Now that GNOME 2.0 is out [congratulations everyone involved], I hope
work can be done on some things that were UI frozen.
I am specially interested in bug #44970 (GNOME bugzilla), about the
problem of accesing removable media to right click|Disks|... and having
icons appear on the desktop only when media is mounted.
I would like to see a discussion about this in this list from an
usability viewpoint. My complaints about usability on this are (based on
experiencies with several non-techie users on computers w/GNOME I
administer):
* The "right click|Disks|..." is quite opaque, for an action that is
usually done (looking inside a floppy, CD or zip). It should be
available in a more visible space ("my-computer:" in VFS, with links
from "Start-here:"? or directly on "start-here:"?).
* I've seen several times people looking for a CD icon (perhaps because
of previous windows experience) and not beeing able to find it.
* Having a .desktop file appearing and disappearing, has the problem of
finding where among all your icons is the link to the CD you just
inserted. Perhaps this is a separate problem and should be solved
remembering the desktop position of each device. But this has the
problem of what happens when I put some other icon there while the media
is not inserted.
* other problem of using a .desktop file is with drag and drop. When
dragging and drop folders to an app (for example, the xmms applet), the
app receives the folder name. If that is done with a .desktop file like
the ones nautilus creates for media, the app receives the name of the
desktop file, so behaviour is not transparent and devices don't act like
folders (years of UNIX tradition lost here ;-) ). Perhaps this could be
solved ortogonally too.
Advantages of current approach are also listed in the bug description
(http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44970)
I've been wondering what should be the "right way" to do this. But I
know the current one is quite uncomfortable from an usability
standpoint.
Daniel
--
Knowledge, sir, should be free to all!
-- Harry Mudd, "I, Mudd", stardate 4513.3
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