Re: [Nautilus-list] unification

[David Moles <david moles vykor com>]

On Mon, 2001-12-03 at 14:50, Jamin Philip Gray wrote:
> On Mon, 3 Dec 2001, David Moles wrote:
> 
> > So do the menu bars, toolbars, etc. all suddenly change when you
> > type a web address in? As a user, I'd be freaked out. It seems to
> > me like it would kind of miss the point of having my file manager
> > also do web browsing. (Maybe this needs to be on the usability
> > mailing list?)
> 
> The galeon web view is very young and doesn't do much yet...certainly
> doesn't start changing tool bars.  It's an interesting point for
> discussion, but I don't think toolbars changing freaks out users.
> IE/Explorer, MS Office are all examples like this.  If you go to a web
> address in windows explorer, suddently you're in IE.  It just works.
> If you're in Word, and click on an embedded spreadsheet, suddenly you're
> viewing the Excel editing controls.  Personally I think that's beatiful
> because it just works.  

*When* it just works, it's beautiful. :) I think it would be beautiful
if the whole GNOME environment worked that way (which I think is what
Bonobo is designed to do -- move away from an application-centric mode
of operation to a data-centric one), but when it's inconsistently 
applied -- e.g., when only some applications can do the trick, and when
there's a difference between "application X running as a component
inside application Y" and "application X running by itself" -- I think
it's confusing. How many Windows users do you know who generally edit
their MS Word documents using a Word component embedded in IE?

But hey, this is all anecdotal bitching. Let's see some user testing! :)