[Usability]Re: Nautilus preferences proposal

[Alex Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On 27 Apr 2002, Dave Bordoley wrote:

> I went through the preferences today and have some suggestions. Some of
> these i've already filed in bugzilla. These are in no particular order.
> 
> 1. Remove default font from "appearance" preference, the default font
> should just be the gtk system font. I have a feeling that this will be
> important for accessiblity as well. Also while i'm on this we should use
> a font selector similar to the one used in the gtk font selection. The
> current font selection sucks.

That particular pref only controls the sidebar fonts as far as i can tell. 
I agree that that should be removed in favour of always using the normal 
widget font. If you really want to change it you can muck around with your 
gtk+ theme.

I do think that setting fonts for the icon views, especially the desktop 
should be easy though.
 
> 2."Icon & List View" preference should be renamed. Maybe File Manager. 

Maybe "File Windows"?
 
> 3. Remove list view font preferences. While for the icon view it may
> make sense to be able to change the font and font size for the icon
> captions, the list view imho should just use system default chosen by
> the user.

Yeah. Maybe we should keep the listview fontsize. I dunno. Maybe we should 
just implement zooming in the list view instead.
 
> 4. News panel preferences should be in the sidebar panels preferences
> like the tree view prefs are ( assuming we keep the news panel, i vote
> for losing it)

Yeah. And the two items should be in the same frame.
 
> 5. speed tradeoffs: i actually like this one, except what the hell does
> "Make folder appearances Details public" mean, i have no clue what this
> preference does, but if it does anything useful well it should be
> renamed.

"Make folder appearance Details public" means to read and write metadata 
files to the directories. If it is off all metadata is written to 
~/.nautilus/metafiles/. We need to loose this setting and just never use 
public metadata for security reasons. (We haven't and probably won't 
review all the metafile codepaths.)
 
> 6. Navigation preferences: ( this need sub categories)
> 6.a.The option to change the location of the home directory seems like
> crack to me. I don't know what anyone else thinks, but in unix home is a
> very definitive location. 

Yeah. This is something that was used very early to set ~/Nautilus as the 
homedir for "newbies", but since we don't do that anymore this setting 
seems unncessary.

> 6.b Built in bookmarks need to go. They basically were an advertising
> mechanism for eazel. I think this is also important considering right
> now nautiuls is in no way a web browser.

Agree.
 
> 7. Sidebar panels: only complaint i have is that it kind of makes no
> sense to include files in our current tree view. If we were to
> reimplement the tree view like macos well than it would always make
> sense to include files.   

Lots of eazel people complained when we tried to even change the default 
for this, so I think we'll keep it.

> 8. icon captions: this dialog is lame, just integrate these in with view
> defaults for the icon view.

I don't know. Then that tab will be very large, making the whole dialog 
larger. May look bad.

-- 
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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a short-sighted misogynist sorceror for the 21st century. She's an 
enchanted extravagent barmaid living on borrowed time. They fight crime!