[Usability]Re: Nautilus toolbar simplification



Jens Knutson wrote:
On Mon, 2003-03-10 at 13:55, Michael Toomim wrote:

  o As for "Stop" -- why would you ever want nautilus to freeze in the
    middle of displaying a directory?  Or any other type of file?  I
    think that this button is rarely useful.

I'm not sure this can go safely.  What about remote file systems?  SMB,
NFS, FTP, WebDAV - all of these could use a stop button about as much as

Even with remote file-systems -- why would you ever want nautilus to freeze after drawing half a directory? I can't imagine any scenario where I would want nautilus to stop-- and do nothing. If the user hasn't clicked the back button (or given nautilus any other command to execute) there generally can't be any harm done in drawing the rest of a location.

In any case, I don't think that the stop button is used frequently enough in day-to-day file-management tasks to warrant a toolbar button. When you're browsing directories and files you generally don't want to suddenly tell nautilus to "stop and do nothing". And the feature is always available via the "escape" key and the menus if you do.

The user's home is available in many places, yes, but toolbar inclusion
is decided by how frequently a function is used by most users, according
to the HIG anyhow.  While having it in those other places is nice, I'd
guess it's popular enough that it deserves a toolbar button, too.

I disagree here, too. Because the home folder is always within the user's immediate reach (even if there aren't any other nautilus windows open), I don't see the point of allocating toolbar space for it in each opened nautilus window. It's true that toolbars should get frequently-accessed features, but what's the point of using the toolbar for a feature that's just as easily accessible from a slew of existing locations?

  o "Reload" shouldn't be needed if FAM et. al. is doing its job, right?
    And if it IS needed, you have View->Reload and Ctrl-R.

See my argument about the stop button.

Even with remote filesystems, "reload" just isn't something that you have to do often enough to warrant a toolbar button.

I'm not saying that reload, stop, and home aren't useful features under some circumstances -- just that they're not used enough to be put on the toolbar. I think that having a one-toolbar UI, with prominent placement for the *really* frequently-used features (back/up, location, view type) is a very important goal. If you include buttons for all of the "can-be-used-in-some-situations" features, you can't achieve that goal. So let's put the key, ubiquitous commands on the toolbar, and the rest in the menus and on the keyboard.

In your mockup, you also ditch the spinner, which also must stay, for
slower machines, for huge directories, and again, remote filesystems.

Yeah, I was wondering if anyone would notice that. :) I've fixed the mockup now at the same URL (http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~toomim/redesigned_toolbar.png) and improved the back button while I was at it.

BTW, one of the reasons that you have to rely on the throbber is that there isn't any busy-interaction hourglass mouse cursor when nautilus is active (see http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=108041).

That said, moving the zoom and "view as" controls up into the main
toolbar and ditching the location bar in the default view aren't too bad
an idea.

 - jck






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