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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.
Didn't think Gnome *was* an operating system.
So that's it huh? Years of development, we've come up with better screenshots. Not-so-annoying handling of renaming files. Media players with some nicer features and wait for it....wait for it....zooming!
Look out Microsoft, your days are numbered!
Although Steven some nice features, he missed to mention that Nautilus supports WebDAV as well. WebDAV stands for "Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning".
However Nautilus needs to improve the WebDAV functionality. MacOS has the best implementation of a WebDAV client as far as I know.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
99% of my apps are GNOME compliant. With the exception fo XChat, they are also HIG compliant. That's better that the Windows desktop I used at work (before switching to Linux there as well).
i personally think the file dialog could use some improvements, (i know, this is gtk), maybe it could use a few more navigation buttons to speed things up, seems a little primitive atm ?!?!
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
A google cache link is available here.
*twitch*
I have been using Gnome for a while, so it's no surprise to me when it comes to the things discussed in this article. About the only new thing I learned is that you can drag and drop screenshots into another program.
I do think that Gnome developers have paid good attention to detail in the last two 2.x releases. Without KDE 3.2, I'd have to throw in some criticisms there, but KDE 3.2 just rocks. Very refined.
Site seems to be down already, heres google to the rescue:
Google cache
I read the story title as being about Nice little parks for gnomes. What a wonderful idea!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
My days seem to be numbered too. I just looked at my desk calendar and they stop at 29! Oh my god the world is going to end in 21 days!
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Gnome, and the Nautilus file manager (the equivalent of Windows Explorer or Mac OS Finder) allows you to rename files only by right-clickling and choosing "Rename..." from the context-menu. While it may seem like the function is "hidden away" behind the context-menu, give that renaming files is a far less frequent tasks then double-clicking on them or moving them (click+drag), this is an appropriate trade-off. Accidentally triggered the file-renaming functionality in both Windows and Mac OS, I'm happy to report that the Gnome technique is much better.
Just checked on both Windows ME and XP, and confirmed my earlier memory of using the Right-click menu to rename files in Windows. As in Nautilus, the right click menu *does* contain the option to rename files...and I guess that's more often used than the delayed-double-click mechanism, which I think is an additional method to rename a file.
The article may have some valid comments, but when it starts off with an obviously overlooked point, it loses credibility to me. Kudos to the Gnome team though, for all it's good work.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
to get Windows a decently stable and complete Desktop? 10? 15? Let's not forget GNOME is a relative new-comer at 6 years old, and the fact that it has a fraction of the number of developers and resources Microsoft can devote to their desktop should tell you how quickly it is progressing. Yes it is far from perfect, but you simply have not been paying attention if you aren't astonished by the advances GNOME (and KDE) have made in the last 3 years.
tiny details can have a significant impact on the user experience on operating ystems.
Okay, while I completely agree with that article, Ill share some of my 'user experiences' using Linux vs. Windows and how things in Linux coming from a Windows POV are still archaic at best.
For instance, yes like windows, you can hit the Print Screen button and get screen shots the same as windows, BUT it popups up a program asking you what to DO with the screenshot and how to save it - very nice.
However, From a user who used IE just for the convienance when on WIndows, I migrated to Linux beore the MyDOOM crap and heres what Ive found:
Mozilla still has a ways to go, and is still IMHO a superior browser to IE, mostly due to the fact it does not allow executable installations and popups enabled by default -- HOWEVER, installing Java as a plugin in the browser and making it a "symbolic link" in the plugins directory of the JavaVM is tricky at best. If i didnt have a clue about these things Id be trashing Linux right there. No one in windows land has no clue what a symbolic link is, or how to "create one" in a command line.
There are other things also, but ill stick to the most basic and most obvious problem that a linux newbie would encounter right off the bat after installing Linux after migrating from Windows.
Keep in mind, its the things that DON'T work that ultimately decides if a user is going to stick with a particular operating system/GUI/client or not -- unlike most of the slashdot crowd, the general public simply does not have the patience to try and troubleshoot a problem or PAY anyone, for that matter to get the same functionality that they had before.
Ahh the same way Microsoft Office doesn't use the same widgets as Microsoft Windows? And they are from the same company.
Just this weekend I was still getting used to this weird operating system known as MacOSX: "How the heck do I rename a file?" Found out that clicking on the file name works. Yet, I far prefer GNOME's renaming idea: Renaming file is in the context menu, Edit menu and key F2 - and not selecting the file name extension is nice.
I also like the idea of using SVG for icons - scalable icons rule, and have done so for years in operating systems no one uses. I just wish the SVG themers could come up with even a single aesthetically pleasing and extensive collection of file icons. The button themes are good already.
Oh, and Emblems. Nautilus had these years ago. These things rule. OSX 10.3 got colored names. Not sure if Windows has innovated this feature yet.
Now that I finally have some very infrequent access to a Mac - the supposed bastion of good UI design - I've started getting a little bit annoyed that GNOME stuff and WindowMaker are actually better at times. Both are lightyears ahead of Microsoft, though =)
Getting to Know Gnome
by steven [10:56 PM February 3, 2004]
For the last few months, I've been using Fedora, a Linux distribution, as my primary operating system along with the Gnome desktop environment. Linux as a desktop platform still has lots of weaknesses, but I'm generally pleased and am very much looking forward to the progress planned in the next year.
I've written plenty before about the tiny details that can have a significant impact on the user experience on operating systems. Windows XP is rife with little visual glitches and inconsistencies that seem insignificant when considering individually, but together they degrade the overall polish and sense of stability in the system. It's like seeing cracks, no matter how small, in a bridge you're walking on.
I've noticed a few little user interface niceties worth sharing:
Smart File Renaming
In Windows XP, one click selects a file, then a second click (and a short delay) renders the file name editable. In Mac OS X, any click on the file name renders the file name editable. In my experience, on both platforms, the file renaming functionality is triggered by accident far more often than it is intentionally.
Gnome, and the Nautilus file manager (the equivalent of Windows Explorer or Mac OS Finder) allows you to rename files only by right-clickling and choosing "Rename..." from the context-menu. While it may seem like the function is "hidden away" behind the context-menu, give that renaming files is a far less frequent tasks then double-clicking on them or moving them (click+drag), this is an appropriate trade-off. Accidentally triggered the file-renaming functionality in both Windows and Mac OS, I'm happy to report that the Gnome technique is much better.
Also, when you do rename a file, the file name, not including the file extension is selected by default. So, if I want to rename a file called Diary.doc to Journal.doc, I right-click the file, select "Rename...", and type the new name. The ".doc" file extension isn't select by default, so it goes unaffected. In the rare case that I do want to rename a file, including the extension, I can easily manually select the extension as well. To do the same task in Windows, you must re-select the first part of the file name, manually excluding the file extension (which takes a fair amount of manual dexterity with a mouse) to avoid removing the file extension (Mac OS gets extra points here for avoiding file extensions where it can).
Smart Screenshots
In Mac OS X, when you take a screenshot, a PDF file is placed on the desktop. PDF is an awkward choice for a file format for a screenshot and if the desktop is obscured by windows, as it often is, then there is little feedback of where your screenshot has gone (though, to their credit, the camera-shutter sound is the best audio feedback of a screenshot on any platform). In Windows, the screenshot is sent to the clipboard, and then must be pasted into an application for use. Again, there is no feedback as to where your screenshot has gone.
In Gnome, when you take a screenshot, you are greeted by a window with a preview of your screenshot with options to save it. You can also drag the preview from this window directly into an application (an image editing application, or into an email for an attachment). Nice.
Don't Tie My Hands
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. In order to overcome this issues, Totem, the movie player I'm using on Linux (which is a great, simple, media player - something that doesn't seem to exist on Windows) there is a tool built in to take screenshots of a playing movie. Under the "Edit" menu, select "Take Screenshot", and you'll be presented with a window much like
Can't something be flamebait and insightful?
The article does show why linux is more user-friendly than windows, but not in the way that the author intends.
He claims that file-renaming is better in nautilus because the only way to do it is through a context menu, and furthermore, the filename without extension is highlighted by default. Personally, I find both of those "features" terribly annoying. Quite often, all I want to do is change the extension on a file. Nautilus' behavior makes this much harder than it is in windows.
But the great thing is that there are plenty of file managers for linux, and even plenty built specifically for gnome. So I just use a different one that I like better. Choice is what makes linux better than windows, not the default behavior of one app.
What glaring inconsistencies have you found in recent GTK+? From what I've read of the abstract (the article is unavailable as I write this), the article seems to disagree with your view.
In Windows XP, one click selects a file, then a second click (and a short delay) renders the file name editable. In Mac OS X, any click on the file name renders the file name editable. In my experience, on both platforms, the file renaming functionality is triggered by accident far more often than it is intentionally. Gnome, and the Nautilus file manager (the equivalent of Windows Explorer or Mac OS Finder) allows you to rename files only by right-clickling and choosing "Rename..." from the context-menu. While it may seem like the function is "hidden away" behind the context-menu, give that renaming files is a far less frequent tasks then double-clicking on them or moving them (click+drag), this is an appropriate trade-off. Accidentally triggered the file-renaming functionality in both Windows and Mac OS, I'm happy to report that the Gnome technique is much better.
Wait, so just because the guy is clearly incompetent at using any form of pointer input device, the GUI is to blame?!? I use Mac OS X every day and I think it is far more efficient at renaming files, which I have to do regularly when downloading journal articles from the likes of Jstor.
In OS X, if you click on the filename then the rename option becomes available. If you click on the icon, then you select the file. Predictable behaviour in my opinion, and allows you move and select files just as quickly, but rename even quicker.
This guy is clearly looking for reasons to justify GNOME's eccentricities and poor design, and seems to be ignoring the immense research that Microsoft and Apple put into interface design.
Actually the extension idea makes a lot of sense. And it has already been submitted as a wish to bugs.kde.org:
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58749
Please cast your vote!
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)
"Never, never, never, put an option only in a contex menu. It is very bad design."
The "Rename" feature is also available from the "Edit" menu in the Nautilus menubar.
I use Gnome every day at work and while there is much about the environment to love, there are also some really anoying glitches that I don't understand why they haven't been addressed allready. A few examples:
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.
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.
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.
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.
5. Listview in Nautilus again: you can't drag-n-drop a file from another window without dropping it onto an entry.
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.
Just like Gnome's small features really adds to the experience, these small glitches really destroys it too when you run into them. Gnome is my prefered environment though, here's to hoping that some of these gets fixed in the next release...
I'm using stock Redhat 9
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. Some programs can only do middle mouse button and others it's only via keyboard, some only from the menu some will do it from the right mouse.
Some of this is the application programmers fault and some is the window manager.
Other problems, why are programmers allowed to restrict what window functions I am allowed. If I want it to be minimized I want it minimized. I've seen this done on Gaim's away screen and it's very annoying. I would like to disable an application programmers access to these things either permanently or via user settable controls.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
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.
Certainly. You've just described 99% of the articles posted on /.
*Fortitudo, aequitas, fidelitas.*
For instance, he said:
Gnome, and the Nautilus file manager (the equivalent of Windows Explorer or Mac OS Finder) allows you to rename files only by right-clickling and choosing "Rename..." from the context-menu.
This is not intuitive at all. While most of us would try the right-click eventually, there is no reason to go looking Rename there, except out of habit. If anything Rename deserves its own spot in the Edit menu. He also neglects Mac OS X Panther's 'gear' button, which is a nice approach - click file, then the gear to perform any kind of file manipulation. That is consistent. Right-click is for shortcuts but should never be the sole way of getting to a function. I do also agree with having only the filename before the suffic highlighted - I've noticed some apps do this for you and others don't, on the Mac anyways.
In Mac OS X, when you take a screenshot, a PDF file is placed on the desktop. PDF is an awkward choice for a file format for a screenshot and if the desktop is obscured by windows, as it often is, then there is little feedback of where your screenshot has gone...
This is true, although a slight modification of that same keyboard shortcut will capture to the clipboard, and gives you the same deal (and you can re-assign it). The GNOME minipreview thing sounds cool though. Windows would beat everything here if they would finally just rename PrtScrn to 'Screen Capture Button', and added a feedback sound.
The DVD capture thing is interesting, I haven't tried it yet. Would it not be different depending on video hardware? (I remember Mac ATI cards would do the solid-colour-overlay thing while nVidia cards could capture DVD frames just fine.)
While browsing font files (TrueType, OpenType, etc.) in Nautilus, the file icons are replaced with a small preview of the font. Very handy when you're browsing for a particular font
A neat trick, but not even remotely handy. This is no way to browse fonts, looking at just an upper and lower-case A, in a 32x32 (or whatever) size. OS X has this one hands-down. Double-click a font and you get the whole repertoire, with a button that says 'Install Font' below it. It even asks you if you want to install for just this user, or all users.
Now when I'm browing files, especially image files, on either Windows XP or Mac OS X, I find myself looking for the zoom controls - a good sign that Nautilus does it right.
Not to be coy but this is only a good sign that you are used to GNOME. :)
I do think that GNOME is pretty much in WinXP territory as far as usability, and you can take that as you will. Its a good thing, really... if they're starting to focus on things like font support and workflow, they may start to eclipse Redmond.
Really I want GNOME to take a page from the design of Apple's Safari browser. Make it clean, elegant, simple, powerful. Do not load it with features. Don't copy features, invent better ones. This is how GNOME will find more diverse users. I worry that with all the propellerhead demand for things like (ugh) themes, the simple and elegant approach will often get lost.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Can I copy and paste between apps now?
sulli
RTFJ.
It's curious that Gnome and KDE based their GUI design template on Windows and not the Mac. Clearly, they're basing their design decisions on bringing a Free Windows to the masses, not a Free MacOS. This may very well be because the developers were more familiar with Windows as opposed to MacOS, but was it the better decision? Or, is it possible that the distinction between Windows and Mac are no longer as apparent as they were only a few years ago, and the Mac no longer has the lead as a better GUI?
= 9J =
That and weird little things like not being able to use wildcards in the file open dialog boxes.
Yeah, that's real weird. In fact, I wonder why no-one's ever written a file manager that can select files based on regexes.
Oh wait, somebody already did.
Okok, I don't want to start a flamewar here, but I have come to love Gnome lately and I wouldn't trade it with KDE or, beware, Windows.I am using Dropline Gnome for Slackware Linux and I must say that it not only rocks in daily works but still gives me cheers from people that see it the first time when passing my desktop. It just looks cool a-n-d useable. Gnome is very clear and not overloaded with features. What's more, now that gtk+ 2.2 is stable and had all it's debugcode removed it became much faster. The lazy responsetimes I had expierenced a few months ago are now all gone. The whole Desktop feels very snappy and responsive. Partly due to Kernel 2.6 but still, Gnome really has matured. I only hope they fix the last remaining issues:
- a dialup tool comparable to Kppp
- a decent CD-Burner (there are some in development, I know...)
- a powerful file-dialog (it got fixbroken lately but I hope for a complete overhaul)
cu,
Lispy
Context menus are one of the coolest UI paradigms in the universe. You only have to learn it once, and then you have tons of features at your disposal. Every UI has features which have to learnt.
I think if you were to ask most people who know how to change the desktop in Windows, (although this is based on the highly informal sample size of myself) they would say that they change it by right clicking on the desktop and selecting properties. If you want to copy text on a webpage, how do you do it? Select text and right click, select copy.
When I loaded up Fluxbox Knoppix for the first time, I thought it intensely awesome how they put so much into context menus. Don't clutter the screen with menus, but put features in a reasonably easy to find location.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
With "point at the thing", you only get to do one action by pointing. I highly doubt renaming would be the one thing that you usually want to do a file. What? Does double clicking or command-key-clicking do the other things that you're more likely to want? Well, that's not "obvious". At least with a context menu, you get to see a list of choices.
Second: a "right-click" menu is not remotely obvious. It's clearly not obvious, by virtue of the fact that there's no indication that you can "right-click" to get a menu. For that matter, what's a "right-click" anyway?
It's no more non-obvious than a left-click. It's not even obvious that that white blob on a wire sitting near the computer is supposed to be rolled around on the desk. It looks more like a microphone to me. I've been trying to give it verbal commands all morning, but nothing's happening. It's not doing the obvious thing! Computers suck!
"In Mac OS X, when you take a screenshot, a PDF file is placed on the desktop. PDFis an awkward choice for a file format for a screenshot and if the desktop is obscured"
As a open source developer who develops Cocoa apps on OSX, i regularly take screenshots of my apps and put them on sourceforge. Im not sure what OS this guy is using, i definetly take my screenshots as TIFF of Jpeg
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
[Vanilla RedHat 9 installation]
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Andy co-founded Eazel, and wrote much of Nautlius; all the UI touches mentioned feel like his handiwork.
The user is suppose to know that if he wants to do an unusual operation on any object, he can right click on it and get a full list of choices. I'll agree that this is not obvious the first time you use a computer, but "having a good UI" does not mean that "every user is able to use the software perfectly the first time he or she encounters it".
