Re: [Usability]Dealing with files in Gnome

[Wesley Leggette <wleggette gate net>]

Regarding Pick up and drop, I think the semantics are no better. What
happens if you "pick up" one object, then another, and then drop? It
would defy all expectations to "drop" both of them at the new location
if this is simply a change in cut, copy, paste. So assuming that that it
would work this same way, the change in terminology is pointless. We all
know what cut, copy, and paste mean and it's more than logical to assume
our users do to.

But of course there is a utility for remembering multiple cuts and
placing them all in the new paste spot. But users would have to be able
to easily remember what they have currently cut (some sort of cursor
tag-a-long that shows the icon's they are carrying and allows them to
drop all or some of them unchanged?). If this sort of behavior were
implemented, "pick up" and "drop" would make a lot of sense, and since
it's different that traditional cut and paste, the name change would be
appropriate. And hey, we could always have a preferences toggle between
the two modes of operation.

On Mon, 2003-03-31 at 11:48, MArk Finlay wrote:
> The (very) recent discussion on the nautilus list[1] about whether or
> not nautilus view should be editable got me thinking about the way gnome
> deals with files in general. Atm we have the "Open with" menu in
> nautilus which is divided into internal viewers and external
> applications which can both be either viewers or editors.
> 
> There is a lot of duplication here. eg. we have internal and external
> image viewers: "Open with gthumb" "Open with eog" and "Open with Image
> viewer". All in all, it's less than ideal IMHO.
> 
> Maybe others greater than myself have done it before, but I stepped back
> and asked myself this: "A user is looking at a folder of files, what
> could they want to do with them?" There are the obvious move, delete,
> rename, copy which I'm not going to go into[2]. 
> 
> Aside from those - they generally either want to view a file or edit it.
> The distinction between them is really useful as it allows us to use eog
> instead of the gimp when we just want to look at a picture.
> I may be totally wrong about that, but If I'm not then it makes sense
> to me that "Edit" and "View" be more prevelent in the general ui.
> 
> Would it not make more sense to have "View with.." and "Edit with.."
> items in the nautilus context menu, than to have an "Open with.." item
> with a mixture of viewers and editors, and with no obvious distinction
> between them?
>  
> Then there is the issue of internal viewers v's external viewers.
> Personally I think that nautilus should be a file manager and try to do
> it well and eog should be an image viewer and do it well etc.. and they
> should not overlap. I find that users get very confused when they click
> on a file and then the directory they were browsing disappears. It seems
> much more intuitive to me to have the file be "viewed" in a new window
> and have the user close that window when they are done.
> 
> [1] along with a related discussion I had on #abiword
> 
> [2] But I do think that we should use pick up and drop
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77293
-- 
Wesley Leggette <wleggette gate net>