Re: [Usability]Nautilus tree sidebar / location field

[Daniel Borgmann <daniel liebesgedichte net>]

On Fri, 2002-08-02 at 02:14, Sunnanvind Fenderson wrote:

> > 3. How does a location bar within the Nautilus window make typing paths
> > any more obvious than a location bar provided by an applet?
> 
> "Because it's easier to find and to connect visually with file
> browsing" - is that a good answer? 

And:
- If you have many windows open, the applet wouldn't know which window
to open the location in. So the only sane way would be to open new
windows all the time you type something in there.
- It doesn't provide you an easy view of your current location in the
window you are working in. That's IMO the more usefull feature of the
location bar. Everyone likes to know where she is.
- It takes time to travel from the window you are working in to the
applet, unless you are running maximized.
- It permanently takes valuable space on your panel, although you will
only use it from time to time.

 
> Now, having it hidden as default might be good. I've been out of the
> loop since that first usability testing - but in it, users seemed to
> think that the location bar was the bee's knees.

Are "bee's knees" a good thing or a bad thing? Please think of us poor
non-english-natives. :)
FFIW, my personal opinion about the locationbar is, that it takes too
much space because of the ridiculous large padding. This IMHO has two
major downsides:
1) It takes a lot of space for open windows, so you have to make them
larger. On small resolutions this can be a real DND killer (how can you
effectively perform DND actions, if you can't place several windows on
your screen without major overlapping?)
2) It makes the locationbar look like something terribly important,
which it most probably isn't.

Look for example at evolution, the "search" location bar above the
messagelist is very nicely embedded. It doesn't waste any remarkable
space and it looks extremely unimportant so people will probably not
loose a lot of thought on this until they really want it's
functionality. So even while I never actually used this bar, I don't
mind it beeing there.

Disabling the locationbar as default could be a good compromise, but
then again I think it's usefull to always show you your current
location. Also when moving the zoom and view buttons to the toolbar, the
locationbar becomes really empty and would still take a remarkable lot
of space.

Just my 5 cent or however the saying goes.


- Daniel