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Why Users Blame Spatial Nautilus
An anonymous reader writes "OSNews has a commentary on spatial Gnome and why you KDE/Windows people hate them so much (hint: because almost all of you use Windows and/or a Windows 'interface clone'). Steve Jobs, however, denounced spatial interfaces because they make the users janitors. Hmmm!"
GNOME 2.6 is all about ease of use, performance and unification
...
Don't know how to use gconf? Then you shouldn't change the way Nautilitus works, I presume.
Am I missing something?
--
Remove the Kiddie Gloves!
In other news, god uses three-space tabs.
From the Wikipedia article...
/apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_browser
If you do not like Spatial Nautilus, turn it off by setting the following key to true using gconf-editor.
found here
One of the highest paid janitors in the world....but I don't smell like piss and vomit....well not today anyway.
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
There shouldn't be such an outcry over this. People are accustomed to things such as double-clicking (OOPS, VIOLATED A PATENT) and other parts of Windows. To ease the transfer from Windows to Linux, the GNOME team should at least create an option to disable it.
got sig?
Whether a spatial interface is useful or not depends on how many levels of nested directories you have. In linux you can go pretty deep, and a spatial interface quickly becomes unwieldy. On old Mac OS, you hardly ever went deeper than Macintosh HD:Documents, so a spatial interface was very efficient and intuitive. OS X could easily be spatial: all the unix stuff doesn't show up in the GUI anyway.
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
I really can't understand arguments like the one OSNews makes. If people hate the interface then they hate the interface. Saying, "No! You can't hate the interface becasue it's right! You're all worng! You really like it!" just seems, well, silly. What's next, "Why Users Find Spinach Disgusting" telling us why we should really all find spinach to be tasty?
Laugh at stupidity: mod idiots +1 Funny.
Did anyone see the book/movie Disclosure?
Spatial navigation is the wave of the future, face it. It's much more intutive than our current system. We just need to get used to it.
It's like the metric system: we don't want it now because we're not used to it, but everyone knows it's better than the English system.
As some of the osnews comments pointed out, there's nothing new about the spacial interface. the first version of macos had it, and windows has had it since win95. In fact, you can still switch to it easily in winxp. However, xp does provide an easy way to turn it off, which nautilus apparently doesn't.
Overall, I think that the spacial metaphor is good for novice users, but once users get used to organizing files and folders themselves, they begin to find that it clutters their interface more than a browser-based interface does.
i recently switched from GNOME to KDE. i was using GNOME in it's infancy but found lately that there were certain tools (gnome-pilot for example) that were trash. and then the gang at GNOME pull off this wonderful new "spatial" feature which seems to me just a nice and fancy way to describe "opens a new window every time you click on something". what was wrong with the method that millions upon millions of people had grown accustomed to? and no - it's not a "you're just a windows user" thing because i've not had windows on a computer of mine since 1997. it's hard enough to get people to accept Linux as it is. people are simply afraid of change. i think it's time the Linux community accepted this and just improved on the already working interfaces we already have. and stop giving behaviors fancy names to try to trick people into thinking it's oh so new and oh so improved. instead - just make the darn think work as well as it always has... and maybe kill some of the memory leaks and, for the love of all things good, someone please fix gnome-pilot!
nature loves variety::society hates it get your variety at http://www.monkeypantz.net
Some people aren't interested in the Gnome developers personal interperation of the desktop metaphor. Some people think that making poor decisions based on pushing on a metaphor to the breaking point is stupid.
Some people think that using a tool to apply struture to files is an excellent use of a computer, rather than yelling at users that they're too messy and they need to conform to thier tools rather than the other way around.
Jesus. What egocentric crap! There's nothing wrong with a "spatial metaphor" if thats what works for you, but your underwear twisted in a knot when other people don't willingly submit to your attempt to push it on them is just egocentric and irritating.
I've not read such a bunch of poorly written flaptrap rhetoric in quite a long time.
There is not a single case of anything there but first-hand anecdotal nonsense. Not only that, but it ignores the fact that spatial browsing (as they call it) was tried with Windows - and dumped, because it largely sucked.
Some people might like GNOME, but most do not. I do not like it because it is not configureable. Even Windows is more configurable than GNOME is in some respects.
The author tried to say that hard disks should be browsed like a file cabinet's folder. That's fine - but I like to browse by task (if I'm browsing at all). It would drive me nuts if i had a seperate bash instance or state for every directory I navigated to - as I've evidently moved from those directories, and no longer need them.
That said, this guy's writeup is borderline incomprehendable. How'd this make it to the front page, again? My left testicle could make a more sound argument for castration than this guy's half-assed attempts at arguing for spatial file browsing.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I for one am kinda tired of people flaming me and saying things like "you kde/windows people" just because I don't care for spatial nautilus.
I'm not trying to flame anyone here, but it is a valid opinion shared by me and lots of other users.
bash: rtfm: command not found
I use Konqueror. I use the command line. I don't like IE for various reasons, for one it freezes often when opening a directory, especially when it's networked. I don't like Spacial file managers. I didn't like classic MacOS's spatial mode, why should I like it now?
To be honest I don't use GNOME or KDE, my most common activity is browsing the web (firefox), mail (thunderbird) and most other things I do are through a terminal window. Sometimes I use other apps (openoffice, media players, etc) but that's insignificant compared to normal usage.
The Gnome interface guidelines are different to what people are used to under Windows (e.g OK and Cancel buttons in a different order) which makes it annoying when using Firefox which conforms to these guidelines, because I'm swapping between platforms all the time.
Thiw isn't a firefox problem as they designed it to fit in with the Gnome UI guidelines, but it's not going to be successful unless they get guidelines that all main Linux apps use (Gnome, KDE, and other apps that don't fit into either like OpenOffice) otherwise it's just an inconsistant mess.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Well, that point of view is one-sided. The whole thing about spatiality is to provide the user with a real-life-alike interface that keeps objects' state and does not alter the contents of any physical object if not ordered to. Browser mode folder windows violate these rules by replacing physical object (folder, represented on screen by a window) contents with new set of icons every time the user opens a new folder, and not retaining folders' state (view mode, sort order, icon placement)." Whoever thinks a computer should emulate a file cabinet should trade their compiler for a carpentry set. Poor interface design requires bullshit defenses like this. Good interface design becomes obvious upon using it.
Not everything on a computer has a real-life metaphor like the author of the article is suggesting. Sure, they can be helpful to describe some things, but they should almost never be the sole reason to do something.
I hate spatiality in file browsers, regardless of my directory structure. I'm pretty much always only using one file manager window. I never manage five windows at once, so I have no need to open five different windows -- I'm only using the one. All the rest are clutter, whether it's five extra windows, or just one extra window.
I guess, if we keep taking their metaphors too far, then a non-spatial file-manager would be like a drawer that magically changes its contents to be whatever you want. Sounds useful to me. Also, butchered the hell out of the metaphor.
I personally agree 100% with Steve Jobs about the stupidity of having to tidy up a virtual desktop, and that's why I run fluxbox. But the whole point of open source is freedom to choose. If other people want icons heaped all over their desktop, they can run Gnome and configure it that way.
Ditto with the recent /. discussion of whether KDE and Gnome are getting too slow and bloated. I happen to agree that it is a problem, but again, nobody's forcing me to run Gnome, so it's a big non-issue.
Find free books.
The guy is basically saying that this way of browsing your desktop is better for you, so shut up and get used to it.
Thats just insane.
Users have their way of using their desktop, and software should adapt to that. Yes - software should push new ideas. However, when users flat out reject them it is not the place of the developers to say "quit your bitching, we know what is best for you."
As for the guy that wrote the article, attacking users that complain and don't know how to use gconf? What, only power users are allowed to choose how their desktop feels?.. [ as a side not, perhaps if gconf wasn't so crap... ]
stuff
Hrm, i must be confused about the term 'spatial'. Steve Jobs thinks it makes users janitors, but... i always thought the whole spatial concept was invented by Apple. The whole the-directory-is-a-folder-on-your-screen thing...? Am i confused, or has Jobs changed his tune, or what? :/
I've decided to post this instead of mod.
I've thought about this, and seen the way a lot of different people use their computers, and i've come to this conclusion why spatial mode is a really dumb thing to do. Spatial mode only helps you move or copy documents from one directory to another.
Users are basically divided into two groups: people who can find their files, and people who can't.
People who can find their files hate spatial nautilus because it just clutters up the screen without providing any real functionality. Sure it makes it easier to drag and drop files the few times you need to do it, but it makes navigation of the file system a complete bitch. These people don't want the hassel of working with twelve different windows.
People who can't find their files typically put every single one of their files regaurdless of content or file type into a single directory, "My Documents" or its equivilant. Since these people pretty much always save their files in this same place, they never benefiit from spatial nautlilus because they never have multiple places for their files. The only benefit of spatial mode is easier copying or moving of files from one directory to another, and since these people only use one directory, spatial mode means nothing to them.
Slackware, what else when it must be secure, stable, and easy?
Gross.
I've spent a week or so using spatial nautilus, after previously disabling it, and I'm starting to get the hang of it.
However, lots of my file are on NFS mounts several levels deep. How is someone supposed to deal with that? I can't seem to make shortcuts in the "Computer" place or anything like that. How does one make shortcuts? (making symlinks on the command line doesn't count)
I'm sorry but the newspaper analogy sucked donkey balls. I mean, my web browser doesn't turn my hands black either.
GNOME devs - Lay off the Kool-Aid and switch back to something with caffeine!
This article is what is wrong with the OSS community. Simply because one disagrees with the author, that person is wrong wrong wrong.
I *hated* the folder diarrhea that began with Mac OS. Some people love it. The option to turn it off and on should be an easily configured checkbox in the app, not something "hidden" in the gconf setup.
From the article: "why oh why does it need 2 minutes to list 3000 files stored in one folder"; I'd better not use it to browse my porncollection then...
Yes please, can I have some more?
Yes, I'm sure it would be perfect if all files were only 2 directories deep, but achieving that would require you to really really want it (for philosophical reasons?), and waste your time on it. It's not real-world though.
In the article (I read it) it says that the spatial nautilius mimicks the way physical objects behave, ie by staying in the same place unless you put it somewhere else etc (not replacing the directory you had open). This works fine in the physical world, but computer systems are often more complex (or more simple but act in a different way, depends on how you see it), and therefore we have developed suitable abstractions and interfaces to be able to interact with them. The "browser" mode is one of these. It prevents clutter, and it's easy to get at both folders a level above and below where you are in the directory structure.
BTW, congratulations on getting an extreme flamebait submission accepted.
And say that of all the file browsers I've ever used, the default OS X system (and its simplified iPod cousin) with multiple columns scrolling left and right is probably the most useful. It simultaneously tells me what files are in my current folder and leaves a breadcrumbs trail back to the root directory, with the added bonus of giving me detailed info on whatever file I've selected.
It's not perfect -- it's stuck on alphabetical order and always takes me to the top of a folder's contents instead of scrolling to wherever I last was -- but it gives me a lot of information in one window, which is just the sort of thing an info-geek like me loves.
The Ford car company doesn't go with handle-bars one year, to a joystick the next year, then back to handle-bars.
And I'm sure that ideas and concepts can be expressed better than using the English language but we use it primarily because the work put in to re-learn a different language exceeds the drawbacks of the English language itself.
I even know few people who never open more than one browser window, viewing all pages in tabs; I hope they do not try to glue a daily set of newspapers together before reading them...
Ouch.... that hurt.
Advice for shallow folders seems stuck in ages of DOS when you had 100s of files on a drive max. In age with 100's of thousands of files, shallow hierarchy is a murder both in terms of organization and performance.
Similarly, author's disgust at some people using tabs to display separate pages seems ridiculous - we're not supposed to use interface in the most convenient way possible, just to avoid crossing some imagines real-life metaphor none of us knew existed?
I guess I just cannot get myself into the mind of the reviers, or the way that he apparently uses his computer... all I can say is, he better realize that other people don't all use the computer in the same way, before he presumes to write UI articles with any authority...
- To err is human; but to really screw up, you need a computer
Ok, I am one of these people, I like to have one browser window open with all of the pages I need in tabs along the top. Why? Because I find it much more efficent functionality wise, if I had multiple windows on the bottom menu bar, it would get far too cluttered.
I am getting the feeling the author is attacking people like myself who use their browsers like this based on his view that people like their software interfaces to act like objects we encounter in real life. But why should I be limited to how objects work by the laws of physics, when there are better options available to me that aren't confined by these laws?
I don't understand the attack here, if I find it more functional to use my browser this way, who the hell is he to suggest otherwise? No I don't glue pages of a newspaper side by side, because that would be plain stupidity, but this is not the same. It would take ages to glue newspaper pages together in a different arrangement, whereas on a browser interface such as mozilla, it takes a simple: Right click > Open link in new tab.
Worst analogy ever.
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
Try the new FSview that debuted with KDE 3.2. In konqueror, click the icon that has multiple colored squares. You will then easily discovered where your disk space went. I gained over 10 Gigs of space today by trying it out!
found here
I like spatial mode. But the GNOME developers should be careful about ignoring complaints about the lack of options. Linux users aren't fond of being told what's best for them and it wouldn't be a huge development effort to make an options page for the top 5-10 things that GNOME users complain about not having an easy way to change (i.e. not tracking down a gconf key, please let's not head down the path of the undocumented/obscure reg-hacks again)
Insert pithy comment here.
People hate untidy desktops. If I store 10 real manila folders inside one another, the last thing I want is to open them all up on my little 17" desk, and find the stuff.
I'd like to know how many Nautilus developers actually leave the spatial mode "on".
Just imagine:
"And kilometers to go before I sleep, and kilometers to go before I sleep"
- OR -
"I can see for kilometers and kilometers and kilometers...."
Yeah, the metric system is better, really.
