Re: [Nautilus-list] Integration of gmc and nautilus desktop directories.

[Bud <bud eazel com>]

It's hard for me to argue with taking a look at how OSX/NeXT did things :-)
At NeXT we got lots of user feedback and spent many cycles trying to
deal with reconciling the semantics of the desktop and the single rooted
Unix file system.

On the whole I agree with Miguel's comments on this issue.

The only thing I would add is that the desktop (and other GUI) metaphors
are an illusion layered on the underlying semantics in order to satisfy both
the need for elegance for the end user as well as the need for elegance for
the system designer.

Whenever such illusions are introduced (and there are tons of them), they
must be meticulously maintained, or the user gets a glimpse behind the
curtain
and ends up confused or at least the spell is broken. So, for example, the
desktop
semantics (whatever they are) need to be dealt with in the open/save dialog
etc.

The more sophisticated a programmer is, the less they want to deal with
illusions
(vs. the real deal).  Such illusions are abstractions-- yes, information is
hidden,
but information hiding is the only thing that makes our craft tractable at
all.

Bud Tribble


Christopher James Lahey wrote:

> On 24 Apr 2001 04:56:35 +0500, Dan Winship wrote:
> > So IMHO, the right thing (if you're going to go with $HOME==Desktop) is
> > to let the user right click -> "Don't show on desktop", and Nautilus can
> > just keep a list of those files and not show them.
>
> If we do decide to ship with a bunch of files not being shown and/or
> allow the user to set files as not being shown, we should look at how
> OSX/NeXT do it and copy their mechanism so as to be more consistent with
> them.
>      Chris
>
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