Re: Volume handling proposal

["David Adam Bordoley" <bordoley msu edu>]

Hi Alex, 

In the interest in keeping down the spam I'm going to reply to a bunch of 
comments of yours from different emails in one. Hope you don't mind :) 



> So, my proposal handles this by only showing mounted CDs on the desktop,
> to not waste space there, but show unmounted cd drives in "Computer",
> where clicking on them would mount the cd.

This sounds good. I'd also suggest always showing the Floppy Disk Icon (as 
oppose to only in Computer) on the desktop as well, for systems that still 
have them. I recommend this mainly due to the sad fact that on pc's we can't 
autodetect floppies, but we still want the floppy folder to be very easily 
accessible and not hidden in a subfolder. 


> I don't like this idea. The reason we went to ~/Desktop was to have the
> desktop directory visible. Having it sometimes there and sometimes not
> (people might not immediately grasp the reasons its sometimes hidden)
> can be frustrating when you're looking for it and you know it was there
> before. 
>
> I think that while the desktop->home->desktop loop is a bit "strange" it
> doesn't really affect the mental model, because you probably see the
> home icon and the other volume as links, a concept we expose at various
> places in the desktop.  

Wasn't the switch more to make saving files to the desktop from the file 
selector easier? At least in the object file manager i think the "Desktop" 
directory should be hidden. If not clicking on the "desktop" icon in the 
home folder should show the desktop. If you open another window representing 
the "Desktop" directory you break the model because you now have two visible 
folders for the folder "Desktop" (the actual desktop and a window, breaking 
the one-to-one relationship between a file-system folder and its window). 

dave