Re: Nautilus bugs and design choices

[Tuomas Kuosmanen <tigert ximian com>]

On Mon, 2002-07-08 at 23:54, Erik Pukinskis wrote:
> On Mon, 2002-07-08 at 16:39, Reinout van Schouwen wrote:
> > What people are used to from windows does (or should) not matter; web
> > browsers even less since Nautilus is not a web browser.
> 
> I agree that it's counter-productive to let consistency with windows get
> in the way with internal consistency in GNOME.  That said...
> 
> The reason to have browser-style navigation in a file manager is that
> many people treat their disks like the internet.  I don't have a
> citation, but I've been told that while programmers tend to keep track
> of hierarchies very easily, less technical people view their computing
> experience as a linear thing.  They follow a sequence of steps to
> accomplish a goal.  Because of this, it's easy for them to grok that in
> order to go to where they were a few steps ago, they don't navigate "up"
> the tree, but they go back through the steps, like they would in a web
> browser.
> 
> At least that's my understanding of it. 

I used to use "open each folder in a new window" which is nice since
different things opened in different parts of the screen etc.. 

I also used to hate "open in current window" since I was used to MacOS9,
which is very nice. It used "everything opens in a new window" -mode.

OSX however defaults to "browse" mode, and I have found myself liking
that too. The reason is that these days I have a lot more files on my
computer, they are organized in quite large folder structures (nested
etc) so it is not practical to use "open in new window" anymore.

There is one thing though, I do like to use a bunch of folders on the
*desktop* since *those* folders open in new windows and they are easily
found on the desktop. So I sort of get best of both worlds. Quick access
(and saved window size and position) for desktop folders, and then quick
browsing and navigation in the deeper dir structures.

I think this is *very* much a matter of your personal usage pattern, so
this is one of the few preferences that makes sense to be around. 

Currently Nautilus is very lovely for me, I am thankful for the hard
work you all have done for it for the Gnome2 port, it just rules. You
got all my big issues and feature requests fixed and implemented.. A big
thank you for that! :-) I was watching my Gnome2 desktop the other day
and I realized: this is it, dudes. *A Desktop*. It sounds so cheesy to
write it in a dull email like this, but it was really a big "whoa!"
moment for me.

Now be careful to not make too quick decisions to remove "unneeded"
features or such :^) I dont want it to be broken again..

Tuomas

-- 
:: :: Tuomas Kuosmanen  :: Art Director, Ximian :: ::
:: :: tigert ximian com :: www.ximian.com       :: ::