Re: [Usability] nautilus, panel, and metacity not acting as if the desktop was a single entity

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Tue, 2005-07-12 at 01:01 +0200, Maciej Katafiasz wrote:

> APPLICATIONS ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE RUN FROM DESKTOP. Having crappy
> Applications menu or suffering from must-put-my-branding-everywhere
> ISV-itis is not an excuse. Desktop is for user's work (and only for
> user's work), application launchers clearly aren't user's work.

Well, applications are part of *my* work... I have a calculator on my
real desktop, and I'd go mental if I had to go and open my filing
cabinet or look up on the wall (which is the nearest real-world
equivalent of a 'panel' I can think of ATM) every time I wanted to use
it :)

FWIW, I've always thought that the desktop should really just be one big
two-dimensional panel, with as similar capabilities and interactions to
the panel as possible. (A direction that we're arguably headed anyway,
with the increasing popularity of things like Konfabulator, gdesklets
and Apple's Dashboard.)  Having two objects that share many similar
behaviours but also have some arbitrarily different ones is a surefire
way to screw up a user's conceptual model.

Having said that, I totally agree that we should strongly discourage
applications to install launchers on the desktop... if we could find a
way to prevent that whilst still allowing the user to create their own,
I'd be entirely in favour.  Just because a feature is open to
annoying-but-harmless abuse shouldn't automatically mean we deprive our
users of it though, provided they consider the usefulness to outweigh
the annoyance.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            Java Desktop System Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems