Re: FileChooser's path bar and re-rooting

[Joel Becker <jlbec evilplan org>]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2004 at 06:38:04PM -0500, Seth Nickell wrote:
> flavour) also reroots the path bar. So some things reroot and some
> things don't.

	Violating PoLS so heavily is really hard to justify as "easy",
you know.

> Instead of treating the list on the left as shortcut commands, we
> explicitly define it as not controlling the file list, but as tied to
> the state of the path bar's root.  One item in the list is always
> selected, and controls the root of the pathbar. The pathbar's toggled
> state, in turn, controls the current folder displayed by the file list.

	Why reroot?  Why not just "hide" the uninteresting parts of the
root.  How do you title differing folders with the same name?  The
shortcut list on OS X has the same problem.

	o Navigate to $HOME/Documents
	o Drag to shortcut list, creating a shortcut "Documents"
	o Navigate to /team/Documents
	o Drag to shortcut list, creating another shortcut "Documents"

	In OS X, it is confusing.  What you end up doing is picking one,
then looking at your path history in the scrolling view to figure out if
you have the appropriate one.  This is surely not good UI.  But
forbidding two shortcuts named "Documents" is really bad too, as the
user often doesn't have control of the folder names.
	With your solution, there is no context for the user to even
find, so they are doubly in trouble.  In fact, they are stuck.
	I'm not asking for all-deep-paths, all-the-time.  I think it
would be nice to have a way for the path bar to scroll out of people's
way when the nesting is deep.  But making it impossible to get to
parent hierarchy seems unpleasantly restrictive.
	One thing I'd like to avoid, if its possible, is "stupid" vs
"smart" modes.  If you have a seperate setting for "I am 'smart', give
me full paths in my path bar", you've just created a case where user A
can walk over to user B's computer and be completely confused as to how
the interface works.  That's bad.  You really want to enable both users
to see what they need to see in the same exact dialog.  Heck, just an
"expand pathbar" button to the left of "Home", just like the "full tree
browse" toggle on the Save As dialog, would do the trick.

Joel

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