Re: Nautilus 2.6 - We're going all spatial

["Eugenia Loli-Queru" <eloli hotmail com>]

A reply to a previous email: regarding Alex Larsson's presentation last year
about the OO Nautilus:

>Another victim in the object oriented world is embedding viewers for
>files in the nautilus window. Different directory views such as listview
>and iconview make sense, but since opening a file have to open a new
>window it makes much more sense to open the actual application
>editing or viewing that type of file. You don't want to click on
>e.g. a postscript file and get a postscript view in a worthless
>filemanager frame that can't do anything else than go "up" to pop up
>the previous window. You would much rather have a postscript viewer
>application.

I agree with that. Embedded viewers on a file manager are useless and
specialized apps should be used instead. Let's not pull a Konqueror on
Nautilus. :D

Reply to Seth:

> BeOS mostly *had* power users using it by and large. They were what we
> might call "intermediate users".
>
> 1) BeOS was very much aimed at an enthusiast community, all very
> sophisticated users compared to your basic office user.

Actually, a lot of BeOS users were really newbies, surprisingly enough.
Computer enthusiasts yes, but not all of them were proficient. It was
countless times that I had to tell people on forums or IM to open a terminal
on BeOS to fix their driver or other problems and they just didn't know how
to use a terminal _at all_.

>Linux has that
> appeal right now [office user], but I think there's a lot of interest in
GNOME toward
> appealing to a broader corporate desktop.

Right. So are you saying that MacOSX and Windows do not have an office
appeal then? Why did Apple moved to Navigational model on OSX if they
already had OO on MacOS and that was so much extremely better?

Gnome should innovate instead of rehashing MacOS 8/9 IMHO. "Storage" is a
great innovation and idea for example and congratulations on your work on
it. But this new OO nautilus, well, I am not sure just yet. I am not saying
that Nautilus is great right now btw, it does not please me as much as
Windows Explorer or even OpenTracker does regarding *productivity*, for
example. But that doesn't mean that making it OO will make things any
better.

As for Gnome on the broader corporate desktop: how can you be sure that this
is what these office users want and conceptualize? Personally, I am just not
convinced. I need more input and proof on that instead of trying out dresses
to see which one fits better at the end.

> 2) Almost anybody who's noisy is an enthusiast. You are assuming just
> because 1000 people complained this indicates that pretty much all your
> population loves navigation model.

When this complain was happening (1999-2000), BeOS was in its hey day: it
had more than 150,000 users. Sure, it is not many compared to OSX's 7
millions of users, but it is a good and _clear_ sample of what the majority
wanted.

> But you have major self-selection
> bias: the people who complain are both technically proficient and
> they're more apt to say something because they were not . Pavel was
> probably right not to cave just because a bunch of people made noise.

Well, that "bunch of people" were his customers. If you are telling me that
a company should not listen to its customers' public outcry (literally!),
then you are not telling me much really. Gnome today also has a bigger
market of such "bunch of people" instead of office users (who are btw
already trained on MS Explorer's navigational model and probably they prefer
it because they know it).

BTW, I would really need an answer on my previous question: I need more info
of how OO Nautilus can improve my productivity overall. That's what really
matters at the end of the day. We use computers to do our job faster and
better, aren't we?

thank you,
Eugenia