Hi Mark - I am also in favor of your proposal because I too find the nautilus as both file manager/universal viewer concept confusing... I do however think three things need to happen first before we can really consider doing this right: 1) Nautilus needs to have the possibility of two different applications associated with each file type. The first would be a viewer and the second would be an editor. For things like web pages or images, this is key. 2) Mimetypes/filetype handlers configuration needs to be fixed and stabilized. 3) Major GNOME applications need to build into their architecture the ability to use existing instances when available. This is needed for speed's sake or at least the appearance of speed's sake. Users shouldn't have to start up a whole new instance of EOG just to view an image when EOG is already running. Likewise for things like Gimp, AbiWord, etc. I believe gEdit and Galeon (Epi too? je ne sais pas) already have this functionality. But yes, I"m definitely all for it, but I think it's not worth it until we can get the above done as well. -jag On Fri, 2003-05-30 at 16:08, Mark Finlay wrote: > We recently had a discussion about killing nautilus internal file > views. And it was one of those issues that I wished I had some > usability statistics to back it up. > > Today I've been reading the usability review that sun did of > Gnome 1.2 and came accross this page: > http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/ut1_report/file_management.html > > Users were confused by the read only view of a text file and > said things like: > "I was expecting a word processing app to open [the file]...weird." > "I was confused when the text file opened in a browser type thing." > > The sun reccomendation was to make it more clear that the file is > read only, but I would say that it makes more sense to remove the > internal viewing of files in nautilus all together, now that nautilus is > no longer used as a web browser. > > There is no real benefit to viewing a text file or image in nautilus > AFAICT, but there are definately drawbacks, and as that usability > study shows, it causes user frustration and confusion. > > I don't want to start another holy war. But I would love to get a > response from the nautilus maints for or against this. The rest of us > can argue to we go blue in the face, but if the maints aren't listening > then there is no point. > > Thanks for you time, > > -- > Mark Finlay <sisob eircom net> -- --------------------------------------------------------- Joshua Adam Ginsberg Cellphone: 970.749.8530 Rice University '02 Email: joshg myrealbox com St. Mark's School of Texas '98 -_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_- "All your code are belong to us." -The SCO Group ---------------------------------------------------------
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