I'm an avid user of Gnome, though a less avid user of nautilus (I tend to prefer the good ole terminal window, myself). I have nothing against the "spatial" nautilus or its detractors/competitors.
However, reading this article is like a HOWTO on the philosophy of poor user-interface design. Software engineers in general make bad user-interface designers because of the philosophy of those like Radoslaw. That philosophy is that you can engineer a perfect design and ram it down the throats of users who don't like it, because it is based on "sound" engineering. A desktop "metaphor" is only as good as it does its job- which is to aid the user in doing what he or she wants to do (in whichever context you're in).
"Spatial" nautilus (and to be honest, I'm not entirely sure how it differs from the Windows 95 file manager, but as I said, I don't use Nautilus very much) may be great, but it won't be because it rests soundly on some abstract file drawer metaphor. Hell, if I want to something that matches the usability of a file drawer 100%, I'll buy a file drawer, thank you very much. Nautilus, and any other piece of desktop software will be great if and only if it helps its users get their jobs done. If users are clamoring for an option to turn it off, then that's probably an indication that they are not buying the new UI, or at least not ready for it. Provide them the option (apparently there is one, buried somewhere in gconf no doubt) and move on. Stop trying to deliver a "revolution" to the unwilling, and stop developing user interfaces in a vacuum.
"Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots." - Jonathan Nolan, Memento Mori
I don't use Nautilus but I decided to read this article just cause it's a slow day. I was amazed at what an absolute buffoon the writer is. Check out some of these choice quotes. Speaking of tabbed browsing:
Sometimes they even abuse the physical metaphor of tabbed browsing by opening multiple pages - not subpages of the same web site! ... I hope they do not try to glue a daily set of newspapers together before reading them..."
What an opinionated moron. I browse the web all in one window, using nothing but tabs. But *apparently* I'm abusing my user interface! Here I thought I just preferred it that way, who knew I was offending a purist! And further for people who don't find spatial Nautilus conducive to browsing:
Folder structure should be simple and as shallow as possible, and the "master" folders (something like My Images or My Music folders known from Windows) should have their own shortcuts on a GNOME panel
Ahhh, now it's how we're all storing our files the wrong way. Silly us! I appreciate the basic gyst of his argument. "If you change your way of working to conform to your user interface, then you'll find it's completely intuitive. Sorry, no offense to the folks who use and love Nautilus, but you need to keep this buffoon from engaging in any more advocacy.
I hate it when people applies real world constraints to the computer. Yes, each folder is a seperate entity, but that doesn't mean that you have to treat it as such whenever you handle it. Instead of thinking that each folder has its own window, you can treat the window as a view inside your file system. Opening a new folder is just like switching channels on the tv. As someone else mentioned, each window does not have to represent the folder itself, but rather the current task.
I'm also one of those "few" people browsing the web using just one window (opera). Web browsing is usually one task, thus one window. It's also quite practical if I want to move the browser to the other monitor. Instead of moving 10 windows I can now move one. If I want to use both monitors, I just detach one of the document windows (or create a new window) and move that window.
OK so my view of a folder is like a draw (even tho it's called a folder). why when i delete something beginning with the letter "D" does everything "E" onwards move around? I take my "Desk Tidy out of draw, my Eraser, Ruler and Pen all move position. its a flawed metaphor unless it works perfectly, This is what the Anandtech web page said which all the work was based on.
It doesn't happen in Windows, Mac OS X or anything else I've come across, all thier "Arrange Items By Name" type options do just that, whereas our "Arrange Items By Name" should really be "Always Arrange Items By Name". Cleanup is good for Manual Layout but I don't want to have to switch every god damn folder to manual layout!
...because it forces the user to adapt to the way the UI does things, rather than the other way round.
a UI should allow the user to do things the way the user wants, and not force them to adapt to the developer's whims.
good software accomodates the whims of the end user, bad software doesn't.
gnome seems to be making some really astonishingly bad ui decisions lately. how much abuse gnome end users will tolerate before jumping ship remains to be seen. 'choice is bad', says gnome devs. um, ok.
(yes, i know it can be disabled, but making users have to use gconf-editor to change it is bad. it should be an easily accessible option up front, not hidden away.)
They've had it for almost 10 years now. It's still the default setting in windows, all versions. I see users using it and complaining about it every day becuase they don't know any differently or how to shut it off. They just know they don't like it even when they've never seen anything else.
It's one of the very first settings I change when I do a fresh Windows install.
why the gnome devs require end users to dig through hidden settings with gconf-editor is beyond me.
if such a fundamental ui thing as spatial browsing can be disabled, present it to the user in an easily accessible manner. don't hide it away.
i mean, what's next, hiding away the logoff button in some hidden menu because users might accidentally use it?
"Folder structure should be simple and as shallow as possible", what utter rot. Folder structure is a matter of individual preference, and in practise when you're organizing a squillion files, it's semantically useful to build n-levels-deep categorizations. Imagine a person with several thousand PDFs - a variety of language manuals, specific program manuals, tutorials, misc textbooks, howtos, ebooks both fiction and non... and they all sit scrambled together in a "my PDFs" folder. My ass, more like. Stupid prescriptive halfbaked interface nazis. You kiss your gnome browser's ass, and I'll use konqueror in tree mode.
so in reality.. i open a cabinet... then a folder...
and in that folder i have 16,000 files.
Hm.
Sorting that is gonna be a job for a janitor, subdirectories (DIRECTORIES, NOT FOLDERS) makes this infinetely easier.
Im not using all this hardware to make life as hard as using paper
There is a reason that every single desktop environment (barring GNOME 2.6) has dropped the "spatial desktop". There is a reason that people now write code languages that are not Smalltalk, no matter how much you try and make them so. There is a reason that people get cable modems/dsls, instead of dialing up an ISP on their phone. Let the old technologies die. They served their purpose, and trying to ressurect them is not only painful to those around you, but to the poor, severely beaten corpses of these once proud horses.
"Give away the stone, let the oceans take and transmutate this cold and faded anchor." - Maynard James Keenan
I don't know why this keeps being debated. Spatial interfaces work for when you have few files and shallow directories, just like in the real world on your desk. Browser interfaces work for when you have lots of files and deep directory trees. The only way to get a spatial browser to "feel" like it's powerful when you have a lot of files is to have the computer manage the files in "meta" categories. That way, you're managing groups of things that are smartly organized, not a myriad of individual files. Perhaps when we get some really smart database file systems there will be some automation to bring spatiality back but until then it's browser all the way.
I'm sorry, but I don't like my file manager forcing me to change the way I browse ('should' have a shallow directory structure, 'shouldn't' nest folders too deep, etc.). I think the spatial paradigm is pretty cool, but it should be an easily-disabled option.
As for the screen clutter, sure you can close the containing folder when opening a subfolder etc. with non-obvious keyboard shortcuts, but I shouldn't have to RTFM to get rid of simple annoyances like that!
'Real-life interfaces' are generally a bad idea. The vast majority of people have cluttered desks in which stuff is impossible to find quickly. Review the Interface Hall of Shame's critique of 'real-life' inspired UIs (IBM RealCD and RealPhone, Apple QuickTime Player 4). They're quite thorough and brutal. Computers are not for the purpose of merely representing real-life objects electronically; they are there to aid us in improving productivity over 'real life' methods.
They explicitly argue that the spacial metaphor is somehow intuitively more appropriate:
Think of your hard drive contents as of a desk full of drawers. Every time you put something into a drawer, you may be sure that the next time you open the same drawer it will be in the same place (and the drawer itself will remain in the same place). So, when you open a folder and try to locate a particular icon, it should be where you put it before. Simple?
But so what!? There are other viewing metaphors (such as the browser) that are just as coherent to the user, but don't have such negative usability impacts (such as hundreds of open windows, new windows opening in seemingly random locations, and seemingly random changes in view).
Arguments for usability need to be based on usability testing or proven heuristics - not on "this metaphor is the most conceptually pure, but who cares about its usability impact". The only real advantage of a strong UI metaphor is to increase peoples speed at learning the interface due to their familiarity with the metaphorical concept, but the choice of metaphor needs to be carefully weighed up against how usable that product will be once it is learnt.
I find it a confusing and jarring experience when OS X finder switches view mode based on the previous way I was viewing some folder, because I don't remember how I last viewed a folder, I'm thinking in a browser/viewer type framework (but I realise my experience may not be typical of the average user). How usable is this for the average person?
The commentator claims in part that spatial browsing is better because it encourages a shallow directory structure, which is clearly preferred over deep directory hierarchies for organizing information. He gives as a metaphor the contents of a drawer, which is easily visible to anyone who opens it. But he fails to consider the problems for people who have large numbers of files and documents that need organizing. Imposing shallow directory trees implies that there will either be large numbers of files in each directory, or that there will be a large number of subdirectories under each root and branch node. The appropriate metaphor then is not a few drawers in a desk to keep track of, but a garage with walls that are packed with the contents of shelves, boxes, jars, drawers, cabinets, and other containers. After a while, people forget where things are stored and resort to brute force searching to find things they know are there, but can't recall exactly where.
The solution isn't to impose a particular form of organization for storing and browsing files, but rather to provide superior tools for indexing and cataloging all entries so that they are easy to recall. What we need are browsers that allow us to browse by content attributes, rather than simply by file name or directory path.
simply restructure your filesystem to fit the UI better! after all, its not spatial browsing that's at fault -- it's the end user's fault for having a filesystem structure which doesn't fit well with the UI's design.
see, that was simple, wasn't it?
I like in spatial to be uncluttered, fast, and that keeps the view of your choice for each directory
...
but I really can't stand the fact that it open a new window for each directory
to browse within the same window you have to go back to the old nautilus, that I dislike even more
shouldn't be too difficult give the option to keep spatial closing the current window while opening the new one
well back to Rox, for the time being
The articel itself is standard Gnome propaganda again: "blabla, your file organisation is wrong, you are wrong, but our filemanager just must be right, blabla". Gnome has a whole lot of great ideas in it, but all to often Gnome maintainer seem to think they know better then the user what is good for them. Removing or hiding configurabilty in GConf makes this even worse.
Anyway, back to another issue in the article which I don't get at all, at the end Eugenia talks about Spartial Mode and DB-based filesystem with no folders at all and how they 'mix' well. Well, how do they mix? Isn't spartial actually the completly opposite of a DB-based filesystem? In spatial mode you represent folders as windows, one window represents exactly one folder, its size and position is safed, so that the window actually becomes the folder from a users point of view. With a DB-based filesystem however there wouldn't be folders, just data sorted in whatever way you need it at the point, so you would have lots and lots of different views onto your data, no windowfolder corelation which seems to be what spatial is all about.
For those of you who want to know what they are talking about. http://www.bytebot.net/geekdocs/spatial-nautilus.h tml
No one will understand it until they have that moment of pure everything, where all the good, evil, and spaciality in the universe converges and makes absolute sense. Then, and only then, will spacial browsing make sense to the individual.
I just had it like...a minute ago. I'm still recovering. Whoa.
Regardless of whether this feature can be turned on or off (which it seems it can) - Perhaps the writer should consider people who actually use their computers for more than listening to MP3 files and writting ill-informed opinion articles.
People have various and legitimate reasons for saving files 10 directory levels deep. I myself have various clients. Those clients have various projects. Some projects have various aspects and phases. Etc, etc. Perhaps it is my old-school thinking that prevents me from just throwing all of this information and documents into a "My Projects" directory?
~ Corporate Memo From Sys Admin ~
Dear Employees,
We have decided to simplify our file managment procedures. From now on, all users please save your files on the server in the "My Files" directory, without creating sub-directories. That way we will not have to waste time navigating through unecessary directory structures. I realize this may be a bit unconventional for an organization of 35,000 users. However, we feel that the benefit will outweight any inconveniences. Please use google if you need to locate a project file.
Sincerely,
IT Dept.
TODO: come up with a clever sig
My god. It's a commentary. You people act like this guy is saying that you have to use the spatial interface. He's just providing his arguments for why it's alright. If you don't like his opinion, don't bitch about it, go write your own.
l der-should-look thing could be nice if you prefer having your folders set up just the way you like it. As I recall, W95 didn't have true spatiality. It just opened up a new window wherever the hell it felt like it with the folder laid out however the hell it felt like it. This is different. It allows you to set the exact location and layout of the folder on the screen (although as the Ars Technica review says, you should be allowed to set a different background color for each folder, so that you could perhaps categorize folders and such). And it doesn't have to clutter your desktop. Just double-click with the middle mouse button instead of the left.
Maybe some people 100% absolutely don't ever want to leave browser-based filemanagement. That's fine. Changing habits is not an overnight thing. The Ars Technica review of GNOME 2.6 said it took them close to a week to get used to spatiality, but once they did, they kinda liked it. Maybe you will. Maybe you won't.
If you know how to use GConf, then disabling spatiality should be no problem to you. If you don't, it's an opportunity for you to learn to use GConf. You probably need to learn how to someday anyway.
While I use (and prefer) browser-based filemanagement myself, I can see why spatiality and this whole it-remembers-all-my-preferences-about-how-this-fo
If you like your way, fine, just don't flame him for stating his opinion in the public domain. I couldn't give a damn either way. I tend to adjust to whatever environment I'm put in.
If you want a real "file folder" metaphor there should be no nesting anyway. People don't put file folders in their file folders. They MIGHT separate subjects by using separate cabinets if they have a lot of info. Otherwise it's alphabetical or numeric or date order and in you go. If tghe author wants people people to have perfect real file folder metaphor, this "spatial browsing" won't do it.
And by the way, even in browser mode Windows lets you maintain settings (view type, sort order, detail level etc) for each folder independently of the others. That seemed to be a big beef with the author, but is in fact not even an issue..!
Classic MacOS may by default browsed files spatially.
But Myself and nearly all of my users, preferred the "list view" of the MacOS.
