Re: [Usability] The eternal fileselector dilemma :)

[Kalle Vahlman <kalle vahlman gmail com>]

On Sun, 26 Sep 2004 19:31:32 +0300, Lemmit Kaplinski
<lemmit kaplinski com> wrote:
> The topic of today is the filechooser and most notably the "Save..."
> part of it. I have put down my thoughts and screenshots at
> http://lemmit.kaplinski.com/home/green/Gnome/
>
> Shoot.

You shot first. And at the innocent bookmarks of all things. 

Bookmarks are for the _most commonly_ used locations. It's only
natural that they don't "cover all possible situations".

You also strike air with your pixel calculations, though I do agree
with two things. First is the fact that the chooser gets wider when
it's expanded. It shouldn't, as the whole point of it being wider than
neccessary in the first place is that it would change as little as
possible. The duplication of bookmarks is due to this very same
reason, and thus neccessary. Furthermore, any changes to the layout of
the common chooser elements should be done gobally, not just for the
save dialog. You can't have stuff moving around in only slightly
different situations and claim it intuitive.

Second, the empty space above the path buttons should be usable for
widgets, though I'm pretty sure this is a implementation limitation of
the expander widget (the space for it's children is a rectangle).

I think this is one of those complaints that arise from the fact that
if you use spatial stuff, you won't like it when you have to navigate
down a hirearchy. It's just a no-no. The good news is that if you
adjust yourself to the spatial way, you won't need to navigate
regularly.

The GREAT news is that metadata filesystems are coming (sooner or
later), and after that there is only a save button, if a button at
all. No dialog needed, since your stuff is categorized automaticly (or
from attributes you have set before the save) and can be located by
efficent searching (in opposed to navigating).

-- 
Kalle Vahlman, zuh iki fi