Re: Wastebasket woes

[Alex Hudson <home alexhudson com>]

On Thu, 2010-08-26 at 14:02 +0100, Bruce Cowan wrote:
> The Ubuntu team have decided for themselves that they are going to use
> the term "rubbish bin" instead of "wastebasket" in their en_GB
> translations[0]. No matter what you may feel about downstream taking
> this decision, I suggest that the term in GNOME should also be changed
> to "rubbish bin".

Honestly, I think the entire problem here is that the metaphor is
broken. We're trying to get across that stuff that the user doesn't want
isn't removed but saved somehow, to be removed later at some future
point. That's not how bins work, no matter what you call them.

I still have trouble right-clicking on items in Nautilus. When I want
get rid of a file, I want to remove or delete it. "Move to <noun de
jour>" isn't what I'm looking for and it always takes ~5 seconds for the
cognitive dissonance to dissipate and for me to find it. Of course the
actual key is marked 'Delete', not 'Move to..', anyhow.

Personally I think it should go back to "Delete <this>", and rather than
stretch the analogy past breaking point just label the bin "Back-ups of
Deleted Items". When disk space runs out, ask the user if they want to
remove the backups of files they didn't want anyway.

That makes a tonne more sense to my brain and avoids the parochial
bin-noun issue?

Cheers

Alex.

PS. Sorry. I daresay this doesn't help ;)


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