Re: [Usability]MM's new Gnome file dialogs

[Sven Herzberg <herzi gnome-de org>]

Am Mon, 2002-10-07 um 01.41 schrieb Mark Nelson:
> http://gandalf.psych.umn.edu/~nelson/images/file_selector_compare.jpg

It's looking nice. But IMHO (now talking about the right one) the dialog
can be improved  in the following parts:

1.
We should have a label showing »File« between the folder-view and the
file options. This severes two purposes:
  a: »Location« is not left alone (if we only had one title label we
     could also set the title in the window title, can't we)
  b: it gives users seeing the selector a way to divide the dialog
     correctly into the two parts it consists of. This division is
     realize optically by adding a second not indented label and it
     gives (as a nice feature of the label) more space between the
     folder and the file part of the dialog.

2.
We should leave out »Show navigation« but make the dialogs a bit wider
(at least by default). This way the list could be better »scanned« by
the user.

3.
The sidebar. I really love the sidebar and I'd like to see the following
features:
   a: »History«, a per-application setting showing the last (let's say)
      10 used files.
   b: »Folders«: I like what Mark's seletors have, as they don't simply
      have a file tree (where the upper 2 levels usually don't interest
      the user) but they should show:
       * Home
       * Desktop
       * [all mounted devices, maybe unmounted ones grayed out]
       * Recent folders (IMO 3-5 is a good number)
   e: »Emblems«: a list of known emblems where the user can select
      between must have, doesn't matter and mustn't have an emblem. This
      would give cool filtering options. (This could be done by two
      check-boxes: one for must have, one for mustn't have; this way
      all files would be shown by unchecking both boxes).

4.
»Favorites«: Favorites should (as I said, everthings MHO) also become a
sidebar-tab. I'd like to see it although i don't expect gtk+ to handle
all kind of favorites that appear in the UNIX world. Maybe we should
give developers of Unix desktop environments the possibility to add a
favorite-tab desktop-wide (although i've got no idea on how this could
be implemented). Another way was having a standardized favorites-file
somewhere in the the users home dir.

5.
Emblems Part 2: For the save file dialog I'd like to see the icon-button
behave like the open button from gedit's new toolbar (it has a drop-down
list). The list should show emblems which can be added/removed by
choosing from the menu. There can also be a »Change file Icon« as the
first element, which supports nautilus-style file icons.

I think that - with these improvements - the gtk file selector will be
very powerful although it doesn't directly show all the features that
aren't neccessary.

--
sven

PS: If I find the time today or thursday i'll try to change MM's code to
reflect my changes and then i'll put it online somewhere.