Re: Simplified Nautilus (with less chrome)

[Holger Berndt <berndth gmx de>]

On Do, 21.01.2010 12:50, David Siegel wrote:

>I agree that the toolbar has not become too much more complex, but
>with all of the interest in a simplified default toolbar, to add even
>one more widget seems completely counterproductive and against the
>interest of most users.

I am not sure how "most users" are defined. A dozen loud commenters on
developer blogs hardly represent the majority of all users.

I also found the "chrome vs actual files" demo on your blog [1] not
exactly a fair comparison. Most of the space your gaining seems to come
from not obeying the user's choice of theme and style.

In general, while removing features (or accessibility to features) may
let the result seem to look more streamlined, this doesn't necessarily
end up in improved usability. It may actually be a usability regression
to loose (easy to reach) functionality of use-cases that Nautilus does
in fact target.

That being said, I really like some of your suggestions. Especially the
combined reload/stop button makes total sense to me.

>however, I do think you underestimate how much more confusing and
>unpleasant the default toolbar becomes for the majority of users, even
>when only one or two widgets are added.

Keep in mind that the widgets are actually moved in the UI. They're not
new, they just moved one bar up, to fill the space that used to be
whitespace and let more room for widgets that can actually make use it
for displaying long directory names or paths. So, independant of
split-view, I think that moving is an improvement in itself already. In
the current state, users don't see "more", they just see the widgets
they are already familiar with, only slightly re-ordered.

Actually, the first UI of the split-view branch did this moving of
widgets on-the-fly, so the main window in non-split-view-mode stayed
exactly identical (except a single menu item under the View menu, of
course).

My gut feeling (which is backed up by the few comments of early
adopters that I have received so far) is that two other changes have a
far greater user-impact: The moving of the tabs to the bottom,
and the removing of the edit button. Especially the latter seems be
annoying for people that were in entry-mode when the upgrade happened,
as the only way to get breadcrumbs back seems to be modifying a gconf
key.

>Perhaps we can simply remove
>the zoom and view selector from the toolbar entirely? These features
>are used relatively rarely, are accessible in the View menu, and have
>great shortcuts.

I agree. Removing them from the default toolbar seems to be feasible
provided that a toolbar editor is present.

Holger


[1] http://davidsiegel.org/nautilus-simplified/