Re: [Usability] Content Separation in GNOME

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Mon, 4 Apr 2005, Rodney Dawes wrote:

> Date: Mon, 04 Apr 2005 13:38:01 -0400
> From: Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>
> To: Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>
> Cc: usability gnome org, sds tycho nsa gov
> Subject: Re: [Usability] Content Separation in GNOME
>
> On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 02:34 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
> > On Sun, 3 Apr 2005, Ivan Gyurdiev wrote:
>
> > > I would like to propose introducing content folders to GNOME, similar to
> > > Windows' "My Documents", "My Music", etc.. this will improve usability
> >
> > Some distributions have already done this.  I want to smack them really
> > hard with a wet fish for using that annoying "My " prefix in front of
> > everything.
>
> The "My" prefix to things is annoying, but I can see how it would
> alleviate some confusion to users who are migrating from Windows,
> to our lovely desktop. I still hate it now though.


> > Some users have their home directory set as their desktop and while I'd
> > like to call them rude names and ignore them for being so weird that
> > doesn't seem to be an option.  They would not be impressed if you added
> > yet another folder to their beloved home directories.

Point is that the folders cannot be excessively hardcoded, flexibility
will be needed.  People will want a variety of different folder layouts
and a desing will need to accomdate that.

> I would be fine with ~/Documents, ~/Movies, and whatnot. What I wouldn't
> be fine with is having a "Desktop" directory, on my desktop, which is my
> $HOME. I think it would be fine to provide a few default content
> folders, but I don't think we should overdo it. The big problem here, is
> and always has been, translating the folder names to different strings.

One or two will always bring up multilingualism and try to make the
problem that much more complicated by wanting to have the one folder have
different names depending on what language they might be using that day
(but I'm not convinced this is a very common use case).

> Sure, if we ignore every other piece of software out there that isn't
> Gnome/GTK+, or potentially KDE/QT, then it's much simpler. But as soon
> as a user opens a terminal and types "ls", they are going to say "WTF?".
> I think we should worry about solving it for the entire desktop, not
> just our desktop.

Do you have a some sort of filesystem based solution in mind?


Sincerely

Alan Horkan

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