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

[Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com>]

John Sullivan wrote:

> I agree with the sentiment, but I'm not sure about the proposal. This view
> presents large amounts of text intended for reading. 

Yes, that would be a concern... I supposed the question that springs to
mind is how often do people open text files *only* to read them,
though?  Certainly in my experience, most times you want to edit them,
or print them, or mail them to somebody, or make a copy of them.  Given
that you currently have to open the text file in another application to
do anything all that useful with it anyway, the preview feature (to me)
is just a very quick visual check that you're about to open the right
file, it's not something I'd ever be sitting and reading like a book. 
(Not that this argument would cut any ice with visually-impaired users,
admittedly, but you would expect them to be running with a high-contrast
colour scheme that would make read-only components more legible for them
anyway.)

Then again, I use Netscape 4.x for Solaris every day, and its GUI has a
grey background for everything except the "compose new mail" window (the
only major thing you can type into), so I'm probably just too used to
reading whole emails off a grey background!

> Changing the background color to the "uneditable text" color would make it 
> harder to read. Typically an "uneditable text" color is used to distinguish 
> small amounts of text that are temporarily uneditable for some reason 

Hmm, well IMHO temporarily-uneditable text fields ought to be indicated
by being disabled or greyed-out, as that gives a clearer indication that
there's something you can do to make them editable again.  Personally
I'd only ever use the "read-only" text-field style with text that's
always read-only-- which is very rarely, in fact, because a static text
field usually does the same job without the visual clutter of an extra
border. 

> The lack of context menu is a missing feature. It's worth doing, but not
> high enough priority for us to do before 1.0. It would be helpful if you
> would submit a bug report about it to bugzilla.eazel.com.

With pleasure... I just wanted to double-check first, as I know my
build's a wee bit behind the latest one...

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems