Re: [Usability] tools on the desktop

[Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>]

I like using the "Eject" button on the drive. It works nicely. :)

For things like USB keyfobs and such, I think we should just fix the
problems with losing dating if you unplug the device, and it is not
written to yet. The Mac OS "eject" behavior for dragging to the trash,
is more related to the hardware interfaces, I think. Macs have
historically not had eject buttons for at least floppy and cd-rom
drives, and therefore required the user to eject things via software,
or with a paper clip. They've added eject buttons to some machines
in the near recent development of hardware, but many devices still do
not have hardware eject buttons. Of course, Nautilus also already
provides an "Eject/Unmount" item in the context menu for mounted
devices.

Aside from that, if a device is not mounted, or does not contain
accessible media, why should it appear on the desktop at all? It
seems to me that users want to be notified that things ARE working,
in rather odd ways sometimes, as they don't trust that it WILL work.

And, yeah, adding more functionality to a menu item, based on where
your pointer is horizontally across the menu item, is bad. I also
somehow doubt that the patch needed to GTK+ to get menu items to work
in a way to make the hilight change horizontally across a single menu
item, so that the user will actually know what part they are clicking
on, wouldn't get accepted either. :)

-- dobey


On Sat, 2005-07-30 at 18:22 +0300, Kalle Vahlman wrote:
> On 7/30/05, Alexander Brausewetter <br absb de> wrote:
> > On Fri, 2005-07-29 at 16:12 -0700, Daniel J. Wilson wrote:
> > > On Jul 29, 2005, at 3:27 PM, Alexander Brausewetter wrote:
> > >
> > > > How about adding a small eject icon ⏏ to a corner of the device
> > > > icon.
> > 
> > > I mocked up something similar several months ago:
> > > http://blog.wilsonet.com/archives/2005/04/15/dealing-with-ejection/
> > 
> > I've also done a little mockup now:
> >  http://f4ee.net/~alex/Device_eject_button.png
> 
> Oh, please no. I find menus hard enough to use when the direction that
> matters is vertical, if you make the menus require precise targeting
> in *both* directions, using menus will be a pain.
> 
> More presicely, it will
> 
> a) take a lot of time to open something in menus (you need to target
> twice, so it'll take double the time to target)
> b) make mistakes frequent, and in this case, non-trivial ones that
> eject your disc when you try to acces it