Re: Killing Views Part 2 - The return of the Usabilty study

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Wed, 2003-06-04 at 06:40, Joshua Adam Ginsberg wrote:

> Then we add an item to the toolbar called "Preview" or something like
> that... it would turn the cursor into something like a magnifying glass
> furthermore a window would be spawned... when the user's mouse is not
> over an icon, this window prompts the user to do so... when the user
> hovers over an icon, on one part of this window, file information is
> displayed... on the other part of this window, a preview can be seen...
> so for images an image appears... for an mp3 an embedded mp3 player
> starts playing it... text files and word processing documents can be
> previewed... This window could in fact be a hack of the universal
> previewer...

Haven't been following this too closely so far so apologies if this has
already been said, but...

Rather than opening another window, you could probably preview most file
types fairly reasonably in the sidebar (like XP does, but potentially
better, since XP doesn't do audio previews of audio files, or animated
previews of video files). Text files could be a problem in such a small
area, but I guess you could allow zooming in or out. 

I guess it depends whether you really mean "preview" or "view", which
are two different things: to me, a "preview" shows you enough to
determine whether you've selected the right file to open in another
application, and a "view" is a read-only but complete rendition of the
file that you can use *instead* of opening it in another application.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems