Re: [Usability] tools on the desktop

[Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>]

On Sun, 2005-07-31 at 20:30 -0400, Jason Hoover wrote: 
> Can we at least come to some agreement about how the trash is a stupid
> metaphor but we should allow people to use it anyway? All the reasons
> I've seen usually come out to:

I will agree that we should allow people to drag media icons on the
desktop to trash. I will not agree that Trash in and of itself, is a
bad metaphor.

> For:
> *) Old habits die hard.
> *) If something acts like A then it should work like A.
> *) Correcting users instead of doing what they expect is insulting.
> *) Kills copious quantities of spurious bug reports
> *) What else can that action mean besides something destructive?
> *) Something better would be nice, but why not allow anyway?
> *) No point in pretending people don't do it.
> *) It's unlikely subfs will be in FreeBSD or Solaris any time soon.
> *) Simple, stupid problem - Simple, stupid solution
> 
> Against:
> *Lame metaphors are bad.
> *Macs suck
> *We should come up with something better
> *We should fix the OS, not gnome

None if this is particularly constructive. For one, subfs is never going
to be in BSD or Solaris afaik. It's a SUSE-specific thing. The last two
things in your "against" list here, should actually be complimentary to
making things work. We should fix the OS, gnome, and we should come up
with something better. But we should still allow users to use the
system. The really annoying thing about the error message, is that it
tells you to "Eject" devices that can only be "Unmount"ed, at least,
from a UI point of view.

> Given the pros and cons here, I think it's fairly clear what the
> solution is. I'm really sick of seeing this discussion come up every 1.5
> months with the same arguments, and the same outcome (nothing).
> 
> 1) Let casual users eject by trash.
> 2) Let the people who do a LOT of ejecting use the panel applet.
> 3) Keep the damn right click menu.
> 
> Unless someone can either:
> 
> *) Submit a patch for against every OS kernel known to humanity
> *) Write a multi-platform VFS plugin
> *) Write a solution that is simple/obvious/fast

I think you're confused here. Especially about VFS, from what I can
tell, anyway. No matter though. Making dragging to Trash work is a
simple patch. Nautilus obviously already knows that you are dragging
volumes to the trash, since it pops up the error dialog.

> No one's asking anyone to admit they were wrong, just that they do the
> obvious thing here, even if it's against their moral beliefs. If there's
> that much opposition about it, let's do a fairly worded poll, or even
> better, ask slashdot.

Polls for UI functionality are not really useful, especially if it's an
internet poll. People don't tend to vote for things on the net, if they
do not feel that it affects them. Slashdot is an easy way to degenerate
discussion really quickly.

> Please, someone think of the children. 
> Stop the violence. Start the love.

Funny. AFAICT, you seem to be the one generating the lengthiest mails
that are involved in this current thread. :)

-- dobey