Re: [Nautilus-list] Nautilus user testing at MIT

[Darin Adler <darin eazel com>]

As usual, I agree wholeheartedly with John's comments. I wanted to respond
to one section of the feedback that he seems to have missed.

on 1/3/01 3:26 AM, Rebecca Schulman at rebecka eazel com wrote:

>> "Susan B. Jones" wrote:
>> 
>>> One of the things that we have seen rather consistently is that when
>>> testers open Nautilus, they don't see what they expect.  What they expect
>>> is that the Nautilus window will open.  Instead, the environment changes
>>> and new icons appear on the desktop.
>>> 
>>> If I am a Windows or Mac user, I guess I would expect that the desktop
>>> would open on start up, then I would know to open the Home/My Computer
>>> whatever it's called icon to get to the File Manager.  I guess, what we
>>> have now is a kind of choice: do you want the Nautilus environment or the
>>> Unix environment.  Isn't that kind of half-assed?  If we're heading for a
>>> GUI environment, why not start with the GUI?  I'm not sure I'm saying this
>>> right, but...

This has more to do with the PR2 packaging than with the real Nautilus. We
expect the desktop to be there at startup in normal configurations once
Nautilus is included with GNOME 1.4 and that's made part of Linux
distributions. And "opening Nautilus" will always create a new window
(although it will also show the icons on the desktop if they aren't already
there and the preference to "not manage the desktop" hasn't been tweaked).

    -- Darin