I mean, we're still viewing things spatially, but without the pop-ups of 1000 windows as we're digging into the filesystem.
Perhaps if nautilus were to provide some alternative to the current form of spatial filesystem browsing, or at least an option to turn said feature off, there wouldn't have been such an uproar.
I have been a MacOS user, and a Linux user since way back when. I don't need to be told how to use my computer.
-Henry
--- #@$DF@#2%@^%3^&*$%FRHG%%[NO CARRIER]
A point that really got me: Folder structure should be simple and as shallow as possible, and the "master" folders (something like My Images or My Music folders known from Windows) should have their own shortcuts on a GNOME panel (...)
WTF? Can I please not put all my mp3s/oggs in one folder (d:\mp3s\) and only have an album subfolder? I want to (at least!) use subfolders for genres, please, and then I know of people who then do subfolders for artists, and then for albums (I merge this step).
I also would not put all pictures I took with a camera into one folder, but instead sort them, either by date (probably), and maybe also by other criteria (occasion, filmed person/object, ...).
This My Music and My Pictures crap is always so getting on my nerves on the newer versions of windows... I have all my stuff on d:\, thank you. Yes, I set my profile to point there, so applications point there first for saving and loading. Could you not please recreate all your subfolders in d:\'s root on every other boot?
If this thing is bugging people as it really does seem to be, it should be a rather clear hint for the Gnome developers to at least give that _easy_ way of setting it to work in a more familiar way to how it used to be.
I also find it hilarious that this article actually gives the message that users are just being a bit simple and hinder innovation because they hate spatial browsing. Well, as I at least see it, there's more to usability of a computer program than the familiarity of its paradigms with normal-life situations (e.g. of how you'd think of a folder and then a directory as a folder). I honestly don't think that giving users something they've been used to in real life is automatically the most innovative, ergonomic and natural thing to do.
And in fact, if you think about the idea of a folder, it is not consistent with the idea of the spatially browsed Nautilus folders -- you don't have folders inside real-life folders, and if you did, finding information from them would be rather clumsy, if you'd have to open up one and reveal all the other folders inside it, just to take again one of them, and so on. You'd end up with a horrible messy pile of folders on your desktop, which is exactly what happens with the spatial Nautilus.
And no matter what you personally think about this whole issue, already the fact that there is something as controversial as this on such a fundamental level of using the GNOME desktop environment shows that no collective usability increase has been achieved. As far as I can see it, an user interface with which a huge number of people are supposed to work with (as a file manager surely is), there should be no reason to have half the people hating it and some loving it dearly. The ones who love it so dearly could turn this innovative feature on, and the ones that are put off by it, would not be exposed to it and change back to KDE/Windows/whatever. And if this thing really is the next big thing with file manager user interfaces, it would take over anyway with the people who actually want to change their way of organising information and browsing it.
I guess in the end what I'm trying to say is that in my opinion forcing very radical usability changes down your throat doesn't actually do any good to the usability.
... that one of the key ideas being missed here is that many functions (especially ones we work with a lot) on a computer are moving away from item-specific windows to task-specific windows. I have a browser window that I browse with, a Finder window that I manage files with, etc. Tabs, tree/column views, and so forth allow me to confine a given task within one window, rather than littering my desktop with a dozen windows.
:)
However, I still have the freedom of opening additional windows if I want to to further separate tasks. For example, a browser window with a bunch of tabs for a research project, and another window with a bunch of tabs for news articles or Slashdot surfing.
Just my 2 cents.
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
Looks almost like a consensus against GNOME - I happen to like the system better then the alternatives I've tried. It is taking me a bit of adjusting to get used to the spatial mode nautilus, but I've found for my most frequent uses it does make things quicker following a bit of file reorganizing.
I am *NOT* joe sixpack, though I don't program either. It seems clear to me that GNOME's efforts are geared heavily toward making DE that will be comfortable for someone who has little or no experience dealing with computers - I can see why this irritated most existing GNU/Linux users, and might drive a few toward KDE/Fluxbox/Whatever.
Nevertheless, Gnu/Linux *needs* (assuming we see new users as a good thing) a major DE taking just this approach and taking it well - in the long term, there will be a lot more potential in simply being the first and best impression for someone who doesn't know what "OS" means than in trying to steal Windows/Mac users who are going to have to learn new ways of working no matter how much of a clone their GNU/Linux DE tries to be.
First I have to say: In the beginning I hated the spatial file mangaer, but then I got realy fast used to it. And if I intend to browse alot I placed a shortcut with the --browser (or whatever) argument.
Metaphors: The article speeks about real-life metaphors such as books and drawers. I can understand why this was nesecarry in the early life of computers to make things more understandable, but now computers is as much used as drawers and books, if not more.. and there shouldn't be any reason to try to be like those.
It is a physical thing and should have its own design.
Justice to the computers!
Mohahah!
"""
So, people in fact love when the machine works in a way resembling behaviour of real-life objects, but it seems that only when the "spatial" application is a web browser: they accept the book metaphor with web pages, but reject the drawer metaphor with folders and files. Sometimes they even abuse the physical metaphor of tabbed browsing by opening multiple pages - not subpages of the same web site! - in multiple tabs of a browser window. I even know few people who never open more than one browser window, viewing all pages in tabs; I hope they do not try to glue a daily set of newspapers together before reading them...
"""
This guy is actually trying to castigate people for using tabbed browsers to open more than one website!
LOL
Spatial and meta-categories can mix if you expand the vocabulary of the spatial environment. The obvious example that comes to mind is "piles." Apple has been rumored to be working on this for a long time now. If the computer can organise your documents, say based on date created, format, job, or content, then it can put it into piles, much like you would do for a stack of papers of a particular category on your desk. Automating these kinds of groupings is difficult but I don't think impossible. Perhaps like speech-to-text it will be possible to train the OS based your work patterns. I know that I am pretty consistent in how I manage everything. I have a few types of projects I work on which always have the same patterns of creation.
Windows does not have a spatial interface, never has, and likely never will. Spatial doesn't mean "opens files in new windows" which is the extend of the Windows behaviour people label "spatial."
;-)
Spatial works, and only works, because it's *spatial*. Which means that you can visualize locations and objects based on their relationships to other objects.
The classic spatial example is driving. There are probably tons of places you go on a daily basis on which you have no idea what the road names are. Or, if you do, you at least don't think about them while driving. Many people give directions that don't say things like "turn left on Elm" but instead things like "drive into town, turn left at the corner with the brown building, drive a couple hundred feet, etc."
Another example is a filing cabinent. (Closer to the computer folder/file metaphor.) I can tell someone where the records for my company's taxes are. The name of the drawer, the name of the folder. When I look for that folder though, I don't scan the cabinent for the drawer name, I don't filter through the folders one by one. I go straight to the third drawer, go straight to three fourths of the way back, look for the clump of red folders, and pull out the first one. I know the location of the proper draw in relation to the cabinet itself and the other drawers, and the know the location of the folder in relation to the folders around it. That's spatial.
And the great thing about the spatial Nautilus mode is that it works both spatially *and* navigationally! You can open a folder, scan through the list of folders and files in it, and make a choice based on a known path or set of directions. On the other hand, if you are already familiar with the file, you can navigate to it without so much as reading a single label/name, because all the items are in the same places, each folder opens in the same spot on your desktop, etc. You can remember where to click based on the location of the window and icons therein in relation to each other.
And just as the article states, your clutter argument is crack. Middle click or shift-click will close the parent window while opening the new, so there is absolutely no reason for your desktop to be cluttered other than you being unaware of the feature. Now that you are, that argument is invalid.
Do you know how I can either:
1. turn that off
2. change the size of the windows
I keep a number of files with a long name (+70 characters) and whenever I try to load one I can't read the full name because the browser defaults to the multiple columns. (This is mainly an issue in mplayer)
thanks..
I use gnome 2.6.
The spatial nautilus took me all of 30 seconds to get used to and I still use it today...though I use aterm more in day to day stuff.
But hey folks, it's not rocket science here. It's very easy to use, and it's very easy to get used to. But some people just "I don't want to get used to it! I hate it! HATE IT! I'll never use it!".
I seem to remember that OSX had a new interface also that people had to spend a little time getting used to it. And I recall in the pre-press shop I worked at people saying "I don't want to get used to it! I hate it! HATE IT!" with that too. But after a few days they couldn't live without it.
People hate change. But hey, if you don't want to use it, don't use it. Use kde or fluxbox or _______(insert window manager here).
Ahh...the sweet smell of choice!
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Millions upon millions does not equate to millions * millions, but instead, "upon" implies "in addition to," meaning that the poster's statement implied a number of people equal to or greater than 4,000,000. (Assuming "millions" means at least 2,000,000.)
and if you are interested in a *nix filemanager with a like capability you might try out evidence
Sometimes they even abuse the physical metaphor of tabbed browsing by opening multiple pages - not subpages of the same web site!
You're kidding, right? I didn't know I wasn't "allowed" to open unrelated web pages in their own tabs. What is he talking about? If he is afraid that the metaphor of bookmarks in a book is broken by doing this then maybe he should think of the Internet as one giant book. Then no "laws" get broken.
Your post sums it up perfectly; I just saved five minutes by not writing it on my own ;)
Why would one artificially limit their use of tabs to only pages served from the same website? The author likens tabs in a browser to marks in a book. However, he almost suggests that use of such a tool should be limited in use to one specific style of usage. To me, it might make sense to use tabs within the same window to group pages related by task (recipies for tonight's dinner, for instance) rather than source.
And this is intuitive how? The author seems to think that UI elements should map directly to real-world objects. I am left wondering which real-world object would lead the user to stumble across the idea of holding the shift button while double-clicking.
Why double-clicking? Why must a modifier key be used? My remote control never requires a double-click. Nor do the climate controls on my car. The author seems to like the book analogy -- I've definitely never had to turn a page twice while holding a random button to get the desired response from a novel.
The author also suggests that if one cannot figure out how to change the application's default behavior then they should constrain themselves to the developer's idea of what the proper settings should be. In other words, if a user finds a UI to be confusing and unfriendly, it's their own fault and they aren't qualified to determine what environment they prefer.
Is this really the type of thing one should be saying of an application with a well-designed UI?
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
I read the article, they explain why they think their way is better, and try to tell people how to lay out their directories. Umm, thanks but no thanks. I don't have to listen to someone else tell me what they think is best for me, they should have at least made it easy to tweak the functionality. It is very arrogant to try to dictate how users should lay out their files. As a matter of fact it is borderline asinine and antagonistic. "If you don't like our new browsing structure, then you are stupid" is the gist I get.
I hate sigs.
oh boy i hope you never read a carl sagan novel. it'll drive you batty!
nature loves variety::society hates it get your variety at http://www.monkeypantz.net
The reason people hate Spatial Nautilus is simple: they use KDE or (more likely) Windows most of the time and are used to that. They boot into Gnome and try out the new Nautilus that they've already seen flamed to death on slashdot and osnews. The first thing they do is click the fuck out of it and explore their entire hard drive, opening up dozens and dozens of windows on the screen. They fail to try to explore the interface or read any documentation and don't realize there is a "File->Close Parent Windows" or Ctrl-W available to them, nor do they even notice that folders retain their characteristics like position and size over time.
They then decide that it sucks because they never bothed to give it an honest look in the first place and were either resistant to any sort of change or were simply confirming the pre-existing bias they already had.
Here's who *likes* spatial nautilus: people that use it to manage files instead of browse their filesystem. People that use Gnome as a tool and not a toy, people who and organize their personal files logically. If you actually *use* it, you'll probably end up loving spatial nautilus, despite the areas that still need improvement in it. But those are not the people that tend to review new distributions or new versions of desktop environments which is why there are so few positive spatial Nautilus reviews out there.
501 Not Implemented
Minority report uses a very interesting 2d UI afair.
I'm awed by the fast feeling in th moves vs actions in that ui... But then, i'm computer damaged.
On another issue, i see no flaw in the spatial view of nautilus. But that might be from my AmigaOS background, and i'm also one of those that used the simular file management in windows due to it's speed and ease of use... =), As i said, i am damaged =)
And on a side note, call me strange, but I really do like the spatial interface, especially the way it remembers the position and size of all directories. If you have too many levels of hierarchy... well, that's what Ctrl+Shift+W is for.
And if there's an option that only those familiar with computing is likely to want to change or modify, gconf is a fine place.
You already can browse your files the old way either by choosing "browse the filesystem" (not sure of exact name, using an non-english locale) from the file menu, or right clicking a directory icon and choose the corresponding option.
The only reason to go into gconf is to completely disable the spatial nautilus features. Only people likely to want that, are the non-newbies longing for the "good old days" of "exploring" the filesystem.
Nautilus, as it is, already has five tabs of options in a rather cluttered options dialogue. I'm glad that this rather annoying option isn't in that.
A lot of old Gnome and Windows users hate the new spatial Nautilus. Understandable. It's very different.
On the other hand, I always hated the old Nautilus - with the spatial one it's the first time I've begun using an actual file manager (as opposed to just the gnu file utils from the shell) in bloody ages. Many of my friends feel the same way. (And some, like you, hate it.)
Well, doesn't that make everyone happy?
I mean, would it be cool when I cd and new xterm window comes up. I won't have to cd .. anymore, just kill the new window :-)
Seriously, this spartial thing was used in windows 95. I remember cloing the old window as soon as the new one comes up. I remember I didn't like it too. So the reason I don't like it is not because I'm KDE/Windows user, but because I don't like it.
All Konqueror has is just clicking the goddamned middle mouse button!
Sometimes they even abuse the physical metaphor of tabbed browsing by opening multiple pages - not subpages of the same web site! - in multiple tabs of a browser window. I even know few people who never open more than one browser window, viewing all pages in tabs; I hope they do not try to glue a daily set of newspapers together before reading them...
Yeah, that would be me, but I don't deal in printed works, so no I don't go gluing stuff together.
This more that anything inspires me to never use Gnome ever,
Not only do I find his entire diatribe insulting, but rather narrow minded and overall devoid of substance.
Why do I use only one browser window and load everything into tabs? Maybe I will always have at least 10 different apps open and don't like navigating through a sea of windows to find the 'one' I need at that instance. It's bad enough that BBedit on the mac doesn't support tabbing, so I often have 20 BBedit windows open because I am scripting, modeling, writing DB schemas, writing html and CSS all in different documents, so when I need to access a commandline, I don't want to figure out which terminal it's in, I just use "Screen" and tab to the most appropriate prompt -- and when testing/prototyping/debugging, I don't want to hunt down the one browser window out of a swarm, I want to just select Mozilla and have the one and only window pop up and grab my tab.
What is so wrong with this? The author did nothing to illuminate me on why my methodology is wrong nor convince me I'd be better off mucking about in a swarm of windows which he provclaims is "the one true way".
And who is this "author" anyway?
Some network admin from poland -- where I can only assume the network admins you.
I've never found one that I liked.. File browsers have always seemed too slow and cluttered, etc. 17 years on xterm+tcsh, thanks. It was even fast on a 20 Mhz 68020 (about 5 MIPS).
So, I read the article and it does sound kinda cool. Similar to how I use my browser - middle click on links to open Many separate windows (somewhat management with virtual desktops). I may have 10-20 firefox windows open at a time (but no, I don't keep 3000 files in a folder).
As I reach the end, my hopes are dashed. It all comes back to never sacrificing major performance. And given the hardware that is common today (XP2200 is 3000 MIPS), this is freakin' goofy:
While spatial Nautilius is not perfect (why oh why does it need 2 minutes to list 3000 files stored in one folder
From the article:
Reading the book, you may even put some bookmarks on different pages and that's exactly how tabbed web browsing works: you may keep several sub-pages of the same web site temporarily bookmarked, switch between them with one mouse click and get rid of them (remove the bookmark) when they are no longer needed.
I'm failing to follow the metaphor of the book as worded here. When I browse webpages, opening links that I come across in new tabs takes one mouse click (middle click) in Mozilla (or, as the above poster states, two clicks if your preferences are different)...my links load in the background, in tabs. One click. And I can do it without much thought, with hardly a pause in my reading of the current webpage. It is very little like making a bookmark in the current book I am reading.
This seems more akin to having many books available to you all at once...the book you are reading, a dictionary, an encyclopedia, and other various related books to the topic all stacked up on each other. Tabbed browsing with the book metaphor is more like reading the page of your primary book (on Greek Mythology, let's say), while having the definition of a difficult word you keep coming across ready in your dictionary right under it, and a reference book with more information about say how Zeus came to power which the primary book mentions only briefly ready under that.
My metaphor doesn't work all that great, but it's more akin to what tabbed browsing is best at. I think the metaphor in the article only works if you only browse one webpage at a time, and click on links only available at that one website (internally browsing, no external links.)
In terms of the browser vs. spatial...like anything computer related, there are fans on both sides. One of the greatest things about open source development is that there is always choice, you can always tweek and modify what you dislike, though it may require you to learn more advanced programming skills to do so.)
--Kristen
Voices--Art, Poetry, Photography
It's easy to start on an OSS program to 'scratch an itch' - I started that way myself. 6 months down the line I found I had *real users* who actually (gasp) wanted the program to work for them too.
5 years down the line I probably spend half my development time thinking about how each change impacts the users (yes, even the really annoying ones). I have a rule.. if more than 10 people complain about something I have a design issue that needs fixing (since there's probably another 1000 who didn't get as far as the mailing list to complain).
Too many programmers treat their projects as an excercise in masturbation and forget that there are real, flesh and blood people out there who are relying on you to get it right - some of them have invested money because they believe you can do it.
People don't read documentation, or FAQs, or even google. They want their software to do what *they* want it to do and it is our job as programmers to at least attempt to give them that. Bleating that all the users *must* be wrong because this wizzy new feature is so revolutionary it'll change the world is just wrong on so many levels I can't even begin to express it.
Innovation is good, but you do it slowly - first offer the option, make it a bit more obvious over time (once the teething troubles are out), and see how people pick it up and use it. If they all hate it, then dump it. Forget the ego... you'll just piss everyone off and kill the project.
...is that everyone is different. When you try to create a one-size-fits-all solution you wind up with the computer equivalent of elevator music. In other words something that is usually not too offensive, but never really very good either.
The flip side of this is that when you try to create something that is hyper configurable you just end up confusing people. Consistency matters above almost everyting else. Your interface can be the most obtuse backassward piece of garbage made, but as long as it is consistent it will still be easier for people to work with than something that is functionally superior but inconsistent in its behavior.
The other problem is that interfaces that are easy to learn tend to be laborious to use, and those that are difficult to master tend to be very fast and efficient to use once mastered. This is why GUI interfaces are so cumbersome. There are tasks at which they excel, WYSIWYG applications for example. When you try to use them for other things, file management for example, you end up with something that works and can be mastered pretty easily, but which is forever bound by its inherent inefficiency.
The most annoying thing for me is the fact that so many people who should know how to use a computer don't. For them the question of which user interface they should use is dwarfed by the issues created by their own ignorance. I understand that not everyone is going to be an expert, but when a 20-something college student doesn't know the first thing about how to turn a computer on, it really makes me want to strangle them.
As to the eternal question of which interface is best, I offer this response: Whatever the hell you like best personally is what is the best one for you. Whatever another person likes best is what is best for them. Agreement between the two of you on what is best is not necessary. Neither is it even a good idea because the question itself is inherently subjective.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
First thing I tried was KDE on RedHat 9. What an abysmal failure that was. I upgraded the machines to 3.2.1 using the kde-redhat rpms available here
The problem we had with that setup was the file browser. It's way too complex for non-knowledgeable linux users. 800 tabs on the left side of the screen to get to different parts of the file system just simply doesn't work. Nobody could get to anything.
So I switched them to a custom compiled version of gnome 2.6 on redhat 9 (again, vendors restrict us to it). It's actually gone quite well. However, the change I've had to make across the board is getting rid of the spatial windows (a pretty easy option to change, and now part of our default user config). We use a very large file structure to get around our assets and shots, and navigating it with a spatial browser would have taken a ton of windows and the user would have spent way too much time closing windows. So, their browser window has actually been quite sucessful.
In short, the gnome browser view is a winner, but spatial navigation just doesn't work for very large directory structures.
wtf, the author of the article in question must like creating controversy over his name or his ideas... I can't explain this stupid "spatial philosophy etc etc" in any other way.
:)
Linux users are not like Windows jerks who accept whatever M$ is advocating. Linux users are intelligent and want to have total control over their systems.
This jerk thinks that tabbed browsing is bad. Every time I use KDE, I employ tabs both for web browsing and file/directory navigation (Konqueror). I open the tabs using the middle mouse button, and many times I have more than 20 tabs per window. I also use tabs in mozilla, firefox and other programs that support this beautiful feature. I also do the same for terminal windows, and I also use multiple text consoles (Alt+Fx).
The jerk also thinks swallow directory structures is good. Perhaps he was never in the need to manage 200,000 files. I manage hundred of thousands of files and I use deep directory structures every day.
And who thinks that having an object in the same state/position after its use is good? Methinks it's not, depending on different users' needs. If I fuck up a dir, why find it again fucked up tomorrow? The computer can just forget the fucked settings and use the defaults the next time I open it. Simple.
Maybe some engineers/developers/whatever have never used a computer and don't know the needs of the users. Or perhaps they like to force people accept their shit philosophy. How terrible.
GNOME is evil. Long live KDE!
Gnome users disgust me.
is moronic. A solid interface needs no justification. It's usefulness justifies itself. People have used metaphors before to justify user interfaces - they have failed. When cars first came about, some attempted to emulate the horse and buggy interface for driving - that failed!
The author of that FA (F doesn't mean fine, in this case) also attacks user for using an interface in a way that doesn't match a metaphor (the tabbed browsing of different sites). He just comes off as idiot. He tries to promote the idea of innovation, but attacks users that don't conform and are therefore being innovative.
That being said, I sometimes like a spatial inteface-but not always. I would prefer if the OS (or window manager or whatever) just gave me the choice dynamically. Perhaps left click non-spatial mode and middle-click spatial mode?
i like the old deally better. and when i did the apt-get update;upgrade deally with my sid desktop i got this. i got distracted when my cups deally broke and had to reimplement lprng. cups is back up, and now this. i doan like this spacial concept. where do i turn it off?
Serenity now, insanity later.
and people writing commercial linux distros (i.e. Redhat). If you limit the changes the average user can make, you limit what he/she can break. Plus, it creates very clear support boundries (i.e., you mess with the registry, you're on your own). Small companies without the luxury of cheap, desparte labor (India, Vietnam, China, etc) need this sort of thing.
Besides, if you can't do a little registry hacking to get at the features you want, then maybe Gnome is a little smarter than you. That's what defaults are for.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
First, ask a representative sample of users what they really want to accomplish. Four developers on IRC plus a dork on slashdot does not make a representative sample.
Next, categorize the users into archetypical users, usually by job function or general experiential levels.
Then design an interface that makes ACCOMPLISHING the GOALS of users as simple as possible, but no simpler. Give lots of feedback to orient the user, but stay out of the way of the user.
The worst designs simply retrain the user to comply with whatever implementation the programmer hashed out before lunch. The back-end software should be efficient, and the front-end software should be effective. There's a difference.
Design Goal: Make the simple things effortless, and the difficult things possible.
[
How about old style file browse windows (ala gnome 2.4) that can be divided into 2 independantly browsable views (in the same window) by draggin a bit on the scroll bar (like MS IDE editor). Then you have the spatial aspect for copying files without the annoyance and clutter of full spatial windowing.
Good examples of bad metaphors are:
- Quicktime (see also the links to the RealPhone and RealCD on that page)
- the desktop
- and the recycle bin
To explain the latter two: the idea of the desktop was to have a central point for a document-centric environment. How many people do you know who use it that way? Most people I know use it as a pane for starting programs or just a way to have a nice background picture. I rarely see it myself since windows hide it.The recycle bin is rather dangerous. I gave adult education classes in Windows once, and I had to learn that quite a few people empty it regularly: the full bin looks messy and they are not messy people. But that defeats the purpose of the recycle bin. (I won't go to discuss MS failure to provide this important facility where it really matters.)
The article links tries to tell me spatial Nautilus is good, because it is close to the real world. I haven't tried the new Nautilus yet, but while I actually work myself in the area of creating browsing spaces for data analysis, this particular description does not entice me at all. They can blame me for being someone who uses Windows and KDE (both true, though often Blackbox) and someone who "misuses" the browser tabbing feature (I use two windows if I have two completely different task sets -- reading Slashdot and linked sites counts as one). But that is their problem, for me the description is yet another reason not to use Gnome (the other one is that the Gnome project seems to lack pragmatism).
If they come up with a properly designed browsing space for documents (using metadata instead of tree-based hierarchies) I might be more interested.
Peter
-- CAUTION: Don't read this posting.
Boy, this guy is really not thinking too clearly. His argument, in essence, is "you should adapt to the computer, the computer shouldn't adapt to you". He even goes so far as to say that the computer should work like real objects do.
If I wanted the computer ro work just like real objects, I'd use those objects instead... they're cheaper! I want the computer to be BETTER.
He talks about how multiple levels of directory are bad, and that you should, in essence, dump all your files into a single folder. I don't know what crack this guy is smoking, but there's no WAY I could find anything that way. I don't remember what all the files on my filesystem are called! Say I want a program I downloaded last month sometime. In his system, I'd have to go to my Downloads directory and try to figure out which, of THOUSANDS OF FILES, is the one I want. I'm not supposed to sort by category, like Games, or even, heaven forfend, an English name for the file? And in his system, I can have only ONE program called SETUP.EXE. Earth to author, that's not how things WORK around here.
This kind of spatial metaphor for data is a blind alley. It's poor thinking. It makes good sense when you are talking about 1980s computers, because 1980s computers emulated the paper devices of that era pretty well. You can fit about as many papers on a floppy disk as you can fit in one folder, so it makes sense for floppies act like folders. But the computers of the 21st century are a whole different beast. There's a reason we usually call them 'directories' now instead of 'folders'... we're storing vastly more in them. We don't have desk drawers on modern machines, we have LIBRARIES.
Even a file cabinet metaphor doesn't work very well when you're dealing with the vast amounts of data we have now. My data partition, for example, has 63,596 files on it, divided up into 3,703 folders. Using a normal interface, I can navigate that huge amount of data very quickly and extract what I need. The biggest limitation, at this point, is my memory... folders and subfolders help me to remember what I have and where to find it. Per the author, apparently I'm supposed to dump SIXTY FOUR THOUSAND FILES into the SAME DIRECTORY. Showing all these files in ONE WINDOW is somehow inherently 'better' because it's 'more like a desk drawer'.
The spatial metaphor people are lost in nostalgia for a simpler time, and are letting that nostalgia replace analysis. There's no WAY I could fit sixty five thousand pieces of paper in a desk drawer, and expecting a modern hard disk to react like one is poor thinking.... it's nostalgia. Computers don't work like that anymore, and people are very resistant to being shoehorned into that interface. Reasonable people would be asking why, not telling 95% of the entire computing population that they are brain-damaged.
GNOME devs, this is a blind alley. You have gone the wrong way, and the sooner you realize that and back off, the better.
http://www.nongnu.org/gcmd/
Spatial Nautilus is trying to force users to go with a real life metaphor because supposedly, this is good for them. Though I am not a GNOME user myself, it seems to me that even inside GNOME, this argument doesn't hold as there are other places where there is no resemblance of real life and nobody seems to complain. Take, for example, the start menu. If something that has no resemblance of real life is so evil, why has this not long disappeared from the GNOME desktop? Well, because it works and it's the way people launch teir programs. It actually improves upon reality. Another example I can think of is the single menu bar at the top of the screen. How can it be that if I switch applications, the menu bar changes? In real life, each application's menu bar would be separate and attached to that application. So, there should be a menu bar for each app and the option to switch to a single one should be well-hidden somewhere in gconf. But it isn't. Why? Because it works well for many users this way and they are happy. Just let the users choose. Choice is good. That's what OSS is all about.
> How about instead of trying to justify why people should like Gnome, the open source community make it better so that people stop hating it?
That would be, "Add a GUI control to enable/disable spatial navigation mode".
And if you submit that patch, and the GNOME developers consistently refuse to accept it, then what? Keep on patching your personal GNOME with each new release? Doesn't do much good to try and "make it better" if that winds up meaning "make your own and keep patching it".
Think about it: if the GNOME developers thought such a switch was a good idea, it would already be there. They Don't. They put it in the gconf basement because they don't want it plainly available, they WANT users to use spatial mode and will make it difficult to turn off (until said new user is advanced enough along to use gconf).
This just occured to me. If the file system is to be seen as a file cabinet full of files - then how can there be subdirectories at all? If root is the filing cabinet, then the directories in root are the drawers. Inside the drawers, there are files. How can there be subdirectories inside the drawers? Drawers inside drawers? Entire filing cabinets inside drawers? No matter how you look at it, the metaphor doesn't hold. So the argument of making it "just like real life" is just plain wrong.
You complain:
However, when users flat out reject them it is not the place of the developers to say "quit your bitching, we know what is best for you." As for the guy that wrote the article, attacking users that complain and don't know how to use gconf? What, only power users are allowed to choose how their desktop feels?
Yeah, Bullshit. Users have not gotten their hands on the new Gnome yet. The author is pissed off at what reviewers, fucking M$ "power users", have been saying. They should know better. What the author said was:
I can understand the author's frustration. He's peeved at such bad reviews for a feature that can be turned off and thinks that the way Gnome made things work is nifty and exactly what people asked for. Why have so many WinTel rag trolls panned it?
Why not be pissed about pans of software that's free and easily avoided? Gconf is easy enough to use. The user could call up Konqueror and have a first rate file manager for all the people at Gnome care. They have responded to what users asked them for.
Gnome has gone out of it's way to make a Windoze experience that out dozes Windoze. People have screamed and yelled that Joe Sixpacks wants something easy for his shallow file structure. People, such as my wife, who have never owned more than a few dozen files at a time demand desktop shortcuts and "consistency" of just the type Gnome offers. They want one directory for their hundreds of picture directories and no funny business that might "hide" something. In short, they demand and love clutter. Now they can have it and more.
The author could have been nicer in his write up, but he has a point. Gnome has indeed done the Microsoft Monkey dance. The kinds of people who ohh and ahh over the XP and it's simplified, single desktop, GUI, should love Gnome. It's exactly what people have asked for. But those people are the same jackasses who have forever been claiming "Linux is not ready for the desktop". Two years ago, they pointed to a lack of an "integrated" browser and utilities that were "thrown together" and used different rules. They called inconsistency in the user interface and pretended that Winblows did it any better. They also complained of a lack of "innovation". Well, here it all is! What does it elicit? Complaints. Those people will never be happy with anything but their stale, broken, Microsoft junk.
This software has it's place. Do I use Gnome? No, I don't. At the same time, I know it's just right for people like my mom. She's been pining for her Windows 3.1 machine for years and has made everything look just like it since.
Crazney, if you don't like gconf, why don't you fix it? I'm sure you have such good ideas that everyone will want your fork. Can't do that? Fine, be happy with your fluxbox and leave Gnome alone.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This is what I love about the Mac OS X: click: spatial Finder for my DeskPad folder; click: column view for drilling down; click: list view for all the details.
What's not to like about having a choice?
ThosEM
The only thing keeping me from reinstalling gentoo...
[poll]What do you use as an alternative to reading slashdot?[/poll]
Radoslaw Sokol is a network administrator in Poland.
I'm sure there's a joke in there somewhere, other than the article.
And now, when the time to ressurect the spatial ideas has finally come, people accustomed to the bad interface design try to defend it only because for the past years they have been using it
Obviously, it hasn't occured to Radoslaw that perhaps "the desktop" is a bad metaphor to design around.
For christsakes, I'm not trying to turn my hard drive into a file cabinet like one I may see in "the real world."
He painted a unicorn in outer space. I'm askin' ya, what's it breathin'?
I for one like the spatial browsing method. I was tickled pink when I opened my music directory to find it still using the same size window, being sorted the way I wanted it, and having it viewed as a list rather than icons.
I don't think any type of browsing needs defending, we just need to make the alternatives easier to find and use. I'm sure by the next release of GNOME this whole thing will be settled. Until then, if I want to specifically browse my filesystem, I'll open the "Browse Filesystem" link in my "start bar" (I can't say I actually know the proper term used in the Linux world).
add this to your ~/.bashrc
test "$DISPLAY" && { _cd () { ( cd $1; xterm ); }; alias cd=_cd; }
stoooooooopid.
For many years, OS/2 Warp was my preferred desktop. Had it not been for IBM's virtual abandonment of the product, I'd be using it today. There are many things I still miss from OS/2's gui (the Workplace Shell). One thing I remember with nostalgic fondness was the spatial interface. It really worked well on a system that views drives the same way DOS/Windows does (C:, D:, E:, etc.). This kept my directory tree much shallower. When I finally gave up on OS/2, I moved to Windows. I couldn't and can't stand the interface, but the one thing I really began to rely on was the browser-based interface. What really grabbed me at first is that I could very comfortably begin doing file manager operations entirely with the keyboard. For example, to move a file to its parent directory, you can "Ctrl-X" the file, "Alt-Left" to the previous directory and "Ctrl-V" to finish the move. Trying the same operation with the spatial interface would never have been as quick or simple. Being a keyboard-oriented user by preference to this very day, I can really appreciate this. When I finally moved to Linux, I loved the fact that my command prompt became so important again, but in the gui category, I was back to near-total mouse usage. When I found KDE (and especially when KDE introduced Konqueror - which outstrips IE in almost every way as far as I'm concerned), I was happy to get a return to the browser interface.
There are still some things I'd like to see resurrected from OS/2's WPS, but for the spatial interface, I'm okay with nostalgia.
I decided to go sig-less and am so excited, I had to tell you about it!
It's a single button in Gconf. I don't know where to look in Winblows for such a feature, but I do know that most "easy" things in that terrible UI are only easy if you have memorized the 6 different ways Microsoft has done it over they years.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
-
By the way, I cannot imagine how spatial browsing must lead to screen clutter: opening folders with double-middle-click or Shift-double-click closes the parent folder window at once. And even if it is not enough, one can click one field in the gconf configuration editor and turn Nautilitus into "classical" non-spatial file browser. Don't know how to use gconf? Then you shouldn't change the way Nautilitus works, I presume.
Or, "I am so l33t that I know how to use double-middle-click and the "gconf configuration editor". And people wonder why Linux has trouble getting traction on the desktop.Keyboard "shortcuts" are shortcuts. You should never have to use them, and all of them should be visible in menus. Go read "Tog on Interface", or "The Inmates are Running the Asylum". The user should never need to know a secret code to do something.
In the name of all that exists, please stop trying shoving metaphors onto the abstract beauty of computers.
The following things are stupid:
- disabling the backspace key because you couldn't easily erase things with typewriters
- eliminating Undo, Redo, and Repeat because time travel is physically impossible
- having www.airplanetickets.biz take two hours to load because it takes two hours to go to the physical ticket booth
- making directory trees behave like physical drawers
Metaphors do not make things easier to use. If Jane-Six-Pack tosses an empty vodka can out of her armoured utility vehicle, she expects it to disappear. She does not expect it to stay where it landed until it decays in twenty million years.
If computer interfaces were just as tedious as real life, no one would bother with them.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
Is it spelled "Nautilius" or "Nautilitus"?
MC forever, baby!
I seem to recall some pretty slick Amiga utilities that also used a two-column interface. The best thing going in visual file management is now sort of a footnote because everyone feels you have to look like Mac or Windows in order to be "easy to use"...
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
First off, in my using piles as an example of the melding of spatial interface and meta organization, i didn't want to suggest that piles are a particularly great innovation, just that they were an example of a way to do it. I think if Apple put some finesse into it like they did with their excellent Exposé technology, it could be a very welcome addition to an already great Mac OS X. In any case, here's a flash demo of the concept: http://homepage.mac.com/rdas7/piles.html
I've been watching now for several years as many core GNOME developers stuck air compressors up their noses, resulting in ridiculously overinflated egos. And I've been forced to conclude that the "usability" group is the source of almost all these problems.
What has happened is that those who consider themselves usability "experts", but are demonstably *not*, are deciding that something (e.g. spatial nautilus) is cool BECAUSE IT'S DIFFERENT, and constructing a huge set of supporting claims, anecdotes, and broken analogies to support their assertion that it's the Correct(TM) way to do things.
Then again this is not the real problem. The real problem is that these same developers are so astoundingly arrogant that they have decided that they know better than some 30 years of interface evolution (not "design"). Instead of actually asking users how they prefer to work, they are instead removing one by one every normal interoperative paradigm that people have been using on their PC's for a decade, because it's "wrong".
This utterly insufferable arrogance is very visibly driving users away from GNOME. I've been a dedicated GNOME user (and developer!) since well before 1.0 days, and this kind of behavior is making me seriously consider switching to something else. This story itself is evidence, as while the comments seem roughtly balanced between the "love it" and "hate it" camps, I haven't seen a single message that says "love it, switched to it". Instead, I see many messages that say "hate it, ditched it".
If this pattern continues, I predict that a full GNOME fork will appear within a year. I personally would be happy to assist in reclaiming quite a few features that have been unilaterally decided as "wrong", if I had any time to do so.
GStreamer - The only way to stream!
I must be some sort of user interface terrorist.
Command attempted to use minibuffer while in minibuffer
Right-click on a folder and select "browse folder" (it's the second option in the context menu).
Me, I like the new mode a lot. It has a Windows 98 feel, very lean, no-frills.
I use KDE and, of course, Konqueror to browse my filesystem. But I find some tasks easier to do by command line. But I am not trying to say that command line is better; I'm saying that the browser metaphor has its limitations, just as the spatial metaphor of Nautilus.
If and when a file manager with a better metaphor appears, will it integrate easily with our GNOME or KDE desktop? Or the desktop will be so tied to Konqueror or Nautilus like Windows is to the Explorer?
One of the first things I always did in Windows 95 explorer (once I found the option for it) was turn OFF "open folder in new window", because its a pain in the arse.
As to the whole "but a web browser is like a book!" argument... well.... my PC is like a filing cabinet. I don't want to pull files out of the filing cabinet (open in new window) until I find what I'm looking for. I'd rather sift through the open drawer (tree list at side of browser window for example), until i find what I want.
"BAD" interface design is when the implementor makes decisions on behalf of the end-user that increase work-load for *no good reason*.
"Because its bad interface design" is NOT a self-justifying reason. If it makes my work more efficient, it is not bad.
I'll bet the supporters of this crock are akin to those who think that storing every file they create under the root directory is a good idea as well, because sorting through 10,000 files in the same folder is good interface design.
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I'm sorry your blind browser did read the key out loud to you. Let your mother or father read the page and they will point out the part that says: /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_browser
That is the key - Set it to true.
How the f#")(/ did the parent get insightful anyway?
That's simply a load of shit that all OSS users and developers think that anyone who disagrees with them is wrong wrong wrong. Whoever modded this Insightful is an idiot.
This author wrote out a crappy article with bad reasoning and basically said if you disagree you wrong. Last time I checked one person didn't equal the entire OSS community. In fact many of the people here who are in fact in OSS agree that he's wrong. Also people either in OSS, Politics, Relgion, Proprietary software etc, ALL think that people who disagree with them are wrong. You saying OSS has a strangehold on this type of behavior or thought is bunk.
"X is what's wrong with the OSS community" where X is some wild overgeneralized post is a worthless statement at best.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I don't care if your mother might happen to like it. I also don't care how many so called "Useability studies" tell me they might like it.
_I_ use computers, and I want _my_ needs catered for, not some mythical mother, or aunt, or grandmother, or whatever the current model "Average User" is.
I am a real user, I use computers now, I use them for fun, and I use them for getting work done.
I want an interface that caters to my needs - in other words, it doesn't force someone else's interpretation of my needs on me, and lets me configure and set things up how I like it without having to hunt around in configuration files.
I'm no stranger to a text editor, or the command line, but I also don't feel that editing config files by hand somehow makes you 1337 (god I hate that term).
A desktop environment that makes you leave the desktop environment (ie, go to a terminal session and fire up vi) to change it's settings, because having an option in the GUI to change it _might_ confuse one of these mythical users, is just a pain in the neck for us real users.
I recognise that there are benefits to be made by making things easy for new users. But too many people make the mistake of concentrating only on new users, and forgetting that existing users - even the advanced ones are users too.
Advanced users are users too!
I had no idea that I was abusing the privilege of tabbed browsing by using it to keep as few browser windows open as possible. I need to rethink my entire browsing paradigm. This guy makes too many good points, I've been browsing all wrong all these years, what could I have been thinking? Thank you Random Polish Guy, thank you for explaining why one shouldn't abuse tabs by having two separate sites open at the same time.
I like music
I haven't used the new version of Nautilus and therefore can't say much about it, but the article on Osnews is one of the worst texts about user interface design I have ever read.
It seems the author has not understood, at all, what the sense of metaphors in user interface design is. For him, it is a question of finding "the right" metaphor, on the basis of abstract considerations that have nothing to do with how programs are actually used. Then, he brushes away all other aspects and advocates adopting the option that has been chosen as the best for such abstract considerations and condemning everything else as "bad habits".