Once the user has learned the technique, the context menu is a *much* better location for the renaming operation than the system-wide menu bar you propose. The problem w/the system-wide (or application-wide) menu bar is that it does not narrow down the number of choices based on context... to rename under this arrangement, I have to "select" the file (thus enabling "invisible" functionality elsewhere), than I have to search the menus for a rename operation, and that's very costly. With the context menu, I know that my options just apply to the file I clicked on.
Consider this... maximum visibilty would be a bunch of buttons popping up around the file whenever you hover over it. But this would be annoying. Making the user explicitly ask for the buttons to come up removes the annoyance while adding a small learning cost.
But don't take my word for it... go conduct a usability test or look through the research to see what actually works for real users.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
Right-click to rename is the lessser of two evils as far as I'm concerened. Double-clicking the name to rename a file (like Windows and classic MacOS) is a bit more intuitive, but the annoyance of triggering a rename instead of a file open because your mouse was 3 pixels off more than offsets the benefit.
"Right-click is for shortcuts but should never be the sole way of getting to a function."
Too many years using a one-button mouse....
"OS X has this one hands-down. Double-click a font and you get the whole repertoire, with a button that says 'Install Font' below it. It even asks you if you want to install for just this user, or all users."
Have you even tried Gnome, or are you just flaming based on the screenshots? Double-clicking a font file shows a full preview as well.
As for the browser, your hopes are too late. It's already been done. Epiphany is a simple interface with the useful features (like tabs) and none of the crap (like sidebars and themes) built on Mozilla's html renderer. It's quite nice. Of course, if your knowledge of the subject ran any deeper than looking at a few screenshots and posting a defensive rant about the superiority of MacOS, you would know that already.
0 1 - just my two bits
In appearance yes. Of course Windows is playing catch up with Mac by appearance.
KDE has many features that windows just doesn't have, or has but doesn't get right. (I don't use GNOME, but I assume it is in a similar situation)
Just in the main browser interface, IE doesn't have pop up blocking, nor is their spell check of web forms. Virtual desktops are still not shiped with windows (despite being a feature of X11 window mangers since I first saw it back in 1993...), and handy to have. Nor is my favorite: focus follows mouse available. Sure you might not like some of them, but they handy to others, and features windows still doesn't have, in some cases more than 10 years after X11 had it.
KDE/GNOME is playing catch up in some areas true, but in other areas they have gone far beyond windows, and windows isn't even trying to catch up as far as I can tell.
...the first 10 times it was posted here. Why is it now?
It wasn't particularly insightful any of the times it's been posted to OSNews, either.
0 1 - just my two bits
Here's another neat thing in Nautilus that I've never seen anywhere else (Perhaps OS X has it, I've not use it much). When you mouseover an audio file, after a few seconds it will start to play. A bit like an image preview for audio files.
I heard about this on IRC and it worked! Go into Nautilus and load a directory in the list view. I think you hit Control F, however I don't remember the keybinding exactly. A small input box will appear at the bottom right of the window. Start typing and it will act as the autosearch in emacs/Mozilla. This works in any ListView in GNOME.
I don't like KDE much, but I do envy KDE users for having Konqueror. It's a great file manager.
Each of your other points are really subjective. Your use of words like "non-retarded", "not designed by a GIMP", "I waste my time looking for 'skins' that were designed by adults" and "having to dick around with font settings" confirms that.
Maybe if you'd stick to technical reasons (not to mention the appropriate environment - Gnome, not KDE - we'd be more inclined to take you seriously.
Ironically or not, but I am using Gnome for about 5 years, and all that time I am using bash in CLI as well as (X)Emacs dired mode for all file relate operations I need. I need Gnome only for it's pannels with menus, launchers and applets. What Nautilus? Why is it important? I don't know ... I don't use Nautilus and I don't know why should I use it.
Less is more !
So you want to talk about the little details, eh? All right, here are some of the not-so-nice details about Gnome that bug me the most (these are all in 2.4, so please forgive me if these issues have been fixed in 2.5 -- I don't like running unstable versions of software as fundamental as a window manager):
1) No immediate feedback when double-clicking an icon. This is important for the user to be able to determine whether he has actually double-clicked or simply single-clicked twice on an icon, especially for apps with long load times. Both Windows and Mac do this with zooming rectangles or similar animation effects.
