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Gnome's Nice Little GUI Perks

Posted by timothy on from the thinking-of-users dept.

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.

4 of 502 comments (clear)

  1. Google Cache by c4Ff3In3+4ddiC+ · · Score: 5, Informative

    A google cache link is available here.

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    *twitch*
  2. WMP by dancingmad · · Score: 5, Informative

    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)
  3. The source of those UI innovations by elflet · · Score: 5, Informative
    The author keeps using Nautilus to show the innovations in Gnome, and those innovations come back to one person -- Andy Hertzfeld. Andy was a member of the original Macintosh team, who wrote much of Quickdraw and several of the initial applications (including MacPaint). Later, he came up with an vastly improved version of the Finder and a version that handled multitasking natively (Switcher).

    Andy co-founded Eazel, and wrote much of Nautlius; all the UI touches mentioned feel like his handiwork.

  4. Re:Some irritating glitches too... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.