GNOME for Grandma

An anonymous reader writes "PCWorld colmnist Matthew Newton has written an interesting two part article titled "In Search of Linux for Grandma", in which he shares his thoughts on introducing computers to a 75 year old PC neophyte (through Linux). He discusses the new spatial Nautilus that he is planning to unleash upon grandma, and quote from the article - "Grandma is never going to learn about "opening a file manager" to "navigate her way" to her documents. They are all going to live in plain view in folders on her desktop. And when she opens them, there won't be any surprises."."

Comments

Re:Won't grandma be surprised

[Coryoth]

when she finds out that this revolutionary idea of opening a new window for each folder is one of the first features users turned off in windows 95

Yes, but unfortunately there is more to a proper spatial interface than simply opening another window for each folder. Microsoft's implementation was very simplistic and failed to implement the atttribute preserving properties, and general "window as a folder" paradigm that spatial interfaces are all about.

I'm not a huge fan of spatial navigation - I don't think it's that great without some useful systems to make sure the window managment is easy (and note that the GNOME version has many of those, while the MS Windows version did not - another serious difference in usability right there) - but to compare a well implemented spatial interface with the very broken, half implemented system Windows used is pointless. The Windows95-2k "open folder in new window" scheme never grasped the key points of a spatial interface, it just aped roughly what Macs did.

Just because windows created a very bad, half assed version of the idea doesn't mean the idea is bad, merely that the MS implementation sucked.

Check your logic and try again.

Jedidiah.