Re: [Usability] GNOME 2.6+ usability: points of critique

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Mon, 2004-10-11 at 15:20, Alan Horkan wrote:

> > 3) Somewhere along the way from 2.4 to 2.8 (I am not exactly sure when
> > since my reference installations are 2.4 and 2.8) the possibility to
> > dock views into Nautilus was either dropped or hidden so well that I
> > could not find it again. Up to 2.4, I usually configured Nautilus that
> > HTML and text documents are shown inside the browser window. In 2.8 that
> > does not seem to be possible anymore.
> 
> Sorry I dont know anything about this one, asking a question on a nautilus
> mailing list might be productive though.

If memory serves, viewing capabilities were removed from Nautilus
because the maintainers wanted to concentrate on making it a top notch
file manager, rather than the sort of bloated all-purpose shell that IE
has turned into.  And also because usability testing consistently turned
up major issues with the inline viewing, such as users expecting to be
able to print or edit text files or have full browser-like control over
HTML pages that opened in Nautilus windows.

There was talk of replacing the feature with a multi-purpose viewing
component that could handle considerably more file types, so that the
user could still view files quickly from nautilus without having to open
them in a full-blown editor, but nothing really materialised on that
front.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            Java Desktop System Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems