Re: Usability of the GTK+ 2 file open dialog

[Michael L Torrie <torriem chem byu edu>]

On Tue, 2006-03-07 at 14:39 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> No, but people in this thread were talking about reverting to the old
> file chooser, as if that would improve things. It would just mean that
> a different group of people would start to scream (and the intersection
> of the screaming groups would probably be non-empty). People
> just like to complain...

I don't think we're (I'm) calling for a reverting to the old system,
we're just pointing out the features that many of us grew to depend on
from the old dialog box.  The old dialog box had many usability issues
where cool features were hidden.  

This thread really should be focused on
a) what is wrong with the current selector (usability issues have
already been pointed out)
b) what features need to be added to it to improve functionality but not
impede usability
c) how to make the new (current) dialog just as fast and efficient as
the old one (can we satisfy keyboarders and mouse users at the same time
without requiring a lot of extra keystrokes (like an extra slash to
start typing a path).

As bad as the old dialog box was, the tab-completion feature alone made
it amazingly complete and efficient.

The current design is different than the old design.  This new design
does not necessarily fix the problems the old one had; it merely
replaces them with a new set of problems.  Maybe they are smaller
problems, though.  I hope that some day we can kick that stigma that is
quite pervasive among people I talk to online and around the office
about how GTK rocks except for that darn file selector.  As klunky and
windows-like as KDE's selector is, I have yet to hear one single
complaint about it.  It seems to suit both newbies and experts alike.
If I want to I can type out the full path to my file.  Or I can type in
a new mask.  Or I can point and grunt.  Either way.  I use Gnome because
overall I like it better.  I prefer GTK because it is by far the
cleanest and best UI toolkit ever invented.  

I realize that this is all talk at this point on my part.  I don't have
time to code up a better dialog for myself at this moment.  So in the
end, I can only make suggestions.

Michael



> 
> Matthias
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