Re: display full path in spatial nautilus

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Tue, 2003-11-18 at 19:14, David Adam Bordoley wrote:

> But does /home/dave/whatever really tell a user where they are?[1] 

No, I was just being facetious :)  

I think most of us would like to see a Mac-style tree or column view in
Nautilus at some stage, or perhaps even (as an interim step) just a
modified sidebar treeview.  Until we have something like that, though, I
think we're potentially open to the same criticism that befell things
like the Win95 file dialog[1] and Explorer[2], i.e. there's not
necessarily any way of telling where you are just by looking at the
window.  

I don't deny that's not always important, particularly for the type of
user who isn't likely to concoct complex hierarchies to store their
stuff in. I know I sometimes feel I'm wandering around a bit aimlessly
when I'm using the new nautilus though... but maybe I'm just like that
generally :) 

> No need to compute, no mental load, 
> this is the folder I'm in. This is how macos has worked forever

Indeed it is... I wonder how many people use the icon view on MacOS by
default though (which like our current Nautilus windows, gives no
spatial context), rather than the list or column view?  I have no idea,
but it might be interesting to find out.

Cheeri,
Calum.

[1]
http://web.archive.org/web/20021216062116/http://www.iarchitect.com/file95.htm
[2] 
http://web.archive.org/web/20021216062116/http://www.iarchitect.com/explore.htm#EXP1

-- 
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