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Gnome's Nice Little GUI Perks
asdren writes "
Steven Garrity has written a short
article highlighting some 'user interface niceties' found in Gnome
with regards to file renaming, screen captures, fonts and file zooming." Garrity points out that "... tiny details can have a significant impact on the user experience
on operating systems. Inconsistencies that seem insignificant when
considering individually, but together they degrade the overall polish and sense
of stability in the system," and points out a few places where Gnome manages to avoid such inconsistency.
A google cache link is available here.
*twitch*
Site seems to be down already, heres google to the rescue:
Google cache
But surely you did think it's a GUI, which is what the article is about.
Using Windows Media Player, it is quite difficult to get a screenshot of a playing DVD. If you take a screenshot while a DVD is playing, you'll see a big empty black box where the movie should be.
I'm no fan of WMP (I use BS Player or Windows Media Player Classic) but it's easy enough to get a screenshot from it, just turn down hardware acceleration.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
To which I retort: BS Player. And his points about screenshots could easily be combined, I'm not seeing much content in the article to be honest.
Andy co-founded Eazel, and wrote much of Nautlius; all the UI touches mentioned feel like his handiwork.
I do not understand why cut and paste cannot be corrected. If a program is closed, what was just copied from it disappears from the buffer.
a emon/index.html
This falls out from the way X was designed. I agree it's annoying. There is a fix now:
http://members.chello.nl/~h.lai/gnome-clipboard-d
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
1. You can easily create or install themes by clicking your way through or drag-n-drop, but there is no apparent way of REMOVING a theme.
Theme Details -> Go to Theme Folder [file manager opens ~/.themes], and delete what you don't want. Granted it's not as easy as selecting or editing themes, but normal people aren't going to be adding/deleting themes themselves anyway, so it's not important to make it idiot proof. Themes are available as packages and are installed/un-installed through the package manager.
2. You can't change the location a launcher or shortcut points to once you have created it. That's irritating if you just needed to move the file or rename one folder in a long path and don't want to go through the hassle of creating a new launcher, name it and select icon from a long list again.
That's not exactly what I would call "a glitch", it's an enhancement, but yes it would be nice to have.
3. You can drag-n-drop emblems onto icons from the sidebar, but you can't remove them in the same easy way. To do that you need to right-click the icon and go into a totally different dialogue.
Again... that is not a glitch, it's something that should be worked on. But it's hardly priority considering how often people use the emblem functionality.
4. View files as a list in Nautilus and there is no way you can right-click on the background to get the context menu in order to for example add a folder. You then have to do it through the top-of-window menu instead.
This is fixed in 2.5/2.6.
5. Listview in Nautilus again: you can't drag-n-drop a file from another window without dropping it onto an entry.
Ditto.
6. There is no way you can change the permissions or emblems of multiple selected files in one go from Nautilus. You have to address them one by one.
Huh? Yes you can, in the current stable version (2.4) and beyond: select the files you want to change the permissions/emblems of, right-click -> Properties, change the permissions/emblems to what you want. Done.
As someone who has done retail computer service since the early eighties, let me point out that MS-FUD is not an issue here. This is a real problem.
I have seen quite a few machines where windows wouldn't boot due to accidental file renaming, and quite a few from deliberate renaming through ignorance.
When the problem is pointed out, the response has pretty much the same: "Why does it let me do it, then?" or "Why is it so easy to do if it's wrong?"
I've also seen systems where children have done dramatic file renaming, because it's easily within their grasp.
Granted, this is not a huge problem, but it is consistant. More common is the bulk movement of system files via drag & drop.
From a technical standpoint, the double-click rename "feature" is actually a weak point in longterm system security/stability.
The fealing on the GTK list seems to be that there's a need for an entire new widget GtkFileChooser, and programs will eventually convert to this new API. IMHO, this is a very bad idea, as the oldstyle will never really go away any more than the win3.1 style has in the windows world. I think we ought to just add the new features and protect future APIs with preprocessor flags. Code for that might look like:
But that's for later. For now, the code that's up there works, and it might make your GTK-related life a lot more pleasantSig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right