Re: [Nautilus-list] I tried the demo of Nautilus..

[John Sullivan <sullivan eazel com>]

Sorry for the slow response. We've been really busy with the 1.0 release
recently and haven't been as responsive as usual.

> From: "Blad, John Erling" <john erling blad aftenposten no>
> Date: Thursday, February 22, 2001 1:57 PM
> To: nautilus-list lists eazel com
> Subject: [Nautilus-list] I tried the demo of Nautilus..
> 
> .. and should be allowed to say something about it!  ;)
> 
> My first try chrashed Nautilus.
> It was usr00008 I belive..
> Was a bit curious and poked around. Gee.. You got nerve..
> 
> Back inside after a couple of tries I found a user with a chrashed..
> Don't know.. usr00014 is weird..
> Okey, another try..
> usr00002 don't work either..

I'm not sure what any of the above means. Are these user IDs for Eazel
Services, or are you creating users on your Linux box for Nautilus testing
purposes?

> What about some kind of sweaper script that cleans up
> the users? I gess there is a lot of people that would love to
> make life hard for you!
> 
> usr00010 works! Yuppi!
> 
> Here goes the comments
> 
> 1) Emblems are not internatinal
> A pencil with a stopsign?
> A stopsign with a pencil?
> To me that is.. Hmm,.. No write? I got it on some catalogue where
> I can write. Or..?

I'm not sure that this is really an internationalization problem. I think
the emblems just might not be clear enough. It would be great if you could
report a bug at Bugzilla.eazel.com specifying which emblems were not clear
to you.

> 2) Opens a property dialog box
> - ops.. it dissapeard.. oh, it's behind the main window..
> I can change the group! no I can't.. I gess I'm speciel somehow
> and only belongs to a single group.. Why can I change the group then?
> Three different views of the same permissions? If this was simpler
> it could go in the basic group.

The permissions are the standard unix permissions. We'd like to come up with
some simpler UI than just showing all the standard unix permissions someday,
but we didn't do that for the first release. In any case, at least expert
users will always need to be able to access & change all the standard unix
permissions.

> So I can set a custom icon? How do I remove them system wide?
> I don't remember very long what I use for different files. (Stupid me)

There is no feature currently to seek out and delete all custom icons. I
haven't heard anyone ask for such a feature before. If you think this would
be useful, please enter a bug about it at bugzilla.eazel.com.

> The buttons at the bottom of the window, they look like dialog buttons
> but they are not. In fact, I tried to change the name of one icon
> and pushing the buttons afterwards..
> I even was looking for "Apply" in the "Emblems" group but then realized
> something had already happen.

I'm not sure what you mean here. It's true that the properties window is
modeless and that all changes take place right away.

> 3) Closes the dialog box.. Closes.. Kills the window through the window
> manager.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Closing the window by clicking the close
box didn't work for some reason?

> 4) Tries "Help" in the left pane.. Fails with an error about web view..
> I was accessing a man page through help and got a web error?
> Hopefully this is a local server?

This is some sort of problem with the Mozilla component. The help pages are
indeed local. Maybe some Mozilla expert (I'm not one) could help you figure
out why it didn't work for you, if you could supply more information (what
version of Nautilus, what platform, how did you install Mozilla...)

> Tries another one, or AnotherClock. That fails too..

I'm not sure what you mean here.

> 5) Why the help tree.. It looks lik it has something in common with history..
> Opens the history and double clicks desktop (This killed Nautilus in usr00008)
> The tree don't open but the desktop goes on top in the list and the desktop
> is shown in the right pane. The history is a list but the help is a tree..
> Something in the back of my head says this is opposite of what it used to be.
> Perhaps it is just me that asossiates help with lists.

We recently fixed a bug where the desktop would appear in the History list,
so that problem is gone. I'm not sure why you think history should be a
tree, or help a flat list. Can you explain this more?

> 
> 6) Notes should be simple! I allways takes notes. I pile them up on my desktop
> (the real one) until they fall off. I write a test note. And zapping around.
> IF ANYONE FINDS A NOTE ABOUT UGLY LOOKING GIRLS PLEASE DELETE IT!!

I'm not sure what your point is. Did something bad happen to your note? Was
it hard to write into a note?

> 7) Made a file with touch and tried to trash it. Dragged it to trash but it
> don't work..

We've fixed various problems recently with items not appearing in the Trash.
Please try again with the latest build if you get a chance.

> "Move to Trash" between "Properties" and "Duplicate"? Well, I can always find
> it in the trash if I misses I gess..

