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

["Ryan Muldoon" <rpmuldoon students wisc edu>]

comments interspersed below...

> Personally, I feel the menu panel with the programs menu,
> etc... is more appropriate than the panel/foot menu.

what do you mean by the "menu panel?"  The foobar panel?
Something like that is definitely a personal preference, not hard HCI facts
that we need to act on.

Two, I think there
> should be a global user preference instead of a nautilus specific one. It
> would be much nicer and more elegant if gnome, nautilus, and other apps
> worked together with the user preferences.

I agree that decisions like this should either be across the desktop, or not
there at all.
Havoc is right in saying that we can't get rid of the "crack-smoking"
preferences, because some people
(including myself, occasionally) like to tweak everything.  But most
preferences can be safely hidden, provided that we come up with good
defaults.

Ex. Have a advanced,
> intermediate, and novice setting directly on the menu panel. Selecting one
> of the three there would then effect everything.

It seems like the control center would be a better place for this....I don't
think that people will be switching all that often.

One thing that should be noted is that user levels should only affect things
that have nothing to do with actual functionality - a novice user should
still be able to use all the functions that gnumeric offers, for example.
It should just reflect what tweaks are available, like reorganizing menus
and such.

 I also feel that the
> redundancy in gnome/nautilus should be gotten rid of. It only leads to
> cluttering and confusion. Ex. Take web browsing aspects out of nautilus,
> and have sawfish, panel, nautilus, and other key desktop options in one
> place.

This is really two different things.
I completely disagree with the whole "take web browsing out of nautilus"
crowd.
My feeling is that Nautilus should exploit its whole "bonobo shell" nature.
It should just Work when you click on filetypes.  The distinction between
local and remote documents, and file formats, should be irrelevant.
Right now, the mozilla component isn't that great.  BUT, Galeon has really
nice browsing.  I don't see why the galeon folks can't turn their mozilla
stuff into a more featureful gtkmozembed.....They already have the code
separation because of their Tabs work....may as well make it a nice bonobo
component that nautilus can use too.  So, if I just want a web browser, I
can use galeon.  If I want to do just general document stuff, I'll use
nautilus, and if I happen to need web pages, I don't have to switch
applications.  I thought the whole idea behind component systems is getting
away from the focus on which application does what, and focusing on just
having the functionality available when it is needed.

I agree that nautilus preferences and sawfish preferences, and various other
things like that should be put into a reorganized control center.  It would
be cool if we could focus on grouping things based on
similarity/functionality rather than artificial application separations.  I
should change my font/color information in one place.  I should change theme
stuff in one place.  Things like that.

This should be accessed through the menu panel. Unlike Explorer in
> windows, I do not feel nautilus should play the role for doing
> this.  Nautilus should stick to being a file browser and that's about
> it.

Then we are wasting half of the potential of nautilus.  It's a cool file
browser, but it can be a lot more, and I think we should exploit that.

I also think the layout of the panels, etc.. should be fixed for both
> novice and intermediate levels. Only a "advanced" user should be able to
> customize the desktop.

I disagree.....the lower levels of skill should just have simplified
choices.  I thought Ximian's Doorman did a great job of offering really
simple cookie-cutter choices that were easy to understand.  Something like
that in the control center for beginners would be really excellent.

Having it this way will make explanations to new
> users much easier since they have not likely changed their
> desktop. Anyway, what feelings do you guys have on this?
>
A lot of people use GNOME precisely because they can configure it.  Rather
than throwing all config options out the window, we should try and just make
simple configuration options for beginners, and offer the current level of
configuration (with some UI fixes) for advanced users.

Being able to lock down configurations could be useful, but I'm sure some
gconf magic can take care of that.

    --Ryan