Re: [Usability] Spatiality does not mean that navigational facilities cannot exist

[Kalle Vahlman <kalle vahlman gmail com>]

On Tue, 01 Feb 2005 10:46:38 +0100, Maurizio Colucci
<seguso forever tin it> wrote:
> Kalle Vahlman wrote:
> > Why should it be a sidebar?
> 
> Look at it this way. Do you use tabbed browsing? I suppose so. Would you
> like it if the tab-bar became a popup list? I guess not:

Actually, yes. Or at least sort of. :)

FWIW, I have not used the task bar for a long time. Instead I use the
drop-down list to select windows and it has worked well. Only thing
bothering me is the amount of windows in that list. The "on this
desktop" categorization (the separator) helps, but I would like to get
at least one specialized drop-down to ease mousing, namely for
nautilus windows. A great improvement would be some sort of automatic
grouping, which would not be by name or something as trivial as that,
but by contents of window (like "Open documents" and "Open WWW
sites"). Perhaps applications could tell the window manager their
assosiated mime type or something, but this would need some thinking
through...

> Secondly, as someone who regularly uses the history sidebar in
> nonspatial nautilus, I am of the opinion that the space the sidebar
> takes is not missed, since the sidebar is only visible when you are
> browsing files.

In the browser, you'll probably have 1 or 2 windows open at the same
time so duplication is not an issue. But in spatial there are more
windows and so more duplication. And _because_ there are more windows
open, I'd claim that the history is less useful (though very useful
still) unless one hates windows and kills them as soon as possible.

> This is of crucial importance. I would not like to see
> the sidebar when, say, I am checking mail. Also, I would not like to
> have to hide the taskbar each time I activate Evolution.

Yes, that's why I think it would be better to add it to the panel.

> > ("whip up" is a relaxed way to say "desing a good algorithm to find
> > out which visited folders are actually worth to keep in the list" ;)
> 
> IMHO, every folder should be in the list. Then you sort it by recent
> usage, and you truncate it at, say, 30 elements.

I was thinking that if you go down say 10 folders (ok, that's a lot
but...), the 10 most recent folders would be of the same hierarchy
that you are in (and is thus accessible through the parent folders
button) and just might drop some useful folder from the view for no
added value.
 
-- 
Kalle Vahlman, zuh iki fi