There are quite a number of things that are, in my opinion, wrong with this approach:
What is at least as bad as the total misunderstanding about metaphors and user interface design in general is that the author buys this crap about "innovation", "reviving" and "spaciality". Whether a new window should be opened for a folder is an absolutely mundane, practical question that has nothing to do with "spaciality" and "innovations". Good browsers (like Konqueror, in my opinion) make it easy to change the default for this setting in the option dialog, and it is also very useful that different clicks have different effects, e.g. with a middle click something opens in a new tab in Konqueror.
So, what's this fuss about "spaciality" and "innovation" - other browsers like Konqueror have the exactly same possibility, the only difference is that with the "spatial" Nautilus this setting is the default and the way to change it is much more inconvenient with Nautilus and gnome. I only hope that not providing a more convenient way to change the setting is just due to negligence by the developers and that it does not mean that they have similar views like the author of the article and want to force users to do something they deem "better" for absurd quasi-ideological reasons. Nothing against new windows for folders, sometimes that's good, but often it is better not to have to use too many windows.
I used classic MacOS for years, and loved spatial directories. I think that they're a really good idea, and a serious lack in Windows.
That being said, it absolutely drives people bananas when you force them to use things differently than they'd prefer. I remember moving from spatial directories on the Mac OS to non-spatials on Windows and *hating* it.
I'd *strongly* suggest that this be GUI-toggleable. The current trend in GNOME has been to increase usability by removing all the options from the GUI config (but leaving them in to keep the hackers that complain "that isn't there") happy. Emacs keybindings, user-rebindable accerators, viewport (vs workspace) support, non-solid-dragging. I really don't think this does a whole lot of good -- having an "advanced" tab is perfectly legitimate, if some UI guy freaks out about the idea of user-rebindable accelerators.
I find it extremely irritating that there is a significant and ever-growing portion of GNOME that is hidden from the "power users" that would normally get a lot of good out of it. These features are not gone, but they are not immediately apparent. This has been a growing trend since GNOME 2, and it is *not* a good thing.
May we never see th
The forced spatial mode is bearable.
What I dislike is the "mime-magic" feature, where it attempts to read every file in the current folder to determine the file types, for 3 reasons:
1) You can't turn it off without downloading the source and rebuilding.
2) It makes the file browser run unbearably slow.
3) Nautilus will ignore your file type settings almost entirely, except to refuse to open a file when it disagreees with you on the type of a particular file. There's no way to tell it "screw you, I'm right and you're wrong, so stop bugging me and let me open the file with a double click"
This is not all entirely bad. Gnome has become an experimental desktop, with cool bleeding edge ideas mixed in with some bad or underdeveloped bleeding edge ideas, the better of which will survive in the long run. If we don't have at least one desktop environment on the bleeding edge, developing new ideas before anyone else, Microsoft, Apple, or some other company is going to patent those ideas and all open source desktops, not just gnome, will be held back by stagnation and threats of patent litigation.
So on the whole, we shouldn't be criticizing gnome, but helping to make it better.
Most drawers tend to organize materials down to a manageable number of dimensions. Spoons here, forks there... 2d. A card catalog is a single dimension. As a designer, old typecases are very 2d. Piles are a single dimension scattered about in a two dimensional organization.
So, while file folder are arbitrary, finding documents via search is slow as hell, and people tend to be horrible organizers. Except of course for those with compulsive disorders!
Mod this up and the lame parent down.
There is an Explorer work-alike for Linux. Try XFE, X File explorer. If you use Debian, the package name is xfe.
This works a lot like Windows Explorer, with the directory tree to the left, and files to the right. The program loads fast and is handy for seeing directory structures. You can even open separate file panes, but I have never found that handy.
At the bottom, there is a seciton entitled "OSNews' EIC's opinion:"
Blah. She drones on and on about a flat filesystem with everything done as MIME attributes.
Here's what Linus said about MIME, who are we going to trust?
The people who created MIME not only should be convicted, they should be shot on the spot. (Linus Torvalds)
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I've been listening to this stupid Nautilus flaming ever since it first came out. Unfortunately, it seems that today's computer using community is largely divisible into two groups. One group likes the Windows way, and one group likes the MacOS way. Then there's the minority who prefer the CLI, Amiga, Atari, VMS, or the C64.
I just want to know why anyone even cares what the default on Nautilus is. I mean, seriously. Who here on Slashdot uses the default for anything. Aren't you geeks? Don't you edit your damn .zshrc to your liking, or the equivalent for whatever shell you use? I've seen this gconf-editor (I don't use GNOME, or KDE, or any other fruity desktop environment, for that matter) and it's not that big a deal. It's not like you couldn't figure out how to do it.
Personally, GUIs annoy me. I probably would prefer the browser paradigm to the spacial paradigm, but I'm not such a fucking pansy that I can't be bothered to change a little, well documented configuration option, and I certainly wouldn't be here whining on Slashdot about it.
For those of you that like the browser system: use it. For those of you that like the spacial system: use that. The GNOME devs are guessing that the majority of new users (ie, the grandma you dorks are always going on about) are going to prefer the spacial system, and you know what, they're probably right. My Grandma could use early MacOS. Not so with the new versions, no matter how pretty they may be. I'm sure (though I don't pretend to be a UI expert, unlike every geek on Slashdot) that the spacial paradigm had something to do with that.
God, you guys are the worst. I've been saying all along: if you want Joe User on Linux, you're going to end up with a shitty default UI -- keep it hobbiest, so we can do what we like -- but NOOOooo. Gotta make "desktop penetration" a goal. Gotta "bring down MS". Couldn't let a good thing be. So now you have all these "user-friendly" efforts going on that are exactly what Joe User would benefit from, and GUESS WHAT? They suck for power users. Thats how it works. As they say, if you sleep with dogs...
I hope they do not try to glue a daily set of newspapers together before reading them...
I don't know about your newspaper, but mine comes in a single bundle of all sorts of unrelated sections. Sometimes they even have totally unrelated articles on a single page!!!.
Maybe if newspapers gave us the news in a convenient deck of shuffled index cards more people would read the dead tree version.
The developers have made the basic mistake of basing something off a metaphor for the sake of it. It does not improve usability (except perhaps increasing learnability) and it does not have good user satisfaction (going by the numerous reviews and comments). Metaphors are there to help a user become familiar with an interface. Which it probably does to an extent. However there ARE NOT IN ANY WAY intended to replace more efficient methods, i.e. the "page view". And I agree, it does make the user the janitor by having to clean up windows.
The logic behind this paradigm is that you use your computer to access data and that the program you are using should be irrelevant. Therefore if you have, say slashdot.org open, it is open in its own window becuase it is its own document. The same would be true of the resume you are editing, the MP3 you are listening to and and game of Solitaire you have open- each item is in its own window. If you have two web pages open, or god forbid two solitaire games open, they should be in separate windows becuase they are separate things: You don't have two web-browsers open, you have two web-PAGES open. It could be my years of windows usage or the fact that no OS has a perfectly consistant GUI that prevents this paradigm from working for me. I generally open a program and then open the file I want from within that program. I don't think of my computer as a box that I use to interact with documents. The Gnome (and I believe Apple) paradigm ultimatly rests on this belief and it just isn't the way I think. Perhaps when there is a truly universal object broker/display/editor/presenter we can approach the UI in such strictly metaphorical terms. Until then, I believe that the majority of users will be prepared to handle some abstraction for the sake of simplicity. With that said, I recognize the fact that Gnome devs don't owe me squat and I appreciate their (misguided) efforts.
well i think so. nothing since has matched it. some things for various OSes that have aped it have come close.
This is perfectly on-topic. Steve Job's low opinion of Janitors is reflected in his comments.
Best Buy can have you arrested
I'm a little behind in my GNOME versions... so I had to dig up this short article with pictures of this spatial mumbo-jumbo. Here I was imagining the weird virtual reality type file navigation in Jurassic Park, but no, it's just another file browser - albeit one that is somewhat more like Explorer in recent versions of Windows.
I really don't see the fuss, it's not like anyone's forcing GNOME 2.6 on anyone. No button to turn off the feature? If it is that big of a deal, then someone will create said button... it ain't rocket science.
I got stuck on a Gnome box for about a week and a half, right after this version of Gnome came out. Spatial navigation was not at the top of the list of reasons I hated it, though. However, it was symptomatic of an attitude that drove me absolutely stark raving apoplectic.
For almost every program the Gnome team has decided, for good or ill, what preferences are the ones that novice users should be using. And if you don't want to use those preferences, then browse the filesystem to find the correct preference file, decode the syntax of that preference file in a text editor, and change what you want. Or fire up gconf (which is not documented), dig around in it until you find the right preference setting, decode its syntax, and change it. Or better yet, download the source code, change the make file parameters, and compile a version that works the way you want it to.
As best as I can tell, if you can't do those things (or don't want to for any other reason), then you're not considered "elite" enough to be allowed to choose your own preferences in Gnome.
I think the argument that the problem is not with your design but with what the users want is a failed argument from the get go.
As always, the ultimate answer to this kind of argument is market share.
In this case, what people people choose to use and what the distros choose to give the most support to.
I'm basically a lurker, but I can't let this "article" go by without some sort of comment.
I remember this sort of metaphor from windows 95. I hated it then and turned it off, not because I am an uninformed luddite, ignorant of the One True Way, but because I ended up swimming in windows and that was a real pain in the ass.
No doubt our fine author would tell me that I am at fault for having a directory structure which is too deep. This *might* be a valid argument in small scale home directories, but what about accessing the corporate network?
We have literally millions of files broken out by department or project. The directory structure is both wide and deep, and not because we don't know how to organize our files. Just try rolling out spatial Gnome in this environment. No one wants to pay for this level of retraining and no one wants the aggravation.
A good idea? Maybe. Scalable to even a mid-sized corporate environment? No.
I enjoy having many pages open in tabs. This is because I often view many sites at once (well, not literally at once, but I'll be doing something with one and then quickly move on to another), and it is a pain in the ass to have a half dozen windows open at once. I almost never have to view two pages at the same time, thus there is no disadvantage to using tabs instead of opening new windows. I couldn't give a fuck about whether or not it conforms to a "real life metaphor" even if I wanted to. Computer programs are not physical objects, and that is an advantage in many cases. Gluing together multiple newspapers would be difficult and time consuming, so I am forced to read them the old fashioned way. Not the case with web browsers.
"Bad organisation"? Nested folders aide in organization, not detract from it. Look, I have a lot of files. Say I want to find a paper I wrote for my CS 3604 class. Using your way of storing all documents in one folder I would be forced to look through hundreds of documents including philosophy essays, letters, biology papers, etc. Thats especially hard if I can't remember exactly what I named it. And if I'm using ls on the command line (my favorite way to browse directories), its virtually impossible to if I have more than a dozen or so files in there. Using my tree based way I just have to go to my classes folder, then to my CS folder, then to my 3604 folder, and bingo. There it is, along with a half dozen other folders for that particular class that I can easily distinguish between. No wondering if that hw3.sxw was my 3604 homework or my math homework from number theory.No, it doesn't correspond to how I use desk drawers (with the possible exception of my filing cabinet), but I can find my computer files in a fraction of the time it takes me to find anything in there. Thus you and your organization standard police can kiss my ass.
Give us choices on how to organize our stuff, not orders.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
You think it's bad now, just try using it with a single mouse button. ;)
KeS
Can't these idiots see straight?
Hell, tabbed browsing has had a HUGE effect on web browsing. Once you use it, you wonder why they didn't just do this way in the first place.
LESS windows is good. THAT is the future. Not more windows as in this "spatial" shit.
Other than that, I quite like the new GNOME. Good work.
Woohoo! Thank you.
Gnome gnows best.
Quack, quack.
Moderators: Please note that "twitter" is a known fanatical psycophant whose obnoxious offtopic rants are legend here on Slashdot. It doesn't matter what the topic is, he'll find a way to scrape in some pointless Microsoft bashing. While nobody expects us to love Microsoft in any way, his particularly tepid style of calling anyone he replies to "troll" or "liar" or "fanboy" because he happens to disagree with whatever they're saying is well documented and should not be rewarded. If anything, twitter is the type of person that should not be part of the open source/free software community. He is an anathema to all that is good about free software.
I'm posting this so that you (the moderator) have some context to consider twitter and not mod him up whenever he posts his filler preformatted rants about installing Knoppix or whatever that unfortunately get him karma every single time and allow him to continue posting his trademark toxic crap (read on) day in and day out. You may consider this a troll - I consider it community service. And I ain't kidding.
If you're a /. subscriber, I invite you to look through some of his posting history [slashdot.org]. I guarantee that you'll be hard pressed to find someone that is more "out there" than twitter. You'll also probably notice he's got quite an AC following. Don't just read his posts, make sure you go through the replies.
To get an idea of what I'm talking about, check this [slashdot.org] post out. I mean, this is an article about email disclaimers, right? The parent of the post is complaining about the ads in the linked page and so on, and twitter actually goes off on a rant to blame it on Microsoft and recommend Lynx. WTF?
Here's another. In this post [slashdot.org] twitter not only calls the OP a troll but attempts to "tell it like it is" while making some vague argument about "GNU". Yes, if you're confused, you're not alone. The reply (modded +4) proceeds to simply destroy his bogus argument. You will notice he did not reply. This is what some people call "drive-by advocacy". A sort of I'll just leave you with my thoughts here and move on to the next flamebait kind of deal. In fact, he almost never replies because he knows that his fanatical arguments simply do not hold up to any sort of discussion. It's not that he's chosen the wrong cause - he's just going at it in a completely wrong way.
More? Just read though this [slashdot.org] post and the subsequent replies. I guess this stands on its own. Or this [slashdot.org]. Or this [slashdot.org].