That's an interesting point; I suppose "Move to Trash" could be more
isolated from less destructive menu items. Of course, like you say, it
doesn't actually do anything destructive (assuming you can find the item in
the Trash afterwards!).

> Hmm, my trashcan is empty..

Hopefully fixed now.
 
> 8) Icon captions. Sounds cool. Why don't anything happen? Oh, I have to zoom.

By default, at the default zoom level (100%), there are two pieces of
information under each icon (name & size). So if you change "size" to
something else in the first menu in the Icon Captions dialog, you will see
an immediate change. It's true that changes to the other menus won't be
reflected at the default zoom level. That's why the explanatory text is
there. I agree that there's probably a way to change the design here to make
it clearer.

> How?
> Forgot to add something? Gee I can zoom the icons in the toolbar! That is, I'm
> on /home/users and I lost my home folder.. So I change to list view.

I'm not sure what you mean here.

> 9) What's that in the menu bar? Nothing changes.. Okey, I'm a beginner I
> belive..

I'm not sure what you mean here.

> But there is the preferences! I think the demo is a bit slow so I want to
> speed it up. Speed trade offs.. There is nothing there.. Perhaps there are
> some other prefs somewhere?

It's a bug that empty categories appeared in the preferences dialog. We've
fixed that now.

> 10) Find sounds cool. I used that one a lot to find files on this computer! ;)
> If I pushes "Find" I got one gui, if I pushes "Web search" I get something
> else..

Maybe someday we will integrate searching the web with searching the local
file system, though they are extremely different operations of course.

> If no one is selected I get a third..

I'm not sure what you mean here.

> In find there are globs..? What the heck
> is that? I give up.. Perl has something called globs, do you expect users,
> even experienced ones to program a find operation in Perl?

"globs" are expressions like *.c and the like. I agree that the term is
horribly nerdly and unlikely to be understood by most people. The
functionality is pretty useful though.

> 
> 11) With a web search I can choose what kind of browser I want to use. Gee..
> Just a thought, I want to look at a web page, I'm not really interested
> in what browser I can use at this point. Perhaps I want to set it as a
> preference.

Nautilus offers up a list of external applications that can be used to open
the currently-viewed location. It's not specific to web pages -- try viewing
a text file in Nautilus and you'll see the same kind of thing. Which
applications are on this list, and which behavior you get by default, is
configurable by each user. Try the "Open with..." button in the sidebar and
set the defaults the way you'd like them.

> Netscape generated a ton of errors.. Oki, killed it.. Can't set which browser
> I want to use but I can try to use gedit. Suprise, it failed.

Nautilus used to show applications that were registered to work for the
displayed type of file, even if they didn't work for remote files and the
displayed file was remote. This has since been changed, and those choices
won't appear.

> At this point I got a message about my demo was about to die.

Wow, I didn't know we could predict that in advance!  : )

> Now, someone would say I'm to harsh about Nautilus but this is what I have
> done for
> several years. If I can't find a ton of errors for each window then I haven't
> looked hard enough. This is just a short list, I could go on and on.

I know what you mean. I can find seemingly endless problems with every
piece of software I study. It's sometimes fun, and sometimes annoying,
depending on what mood I'm in.

> A real problem when you try to make something like this is that you get to
> involved. All those
> neat little gadgets you make are so nice you forget why you make them in the
> first place.
> I once got in one such trap myself. Wouldn't realize the problem until we did
> some user testing.
> The users didn't know what to do but sure it was a nice GUI.

I agree that it's easy to get too close to what you're working on and not
realize it's many flaws. I'd like to think that's not so much the case with
Nautilus. I know it has many flaws (check out bugzilla.eazel.com for a
reasonably complete list), but I don't think too many of them are caused by
the developers not listening to outside opinions. I think most of them are
caused by the ever-present tradeoff between time and desired features.

> Nautilus *is* very neat but there *are* weak spots.

I'm glad that you think it's neat despite the weak spots. I have my own long
list of most disliked aspects of Nautilus. I hope I'll be able to fix a lot
of them sooner or later. Unfortunately we can't fix them all immediately.

Input like this is very helpful. It's even more helpful to put specific bugs
in bugzilla.eazel.com, because those are very unlikely to "fall through the
cracks".

Thanks for your feedback,

John

> John Blad
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Nautilus-list mailing list
> Nautilus-list lists eazel com
> http://lists.eazel.com/mailman/listinfo/nautilus-list
>