Re: [Nautilus-list] Re: GNOME user environment brainstorming

[Simeon Walker <simeon sbs bangor ac uk>]

Luke Hutchison wrote:

> Have a look at how ROX desktop ( http://rox.sourceforge.net ) does it: they
> have a special button on the taskbar for Home, Apps, etc., and one for each
> drive.  The Filer *is* the menu system; applications are self-contained in
> special "application directories" which are executable through the Filer so
> they can be moved around without installing/uninstalling.  A very good point
> is made on the website that many people don't even learn how their
> filesystem structure is organised because Win32 isolates them from it
> through its Start menu and Open dialog boxes.  (Neither are ideal solutions
> to the problem.)  It's a radical thought, now that Win32 has permeated
> everyone's thinking, but why not have a folder called "Programs" which
> contains all your apps next to one called "Documents" that contains all your
> docs, or even better, have a folder called "DTP" that contains your DTP
> program launcher, a few related utilities, and a subfolder called "DTP
> Docs".  When you want to do some DTP, you open your "DTP" folder and voila,
> there is everything that is related to that context.  This has parallels
> with the nicities of encapsulation in OOP--the data and the code that
> operates on that data is all encapsulated in one place.  Using the
> filesystem heirarchy is a required and natural part of what users do, so
> they learn how to think about where they are putting things when they save,
> and you end up with far fewer directories with hundreds of documents in.
> Users tend to create subdirectories for everything (I have seen this over
> several years using RISC OS, after which ROX is modelled) and you end up
> with much more of a tree than the flat mess that most users' drives turn
> into in Windows.


RISC OS had some wonderful and simple ideas that the Gnome
project could learn from.

The Save-as dialog box was much simpler than the Windows/Gnome/KDE
model. You have a filer window open at the directory you're
working in and then you just drag an icon from the Save-as box
to the filer window. You could even drop the icon into another
application (e.g. from text editor to a frame in a DTP program).
Couldn't the standard Gnome Save-as dialog box be made to work
like this?

Another nice feature was the installation of programs. You
dragged a directory from one place and droppped it somewhere
else! If the dir contains a script with a certain name then that
script is run to start the program within when the dir is double-
clicked from the filer (rather than simply opening the dir). If
there was a particular image file within the dir then that became
the applications icon (in place of the default dir icon). This
kind of thing may be harder to implement with unix-like systems
where an applications files are spread across the system (and
package management had to be invented to deal with it...)

IIRC RISC OS programs had no File|Open menu item, why bother
when you can just drag an icon from a filer window and drop
it into an application or onto an applications icon?


Sadly, I think, RISC OS shows how little progress had been made
in mainstream user interfaces over the past 10-15 years.

Regards,
Simeon

--
Simeon Walker,                      email: simeon sbs bangor ac uk
School of Biological Sciences,      phone: +44 (0)1248 383702
University of Wales, Bangor,        fax: +44 (0)1248 382569
Gwynedd, LL57 2UW, UK.              www: http://biology.bangor.ac.uk/