Re: [Usability] Thoughts about the file chooser

[Dave Ahlswede <mightyquinn charter net>]

On Sun, 2004-09-26 at 05:21 -0300, Leonardo Santagada wrote:
>   Radical changes are nice but they have to be planed and well
> executed if you want it to work. Responding to not using mouse for
> drag and drop, I don't use the acessibilyties tools of gnome but in
> windows you can transform your number pad into a mouse and te buttons
> stick so it is easy to do drag&drop operations.
>   About the cli propose. If we are working on a full desktop you
> shouldn't be worring with people who use cli, if they want they can
> use other software to do their work, we can't make every user in the
> world happy.
>   I personaly think that the save button it an old concept from the
> time that saving to floppy disks was the only way to store information
> and it was really slow. Today I think the computer should always be
> saving the user work. Drag and drop is a clean metaphor and if you
> want to see it working nicely you should test rox
> (http://rox.sourceforge.net/).
> 

As far as accessibility goes, mousekeys should be a last resort; they're
awkward and unwieldy to actually use, especially on a larger screen. I
believe it's someone from the Rox project who proposed what I believe to
be the best idea for accessible drag & drop-- That Cut/copy/paste and
Drag/drop be the same thing from a program's standpoint. So for a
drog/drop save without the mouse you'd copy it from the program and
paste it in the file manager.

And while I'm very much in favor of making drag & drop and autosaving
more prevalent in the desktop, I don't think it's a good idea to
eliminate the "legacy" way completely, and definitely not in the first
step. 

I do agree that all users can't be pleased, but careful consideration
should be taken before removing a particular method of doing things. And
all the necessary mechanisms to replace it should be in place first-- My
druthers would have been for typeahead support to be implemented before
the FileChooser. (Though, the opposite is true sometimes.
Dissatisfaction with the filechooser as-is may have been the impetus for
coding the typeahead support)