Re: [Usability] spatial desktop

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Tue, 2006-08-22 at 09:49 +0530, Ritesh Khadgaray wrote:
> Hey,
> 
>  Out of curiosity, Why is nautilus spatial and the rest of desktop
> not ? 

I think the reason is simply, "we had to start somewhere" :)  And enough
people have expressed some dissatisfaction with the nautilus spatial
implementation that we'd want to consider similar changes in any other
applications pretty carefully.

To be honest, I'm also not clear what 'spatial' means for other
applications anyway.  E.g. Daniel Borgmann writes about your scratchpad
example:

        In true spatial philosophy, it is not possible to create a new
        document from inside a scratchpad window, instead you will have
        to create a new document using your file manager and then open
        it.

which I'd say, in itself at least, isn't much to do with spatial UIs
(and as an aside, it would probably drive me mad!)  Without having used
it, it sounds to me more like it's just a document-driven rather than an
application-driven UI, which always sounds like a great idea until you
try to design a whole desktop around it :)

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