More? Bad spelling in astounding conspiracy theories [slashdot.org], more [slashdot.org] offtopic [slashdot.org] FUD [slashdot.org] and uninformed "I'm right, look at me" rants [slashdot.org], promptly proven wrong. Worse even, twitter wants to be RMS [slashdot.org], apparently [slashdot.org] (that first one is a winner). I mean, really [slashdot.org]. You
He didn't end the book analogy...
If books were like the spacial nautilus, every time you'd turn the page on your book, another book would suddenly appear. And if you wanted to go back and catch what you may have forgotten, you'd suddenly have twenty or thirty copies of the same book sitting in front of you.
Is this what he wanted?
Well, hell, I usually use WindowMaker so I'm not sure about the whole "KDE/Windows" user comment.
I launch Nautilus every once in a while when I'm too lazy to use the command line. Now, I don't launch it at all.
Would it have been so difficult to take a poll? "Who is for our new system and who is not?" Chances are, we know what that outcome would have been and thus it irritates some of us that such a radical change has been implimented.
Whenever you read this sig someone's refrigerator light turns on.
My experience is if I open drawer I focus on it and I don't care usually on other drawers status. I need just one drawer to work with usually. If I move things between two drawers It's more convenient to have two drawers opened at the same time ( does anybody remember Norton Commander? Oh, there is Midnight Commander, which emulates it. There are two panels to work with.)
So my paradigm is opening ONE window and closing it when i done with it. Another thing - I do not seat on couch when I open a drawer, I come to it and it's right in front of me. So any window I open should be in front of me until I say it otherwise.
May be the article was wrong about mimicking drawers. It looks like they thought about something like plane cockpit - you are in pilot seat and all the gauges and keys are in the same place all the time. Fine. what if you want to take a look at couple more things? There are no more place to put them there (anyway usual cockpit is too much cluttered for my taste).
Having say that I usually do not have much use for file managers anyway. Basically it's convenient only to browse directories which content is unknown to you. No file browser can get as convenient as shell window with all Unix commands available. How do you do 'diff -u A B' in file manager? or 'tail -f C'?
PS what is the easy way to turn off Nautilus in Gnome? If I kill it Gnome bastardly respawns it.
This kind of attitude seems to be typical of those working on GNOME these days. It's almost as is they think adopting a HIG suddenly makes them the OS equivalent of Apple computer. While reading Planet Gnome a few weeks back I was struck by one of the developers attitude on people complaining about the crappy performance of MetaCity. His take on it was people were whining and not thinking about what was important. Just didn't give shit that a good number of people had problems with the way it performed as opposed to others WMs.
I love OS, but I'll tell you one thing that commercial software does right:
It eliminates people who make crappy software that doesn't sell.
Not so here, they can continue to make mistake after mistake after mistake and will only realize years down the line they have shitty market share and should have been declared dead long ago. Contempt for your users is not an effective way to impress anyone.
BTW, middle clicking in Spatial Nautilus will open said folder while closing the parent folder, leaving you with just ONE folder.
*Fortitudo, aequitas, fidelitas.*
Please stop posting every top-level troll that gets sent your way from OSNews.com.
Thanks.
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
Having the file browser open up a new window every time is a lazy way to solve this problem.
What matter even more is that tons of people are complaing about spatial browsing. What is "better" is irrelivent.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The story is a dupe, the topic is boring, the facts weren't checked. WE GET IT!!
The topic of a spatial finder has been up for many discussions when OS X went departed from a spatial finder. However I have to defer to ArsTechnica for the best information about it.
John Siracusa offers a coherent explaination of what it means to be a spatial finder and why it can be better.
-nicnakit's really a plot by the gnome people to get users to use the command line
"I *hated* the folder diarrhea that began with Mac OS. Some people love it. The option to turn it off and on should be an easily configured checkbox in the app, not something "hidden" in the gconf setup."
Then I suggest you either pull what's out of CVS (The GNOME developers do listen), or download gTweakUI and give the rest of us some peace and quiet.
It must be a fucking slow newsday to bring up shit like this. Who gives a damn one way or the other?
And no, I hate Gnome people for all of the right reasons. They can't code and their mothers dress them funny.
I dream in binary.
I think we should be smartening up users not dumbing down the softare. Remember all you programmers out there, the harder a computer is to use, the more money you make.
It could be that this guy is comparing apples and oranges.
Digital/virtual interfaces have affordances that physical ones do not -- such as the ability to magically replace one folder/drawer with another one. That this can not physically be done with a real drawer is the reason we do not do it.
Here's an interesting tidbit: I've never owned a real desk that had drawers. Nor have I owned a filing cabinet. I've grown up with the "Desktop Metaphor" being the only desktop I've ever known. It's not a metaphor for me -- it's the real thing. The only thing. Having to open my drawers in separate windows would annoy the living hell out of me!
It would annoy me as much as "opening My Music from the panel, opening the appriopriate album folder and double-clicking a file icon" just to play a song. They're called ID3 tags, and they organize your files for you so that you never have to clickety-click through all your nested folders.
Also, maybe it's easy to keep your files organized if you have 1 work computer and 1 home computer, and you keep your data completely separated. I, on the other hand, work from home. I have a laptop, 2 desktops, and a server. I use them all for both work and fun. I am a part-time college teacher, a freelance web developer, sometimes a writer, a blogger, and I have a lot of research interests, not to mention 300 GB of media files. It's difficult to organize all of this into "shallow structures" without having a GABILLION files in each folder.
Just my $0.50
geeks are cats who dig a certain kind of cool
"How about instead of trying to justify why people should like Gnome, the open source community make it better so that people stop hating it?"
Because the ONLY people "hating it" are geeks, and son of geeks. Ma and Pa Kettle haven't weighed in with their opinion yet. Of course as you said to Twitter and I quote "I don't care". Which brings us back full circle, and without a mom and pop friendly desktop (knifed that baby we did). No an (unmodified) KDE isn't it. That's why every time we have this "spatial" discusion it comes up as the "right way" it should be done. Yeah, a geek friendly desktop with all the buttons and knobs, and blinky lights that makes one orgasm. But it's not mom and pop material. Not without changes (Lindows) which oddly makes it simpler[1].
[1] Remember that story posted here were people were placed in front of KDE. People expected Windows, and got KDE. Gnome doesn't have that problem (hence the flames).
I'm sick and tired of hearing everyone bitchslap everyone elses desktop because it's too much like windows/not enough like windows/too spatial/not spatial enough/makes you sterile/your too lame/it's too lame/blah/blah/ who gives a fuck what you like? It doesn't matter to me. I'm glad I HAVE A CHOICE. I'm glad there are people that can find the time to develop kde, twm, fvwm, gnome, afterstep, blackbox, sawfish, (insert your FREE-as-in-your-whining-ass-didn't-pay for-it floss app here.). I'm glad that if I don't like icewm I can switch to xfce. If you dont like $WindowManager fine. But the ungrateful pissing and moaning is over the top. quit bitchin and find something you like or go write something yourself.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
The fuss is because GNOME is -refusing- to add the button. They're adamant that this is the -right- way to do it, and any user who thinks it's the -wrong- way to do it is -quite- stupid.
.. a -fuss-?
Dashes indicate -emphasis-, because that's the -right- way to do it. If they -annoy- you, it's because -you- are -quite- stupid.
Can you see why this approach might warrant
Fine, there are dozens of window managers and file managers. What's the point of flaming Gnome?
Why are you standing up for an obvious troll who's saying something as stupid as "everyone hates Gnome"? I don't use Nautilus but I've got great respect for the Gnome team and don't think they need this kind of abuse. Are you pissed because all of their other tools have been so useful to you but suddenly you don't like the direction of one or two prominent pieces of their desktop?
Don't worry, the code will get back to you without much effort on your part. Evolution, Mono, and the whole Gnome framework are still awesome pieces of code that everyone can use. Besides being able to use whole utilities like Evolution, others will be porting their work to other frameworks. Free software is like that.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Say what? My icons don't change everytime - Windows or KDE. I'm really not sure what he's getting at here.
This is pretty much opinion though: You may like your icons in every folder to stay where you put it. I prefer them to always be sorted in alphabetical order. If I reshuffle them, I want them auto sorted back to alphabetical order when I reopen the folder. Especially since I have a lot of crap (more than one screenfull) and it's much easier to find alphabetized. I alphabetize my file cabinet, after all! (How's that for your real life analogy?) The exception is my desktop, where icons should stay where I place them (so I can see that nice wallpaper I put up).
I personally see nothing wrong with opening multiple pages in tabs. A person that has to put up with limited desktop resolution looks at tabs as a god send allowing you to only have to keep one window open and no minimize/maximize between windows. When I read /. I open the articles in another tab so that I can go back and forth (cut & paste) like I'm doing now.
While I agree that ten folders is too deep, just because someone keeps a folder stucture deeper than say three levels doesn't mean it's not organized or a lack of thought. Come see my anal retentive layout of the files and you'll see what I mean. I tend to categorize and then sub-categorize such that it's not uncommon for me to reach 4-5 folders deep.
"Windows does not have a spatial interface, never has, and likely never will. Spatial doesn't mean "opens files in new windows" which is the extend of the Windows behaviour people label "spatial."
"
Note that most people are saying that "windows tried it" and therefore it must be a bad idea. Windows tried the registry and it must be a bad idea. Windows tried the command-line and it must be a bad idea. Oh wait, guess that means that because Windows did it, and failed, DOESN"T mean that it's a bad idea.
Chalk up another reason to dislike MS. It takes good ideas and ruins their reputations. Apple is relatively immune to this effect because one they show good implimentations of good ideas, first! Two they simply aren't afraid of "think different". Bet you that if MacOSX still had the classic spatial? We wouldn't be having this argument. Everyone would be pointing out how bad MS did it, and Apple did right, and praising Gnome for doing the right thing.
But, unfortunately, as MicroSoft has shown, it doesn't eliminate people who make crappy software that *does* sell. So, we see, how good or bad software is, relatively, isn't the most important point in the software world, just that it is *good enough* to do what people want to do, 80 percent of the time, and has overwhelming marketting advantages.
I think everyone should bicycle to work instead personally.
So there are only 2 options? Make it hard for newbies or make it hard for regular users?
When there are hundreds of Linux distributions with various degrees of difficulty for installation (Knoppix's no installation to Linux From Scratch) I find that hard to believe.
Whatever the usability studies have told you, it isn't impossible. Most installation programs for Windows give you the choice of the default install or the custom install and I've never heard anyone complain that the choice was too hard to make.
Sometimes they even abuse the physical metaphor of tabbed browsing by opening multiple pages - not subpages of the same web site! - in multiple tabs of a browser window.
What's his problem with this? I tab pages by theme, not "not subpages of the same web site". For example, I keep a weather window open. I prefer one website's forecast page, two overlapping doppler radar pages on other sites, and a local temperature page from another site.
People will choose to use or abuse his precious metaphors and he should get over it.
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
if i wanted a "real life metaphor" in my computer i'd rather be using Microsoft Bob than gnome...
serious, my "desktop" is 120x60cm, which is 0.7m^2 waaaaay larger than my 17" CRT, how can you possible put in such a small screen all that i put in a "real" desktop ? answer: you can't.
another thing is how people work with papers. well, i can't say how others do, but when _i_ work with papers i tend to _stack_ them, then shuffle through the papers, and when i need to compare papers i put one besides the other and _no more that two_ at the same time.
see how _my_ metaphor is closer to the tabbed file manager in KDE ?
but this all theoretical. fact is: COMPUTERS ARE NOT DESKTOPS, and people know it. people react diferently to the glowing and the size and the colors and the everything of the computer screens than they react to a phisical desktop. puting icons that resemble folders or sheets of paper does nothing to change this. i know of a lot of people who are excedingly good dealing with and organizing paper that are lousy doing the same on the computer, and is not lack of inteligence or trainig, is just that computers are diferent. period.
just to make sure i'm clear on the diferences:
size: a desktop is much bigger, paper is much bigger and readable than windows in a screen
feel: grabing, shufling and sorting the real thing (paper) whith bare hands is faster and more intuitive than doing the same with the mouse
space: the computer screen is a flat 2D surface, while the desktop allows for stacking, which makes for a visible volume. there's no way for a person to tell if under there is or there isn't other windows under another (unless you use tabs like in KDE). this reason is enough by itself to make the spatial idea bad in the computer. computer screens are _not_ spatial devices. they lack the 3rd dimension, which the desktop has.
in other words: drop the spatial mode as a default and bring the tree view with tabs. Konqueror nailed this right on the spot. i'm pretty happy using konqueros with a tree view on the left and a bunch of tabs, one for each folder moving and copying stuff from one to another. much better and productive than several overlaping windows.
What ? Me, worry ?
If Steve Jobs said it's no good, it's dead. Accept it and move on.
Besides, isn't GNOME that thing the little MS punk de Icaza was involved in? If so, be sure it's a covert collaboration with Redmond as always.
Personally, I installed Gnom3 2.6 specifically for Sthe spatial stuff. MS's browser based filesystem navigation was such a piss-poor design, the first thing I did on all my Window's install was to turn it off...
Maybe the friendly Gnomes should have just made it easier to turn off... To each their own...
The box said "Requires Windows XP or better"... so I installed Ubuntu!
I grew up on Apples and Macintoshes (We got an Apple II soon after it first came out...), still love them, and even have one still sitting around the house, though it's no longer my primary computer. One of the annoying things was using the alt/option key to have it automatically close the open folder almost every time I opened a new one--it became eventually almost second nature to hold it down whenever I opened something, unless I was just browsing. If I was doing work, I knew what I needed, I knew where it was, and I'd rather all the extra windows not stay open, thanks. I suppose really I was just already used to Windows' bad interface design--never mind the fact that I'd never heard of the thing, let alone used it.
