Re: volumes mark 2

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

Paolo Borelli writes: 

> I was not arguing about the implementation, if .desktop files are not
> the right approach, let's use symlinks or in-memory objects or
> whatever... I was just saying that these folders should be easyly
> accesible from the desktop, but they should not physycally be into the
> desktop exposing the detail that the desktop is a folder.

Its better to keep it simple in my opinion. Users are undoubtably going to 
unfortunately be exposed to the fact that the desktop is a folder via 
fileselectors in other apps (eek fileselectors). If the document folders are 
contained in the desktop folder, they will at least be able to make the 
association of "Documents" folder is on the Desktop I'll look there. THe 
other way just leads to confusion. Where is my "Documents" Folder. It 
appears on the desktop but really isnt? Huh? Better to keep the mental 
associations easy. What you are proposing really only helps a small minority 
of users and hurts the majority.
>  

> I don't really see why going up one level and being in $home would be
> confusing: you would see a _normal_ folder containing a list of dirs
> like "Documents", "Images" etc. I think that's way less confusing than
> special casing stuff like disabling the "Open parent folder" or going in
> a special dir called Desktop (as I said above most of the users don't
> think of Desktop as a folder).

Your missing the point. By using the spacial metaphor, you are communicating 
to the user that the desktop is the computer (root to use unix terms). Its 
the starting point/home whatever. We need to avoid breaking this as much as 
possible. Once the desktop folder is firmly associated as the users 
workspace there will be little reason for users to be exposed to the actual 
home folder at all. 

> Creating Documents and putting a link to it on the desktop while not
> putting a link to home is just a nice way to convince the casual user to
> keep his files organized in subfolders and do not mess much with home. 

Puttin the actual folder on the desktop is even better. It avoids all the 
hacks that would be needed to make it convincing and it keeps implementation 
even easier. 


> Everithing can be solved... this does not mean that we should not pick
> the right way of doing things.
> Unix has a clean and simple place where users manage their stuff and it
> is $home. Windows doesnt, so they have invented "My Documents" which is
> poor-man equivalent to $home.

Well I used to use that argument to justify using $home as the desktop (in a 
perfect world). However too much cruft ends up there. Its better from an 
interface standpoint to say $home is where apps do their user book keeping, 
~/Desktop is user workspace. To the majority of users it will never matter, 
to the minority, well they can always put a link to $home on their desktop 
or use $home as their desktop. 



> I have the impression that instead of doing the right thing and help
> users to better organize their stuff in Home we are creating a copy of
> the copy, hoping that hiding stuff would make things better.

Its not a perfect solution, but given the constraints its the best of the 
available options. As I said in a perfect world $home might actually be the 
desktop. 

dave