2) Placement of windows vis a vis virtual desktops. When I open an application or document in one virtual desktop, I would like it to stay in that virtual desktop, even if I switch to another while it is still loading. I like to open my browser in one desktop, switch to another and open my email client while the browser loads, then switch back; but in Gnome this just ends up placing the windows in whatever desktop I happen to be viewing at the moment, which I find inconsistent and annoying.
3) The "notification area" does not work. At all. It would be great to be able to see when I have new messages in Thunderbird or Gaim visually when I am on another virtual desktop, which is ostensibly the very purpose for the so-called notification area's existence; but I have yet to see it display anthing but blank space.
4) The buttons in the taskbar that represent running applications are extremely inconsistent with respect to size -- for example, when I have a single Firebird window open, it takes up more than two thirds of the bottom of my screen, but when I have two terminal windows open they take up less than a tenth that combined!
These are only a few of the things I've noticed, and only those that are "no-brainers," things that any decent window manager should take care of as a matter of course. There are other things that I'd like, such as a Mac-style menu bar -- if they must choose a single method of the two, I would have them choose a method based solely on its merits, not on its prevalence in other software or on its technical difficulty, both of which have been cited as reasons for Gnome's current choice. (I am not about to argue the point of which method is better, but note that Apple did experiment with both methods originally and ended up choosing the global menu bar because of extensive end-user testing.)
Mike
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
Can't believe this got insightful moderations.
If you click on the icon, it highlights. That's it. If you click on the name, you can edit the name. There's more than one thing you can do, here, because the icon and the name are separate objects, when you think about it. (Ever renamed an icon? No, you rename the icon's name.)
If you click on the name and then decide you want to move it, you can still drag the icon to wherever you want it to go. Furthermore, if you highlight the icon and hit return, you can begin editing the name.
If you control/right-click on an icon name, you get the same contextual menu that you see when you do the same on the icon. And yes, if you click and HOLD on an icon name, you can drag the icon normally.
Let's recap:
1. Click on the name to rename.
2. Click on the icon to highlight.
3. Press return while the icon is highlighted to rename.
4. Click and hold on the icon or the name to drag the icon.
5. Control/right-click on either the icon or the icon name to see a contextual menu of frequently used commands related specifically to that item type.
This seems pretty goddamned good to me. You get complete functionality without a lot to think about. It's been this way for years, and we Mac users seem happy with it. How is right-clicking and selecting "Rename" any better than just clicking the frickin' icon name and typing away?
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
Ever tried to use a Gnome app over an SSH tunnel? I have tried running PAN and Gaim from school by SSH'ing in to my home computer, and it's unbearably slow. It can take up to a minute to redraw the headers pane in PAN, because for some reason it slowly draws each header bit by bit.. you can actually see them refreshing slowly.
As an experiment, I tried running some KDE apps over the same connection, and KNode refreshes its whole window nearly as fast as when I use it on my local machine.
Now, I'm not writing this to rag on Gnome or its apps, because quite frankly I think PAN is the better news reader, and Gaim is my IM client of choice, it's just that for whatever reason they really suck over the network.
I hope the Gnome developers don't forget that some people still like to run apps over a remote X connection.
I always thought that Tk/Motif apps were the most stable. The uglier the UI, the more stable the app IMO. That said, Gnome2 looks fine to me. I couldn't think of anything I'd want improved (well, how about not doing 20 round-trips to open a menu. That would be nice.)
IMO, Gnome2 is much nicer than Windows any day, and mostly better than MacOS X (because Debian is about $300 less expensive than MacOS).
My other car is first.
-Don
The Nongraphical GUI
X was designed to run three programs: xterm, xload, and xclock. (The idea of a window manager was added as an afterthought, and it shows.) For the first few years of its development at MIT, these were, in fact, the only programs that ran under the window system. Notice that none of these program have any semblance of a graphical user interface (except xclock), only one of these programs implements anything in the way of cut-and-paste (and then, only a single data type is supported), and none of them requires a particularly sophisticated approach to color management. Is it any wonder, then, that these are all areas in which modern X falls down?
Ten years later, most computers running X run just four programs: xterm, xload, xclock, and a window manager. And most xterm windows run Emacs! X has to be the most expensive way ever of popping up an Emacs window. It sure would have been much cheaper and easier to put terminal handling in the kernel where it belongs, rather than forcing people to purchase expensive bitmapped terminals to run character-based applications. On the other hand, then users wouldn't get all of those ugly fonts. It's a trade-off.
