Re: [Usability] gparted usability (new)

[John Keller <jkeller matchbox fr>]

B.Hakvoort wrote:
> Outstanding issues (posted by Joachim):
> - why not show the bar graphs for all
>   devices together, since they are all scanned on
>   startup? The partition manager on Windows2000 lets you
>   scale them relative to one another.
>   
>   (hmmz, imho this would take up a lot of space and i'm not sure if it
>    would really improve usability (although i must admit i've never used
>    win2000 partitionmanager.)

I've got Windows XP running now, and I think it uses the same interface
as Windows 2000. Here's my run-down:

In fact, drives aren't displayed on the same scale. That makes sense,
since my 512 MB flash drive would be dwarfed by my 120 GB hard drive.
The granularity would just be too small to be able to see anything
useful for the flash drive.

On the other hand, there does seem to be some sort of weird logic to the
layout: My 512 MB flash drive is exactly one half the view's width,
while my 120 GB hard drive is 100%. Another, external hard drive is
about 90% the width of the view. The odd thing: the external drive is 60
GB - exactly one-half the (unformatted) size of the internal drive.

The logic might have something to do with the number of partitions: On
my internal 120 GB drive, I have four. The other drives have only a
single partition. But the 512 MB swap partition on my internal drive is
almost as wide as the 3 GB I set aside for my Linux test install. So, it
seems that the text width limits the minimum width of the partition boxes.

I'd be happy to provide a screenshot of the case I described above
you're interested.

My take on GParted? I'd keep the editor limited to viewing a single
physical drive at a time. There doesn't need to be any logic behind how
wide the drive is in the view (100% = 100% available space). And it
gives the maximum granularity needed (if I'm working with several
partitions on a small drive, I'm probably not working with more than on
a large drive - but 5 partitions on a 0.5 GB drive will be all but
invisible if presented to-scale next to 5 partitions on a 120 GB drive).

Finally, keeping a single view ensures that the user has no doubt which
drive he's working with. In light of potentially destructive operations,
that seems to me like a good thing.

On a slightly related note, since it was a subject of another thread:
There might be potential problems for color-blind or vision-impaired
people. Only solid colors are used, and some of them (ext2 and reiserfs)
are pretty close in the spectrum. I'm no expert in color choice, I just
thought I'd bring it up. I'm not even sure if people in that group would
rely on the graph, when the text list is nicely laid out right below it.

Very nice work, by the way. Speaking with my user hat on, I'm always
happy to see utilities that clarify low-level admin functions
(especially ones that could lead to disaster if mis-interpreted).

- John