Re: [Usability] tools on the desktop

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Sun, 31 Jul 2005, Rodney Dawes wrote:

> Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2005 23:59:11 -0400
> From: Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>
> To: Jason Hoover <jasonhoover verizon net>
> Cc: usability gnome org
> Subject: Re: [Usability] tools on the desktop
>
> 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

Had not heard of subfs before, for anyone else who would like to learn
more here is the web site for submount
http://submount.sourceforge.net/

It is included in SUSE, Gentoo, and packages seem to be available for
other distributions so it might catch on for the Linux kernel but BSD and
Solaris are whole other story.

> 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.

I believe there are patches for this functionality in Bugzilla and some of
them may only require a little updating to work with current versions of
Nautilus, which is why I suggest asking your distribution of choice.

> > 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.

Agreed.

> 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.

Even suggesting Slashdot sounds like trolling because that is what will
inevitably happen.  Asking slashdot is a fast way to insult, annoy, and
alienate the developers.

> > Please, someone think of the children.

Slashdot is certainly not suitable for childern so that rules that out
then.

> > 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. :)

True.

Better to have people complaining here than picking fights with the
already overworked nautilus developers though.

Later

- Alan