[...]
Ice Cube: The Lethal Weapon
One of the fundamental design goals of X was to separate the window manager from the window server. "Mechanism, not policy" was the mantra. That is, the X server provided a mechanism for drawing on the screen and managing windows, but did not implement a particular policy for human-computer interaction. While this might have seemed like a good idea at the time (especially if you are in a research community, experimenting with different approaches for solving the human-computer interaction problem), it can create a veritable user interface Tower of Babel.
If you sit down at a friend's Macintosh, with its single mouse button, you can use it with no problems. If you sit down at a friend's Windows box, with two buttons, you can use it, again with no problems. But just try making sense of a friend's X terminal: three buttons, each one programmed a different way to perform a different function on each different day of the week -- and that's before you consider combinations like control-left-button, shift-right-button, control-shift-meta-middle-button, and so on. Things are not much better from the programmer's point of view.
As a result, one of the most amazing pieces of literature to come out of the X Consortium is the "Inter Client Communication Conventions Manual," more fondly known as the "ICCCM", "Ice Cubed," or "I39L" (short for "I, 39 letters, L"). It describes protocols that X clients must use to communicate with each other via the X server, including diverse topics like window management, selections, keyboard and colormap focus, and session management. In short, it tries to cover everything the X designers forgot and tries to fix everything they got wrong. But it was too late -- by the time ICCCM was published, people were already writing window managers and toolkits, so each new version of the ICCCM was forced to bend over backwards to be backward compatible with the mistakes of the past.
The ICCCM is unbelievably dense, it must be followed to the last letter, and it still doesn't work. ICCCM compliance is one of the most complex ordeals of implementing X toolkits, window managers, and even simple applications. It's so difficult, that many of the benefits just aren't worth the hassle of compliance. And when one program doesn't comply, it screws up other programs. This is the reason cu
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
This article just highlights that nothing really has changed in the Nautilus/Gnome world.
Development on how to take 31337 screenshots is given a priority, when screenshots are taken often, if at all. (I think I've taken 1 in the past three years, and that was done with xv's "grab window".) Screenshots simply aren't something worth spending time on.
Nautilus still sucks. Yea! It defaults to selecting everything before the extention! It STILL FOUR DAMN YEARS LATER doesn't support icon arranging. You either have them all messed up, or flush left in alphabetical order. What the hell? It still seems slow, and doesn't have decent plugins. I'm not a KDE guy, but Konqueror is heads and shoulders above Nautilus.
Nautilus sucks and needs to be replaced. Hopefully Velocity or Endeavour2 will mature enough to actually replace that dog.
which is why a right-click menu should NEVER be the only way of accessing functionality.
I agree, and it isn't the only way. All context-menu functionality is duplicated in the top-level menu. And you have hot keys. So for rename in Gnome, you have 3 options (that I know of):
1. right-click on file, rename
2. select file, Edit menu item->Rename
3. select file, hit F2
In my opinion, the mouse shouldn't be the only way to do things, there should always be a way to do it with the keyboard.
#!/
This makes sense. No, wait, what's hardware acceleration? I just want to take a picture from this DVD I'm playing on my computer!
... Grandma?"
Do you have any idea what kind of people use computers? Everyone! Not just people who know what hardware acceleration is, or even know where to start to find that particular slider in a control panel. It's a fucking joke that you'd be modded up for saying that, too, since having a menu entry for it is proper UI design -- because then you have the possibility of explaining it over the phone to your grandma.
"That's right, Grandma, just right click the desktop, then choose advanced, then go to the hardware tab, then you want to move that slider over and
Compared to:
"Go to the top and choose Edit, then pick Screenshot."
Your comment is a joke to people who aren't computer nerds.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
What's with the change in panels for GNOME 2.4, for instance?
I used to have a floating panel that was set to only take up as much space as the applet (the workspace switcher) within it took up. I upgraded to GNOME 2.4 and lost floating panels. It's not even like with other GNOME feature removals, where they kept it in the form of a hidden GConf setting that no one really knows a damn thing about (since there's precisely zero documentation as to what keys do what, save for examining the source).
It's still better than KDE, but some of this crap is really annoying.
It is too bad you get confused. There really was no choice there.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?