[Usability]Re: Nautilus Preference Proposal (screenshots too!!!!)

[Dave Bordoley <bordoley msu edu>]

On Tue, 2002-10-15 at 23:00, Darryl Rees wrote:
>
> Could you could have it in both, that would be fine. But to remove it 
> from the nautilus app would make it more difficult for newbies to find 
> the preferences, and involve more work for any user - it just makes it 
> 'less accessible'. Users are conditioned to be able to find an app's 
> preferences inside the app, and these are unquestionably nautilus 
> preferences even if they have global effects on the file selector, etc. 
> Should be extremely easy to test in a useability study I guess, once 
> there are working examples...
> 

This is an option. I guess my personal bias is that I would like the
nautilus ui to move away from that of a file browser application to that
of a folder viewer, in which case having global prefs seems to make more
sense. I don't actually think this will be all that confusing, but we
could do some testing to see what the best option is. Perhaps this
includes both.

> Does anyone actually uses anything other than 'show only folders' on the 
> treeview? Surely the treeview is a navigation aid for the main window 
> and not a functional duplicate of it? Would it ultimately be possible to 
> get rid of this preference?
> 

While I personally agree with you, this has been flamed to death. With
my proposal I have sought to avoid past flame wars and to instead
propose something i think is realistic. I must admit that the current
proposal is far from my ideal.

> Suggestion for a new pref - date/time format. Nautilus always uses the 
> most verbose format possible, it's quite fatigueing to read...

Well I don't know if a preference is needed or not. However as I
mentioned the current proposal is aimed at being realistic. Such a pref
may or may not be warranted, file a bug and we can hatch it out on
bugzilla. Perhaps the default should just be changed to be more useful?


> >4. Desktop and Trash category
> >-----------------------------
> Actually it would be nice to be able to configure *any* folder to be 
> used as your desktop - I guess I just lost all credibility with this 
> comment.

Well there are all kinds of issues this may present, I won't get into
them now. I think we should just pick something and go with it. For my
money, I'd want $home as desktop, but thats a whole different flame war
:)


> 
> >7. Icon Captions Category
> >-------------------------
> >Same...
> >
> It's annoying that the 'captions' (columns?) can't be changed in the 
> list view... (in general the list view always seems to get a lot less 
> love than the icon view).
> 

File bugs, this is outside the scope of my proposal.

dave