Re: Usability problem, and solution proposal

[Maciej Katafiasz <mnews22 wp pl>]

Dnia 30-09-2004, czw o godzinie 23:23 +0200, Julien Olivier napisa:
> Le jeudi 30 septembre 2004  17:32 +0000, paul hendrick a crit :
> > I've written up an idea for a bug in nautilus usabilty. the writeup is here:
> > http://www.student.livjm.ac.uk/cmsphend/gnome/nautilus.html
> > 
> > i hope it's useful. 
> 
> I think it's a great idea, but with a few conditions:
> 
>  - the windows can move (to arrange themselves on the screen) but the
> mouse and the dragged icons must remain at the same position. Else, it
> could confuse users.
> 
>  - the re-arranging of the Nautilus windows must occur after a short
> timeout (half a second without any mouse movement for example) so that
> you can easily move a file inside the same window, or to an
> easily-visible folder without being disturbed b the animation.
> 
>  - if, after the windows re-arranged themselves, you don't move the
> mouse cursor at all, releasing the mouse button shouldn't result in a
> drop. Else, you could have situations where a user starts dragging a
> file, gets surprised by the animation, and just releases the mouse
> cursor without understanding what happens, and just loses his file
> because it doesn't know where he dropped it.

Yeah, all that makes sense

> And there is also an interrogation: what about other apps than
> Nautilus ? Shouldn't all the visible windows re-arrange themselves (not
> only nautilus ones) as many applications can receive drops ? And
> wouldn't it be even better to implement this solution in metacity itself
> so that any application would trigger the re-arrangement of all the
> visible windows when a drag is started (from Nautilus, or from any
> application) ?

Dunno, can get tricky and get out of hand quickly.

Just as a side note: all that makes sense (I kinda like the idea, dunno
about actual working ;) ONLY with working, fast, well-established X
COMPOSITE extension. Otherwise, we can forget about all that happening.
Which means, at best it can happen in 2.12 / 2.14 (or 2.C / 2.E if you
like ;), or later.

As another note, idea of "shelf" for temporary DnD data isn't new - it
was introduced by NeXT I think, and MacOS X today also sports it,
althoug not in global manner AFAIK, only in Finder which isn't spatial
anymore. It's quite an elegant solution, particularly for non-spatial
environment, I'd like to see and try it in GNOME

Cheers,
Maciej

-- 
"Tautologizm to co tautologicznego"
   Maciej Katafiasz <mnews2 wp pl>
       http://mathrick.blog.pl