Re: PATCH for some random stuff.

[Darin Adler <darin bentspoon com>]

On Tuesday, June 25, 2002, at 12:35  PM, Dave Camp wrote:

> On Tue, 2002-06-25 at 03:10, Dave Bordoley wrote:
> > Finally I removed the oh so annoying switch to manual layout dialog.
> > Basically this dialog pops up on me daily and i find it pretty 
> > annoying
> > (i think other users do too). IMHO when I choose to use automatic
> > layout, I have made my choice. I don't need nautilus constantly asking
> > me if I want to change. Removing this dialog make nautilus's behavior
> > consistent with that of Mac OS finder as well.
>
> Yeah, this dialog can be pretty annoying, but I wonder if someone put 
> it
> there for a good reason.  Were users having trouble finding a way to
> switch to manual layout?  Were they getting confused when they would
> drag an icon to an empty space and it would snap back?

Perhaps the original design isn't working. The intent was this:

Lets say someone has never heard about manual vs. automatic layout at 
all. The default is to use automatic layout. Someone who understands 
automatic layout is not going to click on an icon and try to drag it 
within the same window. But someone who is not aware of it who wants to 
move an icon might drag it within the window. If he does, we let him 
know what's going on with a dialog, put the icon where he dragged it, 
and we switch to manual layout so that other icons can be dragged into 
position and the icon location is preserved. When we implemented this, 
it seemed to me like a nice gentle introduction to the notion of manual 
layout, and we expected that experienced users would never see the 
dialog because they wouldn't try to move icons around within a window 
if it was set to use automatic layout.

I think that it's quite frustrating to drag an icon to a new position 
and have nothing happen, silently, which is what's done on Macintosh in 
this case.

Another wrinkle to the implementation is that if you nudge an icon, all 
the other icon positions are kept the same as what you were looking at, 
as laid out by automatic layout. But if you switch from manual layout 
to automatic and back using the menu, all the icons go back to the old 
manual layout positions. This is intended to be nice for manually laid 
out folders; you can switch to automatic layout to sort by some 
criteria, and then when you switch back your careful manual layout is 
not lost.

Anyway, I gather from the tone of Dave Bordoley's initial message that 
more experienced users are nudging icons and getting annoyed that a 
dialog appears, so perhaps it's time to reconsider the original design.

    -- Darin