Re: [Usability] tools on the desktop

[Phil Bull <philbull gmail com>]

Hey Thilo

>  * I can imagine that in some cultures a trash is either not very well
> known or more negativley associated.

The British localisation calls trash the 'Wastebasket'. It's quaint.
Similar things can be/are done for other cultures, as the default
trash icons for most themes are pretty stylised (no flies buzzing
around the icon or bits of rotten stuff hanging out). If the text
translates to something like 'Disposed Files Container', it's unlikely
that most users in a culture greatly offended by rubbish will make the
connection, and will just think of it as a place where deleted things
go.

> I think one could have
> A) a tool for ejecting/unmounting.

I only ever need to unmount media occasionally, so I don't mind
spending a couple of extra seconds opening 'Computer', right-clicking,
and selecting 'Unmount'. Having a permanently visible unmount icon
would, in my case, be unnecessary, as the time saving from it would be
negligible.

I can see where you are coming from in the case of novice users
though, who might not know to unmount media. But it might be just as
well to tell the user the first time they mount something that it must
be unmounted through the right-click menu when they have finished
using it.

> This tool also could manage resources in the
> network that are available via Rendezvous

This would be pretty cool. I haven't used KDE for a long while, but
they used to have something called the LISA daemon (IIRC), which
listed all of the services on the local subnet in Konqueror. Something
similar, and ZeroConf-based, would be a nice addition in the 'Network'
folder perhaps.

>  * Why not use Themes as something that is adopted to a local culture?

Interface consistency. It's bad enough having language barriers, but
when you start rearranging things based on locale, people from
low-user-count locales might get stuck and have no-one to help them
because their desktop layout is different from anyone else's.

Thanks


-- 
Phil Bull
philbull.tk