did like the gnome-file-selector tho.  Hopefully that gets
> > completed and becomes standard.  Another issue I (and many others) would
> > like to avoid is having 10 different file selectors for each app... it's
> > already too bad that we have GTK+ and KDE, and then all the GNOME/GTK+
> > apps that wrote their own file selectors because GTK+'s is so horrible.
> 
> No argument from me.

I think it's a good reason to not make the file selector GNOME centric. 
Or, if GTK has a decent plugin support (haven't looked much at 2.0 yet),
then the GNOME selector could be used even in stock GTK+ apps if GNOME
is installed (that would rule).

> 
> --D
> 
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