Re: Nautilus Preference Proposal -- another point of view

[Dave Bordoley <bordoley msu edu>]

I'm just going to run through this really quickly. Note that their are
no longer nautilus themes (well there won't be any in gnome 2.2), icon
theming should be part of the general theme dialog.

I'm going to selectively cut and paste too, but this is just to make it
easier to read, don't take offense please. I just don't have time to
comment on everything.

On Wed, 2002-10-23 at 05:42, Luca Ferretti wrote:
> 
> 
> ====================================================================== 
> 
> Design Guidelines 
>         * have a cool preferences dialog (no notebook, please!)

Tabs are the standard hig compliant categorization method for preference
dialogs, we should and to my knowledge will use them in any new design.

> Better: make trash a real GNOME desktop entities. Actually users can set
> "move in trash, don't erase", use gthumb and _permanently_ remove
> images. 
> 

I actually would love to see all the nautilus trash handeling move into
gnome vfs so all apps can share it, but what does this have to do with
the preferences. I could conceivably see the show alert pref being more
global for apps that may use the same method in the future, but again
thats the future not now and we need to be realistic about what we can
do.

> 
> ----Interface 
> I disagree the galeon style *bar visibility setting. From HIG: "The View
> menu contains only items that affect the user's view of the _current
> document_." 
> I expect if I want disable statusbar from all windows I've to go in
> preferences.

In practice this is very confusing to users. What is the use case, how
many people turn off the statusbar in one window but want it on in
another. By enabling a global change in the view menu, we move towards a
more directly manipulative ui. This is good.
 
> BTW in View menu we have zoom, view as and item placing options too:
> they work __only__ on the folder you are viewing and not for all
> folders. 

yeah but are you suggesting that toolbars etc. should be per directory.
I'm a big fan of the whole object oriented ui concept and have been
constantly trying to move nautilus toward it but in practice many per
directory features are downright confusing to users (per directory zooms
come to mind here).

> an "Edit->Decorations" dialog (to pick up throbber, zoom controls, all
> windows background... but I'll send another mail about it) 
> 

who is going to implement this? We need real gnome-wide toolbar editing
yes, but this discussion is not the place for it.

> ----Item Views 
> 'cause old 'Icon Captions" category affect _only_ Icon view, it's placed
> in Icon View preferences. New labels should be more useful then old to
> recognize how exactly zoom works. 

My original design had these grouped with the icon preferences in the
views menu, but this caused the tab pane to be too long. So jan and I
comprimised and left these prefs how they are even though we're not
happy about it :)

> 'Show Columns' in list view pref: ok, just to fill empty space, but it
> can be useful :)) 

We need to be realistic someone needs to implement a feature before we
can have a pref.

> 
> Orphans: 
>         * 'executable text files": I'm not sure that "Always run/view
>           scripts" are useful. "Ask each" is the better (you can select
>           run/run in terminal!!!) default option. If you want to change
>           it, probably you are a very advanced user, or you need to
>           run/view always scripts, so launch gconf-editor :-)

These prefs take up little space in mine and the current design, and do
provide a level of security. I just don't see an immediate reason to
remove them. They're not in the way (ie. they don't impose a bad ui) and
may be useful to some users.

>         * theming capabilities: I'll send a different post on it, but
>           take a look at preferences.glade 

They already are removed.

Thanks for the comments and thanks for getting involved. 

dave