"Sometimes they even abuse the physical metaphor of tabbed browsing by opening multiple pages - not subpages of the same web site! - in multiple tabs of a browser window."
Oh dear! Here I am, with Slashdot and the OSNews article open in tabs in the same window! Awful!
"it is able to recreate the desktop metaphor that started the graphical desktop revolution"
This is my other favorite quote... I guess we'd better start printing our books on manually driven, manually typeset printing presses again, to recreate the printing press that started the mass media revolution. Why the assumption that the first idea is the best idea?
Ughh... as I was reading the article, I kept on hoping that it would suddenly become obvious that it was the authors's twisted idea of a joke or something, a parody of... something. No such luck.
Be a PATRIOT--because the only thing we have to fear is the lack thereof.
Spatial navigators know how to spell "stripped" and "survey". We also write the pronominal possessive "its" (as in "its definition") without an apostrophe.
And we never make patronizing comments about obvious typos like "intutive" (because that just leads to lightly disguised off-topic posts about proper grammar and spelling).
1. A user interface is intuitive if it matches the way a user wants to use his computer.
2. Spatial Nautilus is intuitive because people want to organize their files in large, flat directories.
3. If you want to organize your files in deep, small directories, you are using your computer wrong. Use large, flat directories.
4. Thus, Spatial Nautilus is completely intuitive.
I cannot even begin to understand what sort of mind could concoct this travesty of an argument.
It's missconceptions like this that is half the reason Linux has so many GUI issues.
Being an engineer doesn't preclude being a good UI designer. It is just orthogonal, so it is less probable to find human that has both skills. ;-).
Of course it doesn't mean all engineers admit they are bad in UI. Many bright people feel it hard to admit their skills are limited
[In case you wonder, I'm CS myself...]
I don't want my "desktop" to be like my desktop. On my real desktop, I lose things!
Seriously, the location and size of the window Nautilus last opened for directory foo is of no importance to me; I'mn liable to move and/or resize it the next time, depending on what other windows I need to have open along with it. It doesn't make life any easier for me that Nautilus should remember that and use the same position and size next time. All I care about is that it appears when I ask for it.
Then again, you are full of contradictions. Though you say that you are a "die-hard linux fan", I don't see you saying many good things about free software. A quick review of your comments convinces me that you have a strange way of showing your affection:
- You say bad things about Debian "cruft" as well as complaining about how long it took for this Gnome 2.6 to hit the repository.
- You don't like PHP or Perl and by God are too good for it
- You don't even have nice things to say about koala bears
On the other hand, Well, you do have some good things to say about encryption while beating up an honest to God M$ Astroturfer and you do say a few reasonable things. This, however is weird to the core:To Twitter: I'm starting to think you really are a Linux zealot troll. You're off my friends list for now.
Tell me any user would be better off with Winblows than a Gnome desktop. For saying so, you would perpetuate Microsoft FUD language and call me a Zealot? With friends like that who needs enemies?
Now for the core of your gripe:
the biggest point: it opens a new f**king window for each folder.
I don't know how you missed that. Every single review of Gnome has trashed the whole thing for this one annoyance that many people have been begging for. The level of Gnome FUD has reached a climax in this thread and it disgusts me.
The Windows UI might be easy for you, but I have trouble finding the "preferences dialog". Do you right click on "my computer", find it under the start menu, or what? I've used 3.1, NT, 95, 98, and 2000. The controls, if they exist, were in different places in each of them for most things. When it comes to Winblows, I'm lost and generally can't find the answer with a quick Google search. This is learned behavior, not a matter of "some intelligence" and it goes away quickly.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I seem to be missing why exactly the file browser has to moddle real life. It seems that that is a very stupid, almost neurotic approach to software design. Spatial browsers are allow you screen to become extremely cluttered, and prevents you from finding the file that you want. I do not see this as a good thing. The most irritating thing about the Windows 98 file browser for me was this "feature".
And their thing about keeping all of your files in a shallow structure is just plain stupid. This is, however, a very good way to prevent you from finding anything at all. Having a deep structure allows you to keep organized, and it works very well unless you are prohibited by some egotistical gui designers (cough...gnome devs..cough).
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
Personally I call "intuitive" "I can figure out how it works on my own totally naturally".
However I find many people seem to define "intuitive" to mean "I already know how it works".
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I'm posting this so that you (the moderator) have some context to consider twitter and not mod him up whenever he posts his filler preformatted rants about installing Knoppix or whatever that unfortunately get him karma every single time and allow him to continue posting his trademark toxic crap (read on) day in and day out. You may consider this a troll - I consider it community service. And I ain't kidding.
If you're a /. subscriber, I invite you to look through some of his posting history. I guarantee that you'll be hard pressed to find someone that is more "out there" than twitter. You'll also probably notice he's got quite an AC following. Don't just read his posts, make sure you go through the replies.
To get an idea of what I'm talking about, check this post out. I mean, this is an article about email disclaimers, right? The parent of the post is complaining about the ads in the linked page and so on, and twitter actually goes off on a rant to blame it on Microsoft and recommend Lynx. WTF?
Here's another. In this post twitter not only calls the OP a troll but attempts to "tell it like it is" while making some vague argument about "GNU". Yes, if you're confused, you're not alone. The reply (modded +4) proceeds to simply destroy his bogus argument. You will notice he did not reply. This is what some people call "drive-by advocacy". A sort of I'll just leave you with my thoughts here and move on to the next flamebait kind of deal. In fact, he almost never replies because he knows that his fanatical arguments simply do not hold up to any sort of discussion. It's not that he's chosen the wrong cause - he's just going at it in a completely wrong way.
More? Just read though this post and the subsequent replies. I guess this stands on its own. Or these two. Or this one.
More? Bad spelling in astounding conspiracy theories, more offtopic FUD and uninformed "I'm right, look at me" rants, promptly proven wrong. Worse even, twitter wants to be RMS, apparently (that first one is a winner). I mean, really. You think?
FUD,
So there are only 2 options? Make it hard for newbies or make it hard for regular users?
No, I said that there were users who will like this. I'm not sure where you get the above from that. If you don't like it, fix it or leave it alone. To read all the negative comments, you would think that Gnome is impossible for anyone to use and that's a crock of shit.
I prefer KDE, myself but the level of flamage over one dinky feature is way overblown. Gnome has great packages like Evolution and people should not be scared off of it because of one correctable file browser annoyance that some people I know will like.
Most installation programs for Windows give you the choice of the default install or the custom install and I've never heard anyone complain that the choice was too hard to make.
And most distributions include things like KDM which let you select what window manager you want to use and each window manager reads each user's preference files and remembers exactly what each user wants. If you want, you can modify the skeleton files and each new user will get the kind of behavior you want them to have. What are you getting at?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"I don't know how you missed that. Every single review of Gnome has trashed the whole thing for this one annoyance that many people have been begging for. The level of Gnome FUD has reached a climax in this thread and it disgusts me."
Conspiracy theory would say it's either KDE payback, or MS knocking down a competiter.
Anyway as I pointed out (lost in the noise). The Gnome people have made the change in CVS (arrogant people don't do that), and there is a way to make the change without a key. But then I bet some will say either "this is the way it should have always been. Those stupid GNOME developers", or "why should I have to dowload a piece of software to fix a broken UI? (sung to the tune of I can't get no satisfaction)
I could care less what they think is right for me... spatial... I hated it in Windows 95/98 (the first frigging thing I changed)... and I still hate it now. I don't want 20 million windows on my desktop.... and I don't want a window to open for every single directory I open... because eventually I have to close all of them, and that makes my carpal tunnel act up. o.0
if you can configure the user interface any way you "damn well please", then when you call up tech support and they tell where to click and what to do, they've got to spend an extra 30 mintues figuring out what you've done to the UI. It means more costly support (which is always an expense for a software company), and more frustrated users.
Now, I'm well aware that you're advanced enough that what I've said above doesn't apply to you. I'm also well aware that there are very few linux users to which the above applies. But eventually there will be, and if those users can change anything willy nilly it'll destroy which ever software company lets them.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Can't you just start like this 'nautilus --browser' Problem fixed
just because your a schizophrenic doesn't mean people arn't really out to get you
For all the reasons that file extensions suck, this is their One Killer App. They're still more convenient and flexible to deal with in many situations than the relevant Info... dialog.
This is the upside to all the questionable decisions made in the OS 9 -> OS X file handling arrangement.
Organize the friggin' desktop.
One thing that truly annoys me is the way that they encourage a cluttered desktop. Heck, Mac Land goes so far as to have the web browser put everything on the desktop by default.
In my dream world, files and directories don't go on the desktop. Files and directories go into file drawers that are accessible from the desktop. These let you organize tasks by putting things you use frequently in one space. Think of these as something like the drawers in your desk. They can be icons on the desktop just like how it's treated today, or they can be menus that pop out of the Dock, or whatever.
The desktop, on the other hand, is NOT a drawer. It is where you do your work, not where you store your huge piles of crap. Using drag and drop, dragging something to the desktop implies that you want to work with it.
The upshot is that one aspect of this perfect world is that when you're navigating the filesystem, clicking on directories opens them in the same window. When I'm navigating the filesystem, I just want to get to my destination, I don't want to have to deal with everything I passed through to get there. However, once I'm there, I drag the final folder to the desktop. Since this desktop is really a desktop and not a misnamed filing cabinet, the implication is that I want to work with this folder/directory. Voila - it opens the folder in a new window. I have now put the folder on my desk, and I can work with it. However, pulling a folder out of a filing cabinet IRL does not force the filing cabinet to close, which is why this final folder gets opened in a new window when I drag it to the desktop. The filing cabinet is still open for me to go find other folders, so to speak.
Can anyone recommend a tabbed File Manager for WinXP to replace Explorer? Like a tabbed web browser, it has multiple windows open at a time, but instead of web pages, you have different directories open. Drag+Drop moving is ultra easy, and you can have all your important file locations open at once.
i guess that is the fancy term for "open in new windows"
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Ok, apparently no one knows how to properly use spatial nautlius. If you've got deep heirarchy, as I do too, spatial still helps immensely. Spatial is about using people's innate knowledge of space in order to help them navigate, and this spatial knowledge does not disappear as you drill down a heirarhcy. Indeed, it becomes more and more important because a deep heirarchy adds complexity, and using your subconscious spatial awareness instead of scanning every directory name as you go down speeds things up (or at least creates a placebo effect towards it).
/usr/share/pixmaps/other has a slew of them if you're interested) in conjunction with spatial. You can actually drag a an icon pixmap directly on to the icon in the properties window to quickly apply it to a folder in Nautilus. What Nautlius badly needs is an "align to grid" function to clean up slightly misplaced icons. Overall though, you have to double-click on every folder you want to open up anyway, and holding down shift or using the middle mouse button to close previous windows is absolutely not an issue once you start doing it. If you give it a fair try for a little while, you may be surprised.
The benefits of having deep heirarchies over shallow broad ones applies to spatial metaphors as well. You don't have to remember where a thousand pieces of the puzzle are placed individually in a single directory, but instead have to remember a few discreet pieces of information per group, which is easier for most people to handle. This article is amazingly flawed in ignoring this, and totally ignores the benefits of organizational division.
Spatial isn't perfect by any means. I've found that adding custom icons to folders helps quite a bit as well (on Debian
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
twit, i know this is yuo!!!!!
twit, first people who dislike you are enemies of teh free softwarez. then they are in the employ of Bill Gates. and now they are in india????? do you hate indians twit???
hahahahahaahaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
stupid, pathetic little twit!!!
I have over a quarter of a million files on my machine (with another >half million archived, including over 150,000 CVS files for several dozens of projects.
How, exactly, are so many files supposed to be placed in a shallow hierarchy?
How is projects/graphics/3D/modelling/ blender/blender-2.33/ supposed to be broken up into smaller pieces without having dozens or possibly even hundreds of entries in one or more of the levels?
I find that it is easier for me to navigate if there are no more than 20 entries per level (including leafs).
Also, with tab completion in many shells these days, it is more likely that one would get the desired choice more quickly in a deep hierarchy than in a shallow one.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Yes, and then those freaks will do something really crazy, like make a text editor with tabs and use it as their DE's default text editor.
Madness! Utter madness!
There are many examples of exactly what he was saying people don't do - for instance, going to "news.google.com" is just like "gluing newspapers together" that he derides users for wanting to do. Also, in most local newspapers there's at least one summary section like "news around the world" that also serves to "glue" together content from various sources.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The "real world" system is intuitive, but it's too damn inefficient. I mean, why can't I have the pub, toilet and a selection of restaurants right next to my bed? Why do I even have to get out of bed? Why can't I just have a list of places I like to go and click one and go straight there?
At least on my computer I can use the equivalent of a teleporter, even if doing so upsets some wannabe hack on OSNews.
Intellectual Property
Intellectual: of the mind
Property: that over which one has control
Okay, the writer's an ass. Get over it. The guy writing the article is an ass for trying to impose his world view on you (particularly the preposterous claims of reducing folder depth - I find spatiality works *better* with increased depth). His points are poorly chosen and made. But that doesn't mean that spatiality is bad - far from it - it just means this guy is an ass.
The main point of a spatial interface that he fails to emphasize (but mentions briefly in passing) is that every time you open a window everything is exactly as you left it. The icons are in the same spots, the view options are set as they were, the window looks the *same*. Each folder is unique.
I can glance at my screen for a split second and tell you exactly what folders are open, just based on their position and view options - all of the "major" folders have distinctive views set. As I click through windows, I'm already moving the mouse to the next icon because I know exactly where it will be. Although he beat his metaphors to death, it *is* just like a desk. I always keep these files here, I can look at my filer and tell how much I have left to do, etc.
Many of you are using spatiality in your web browsers and not even realizing it. When you open a lot of tabs at once, I'll bet you know instinctively where each site is (Megatokyo, Real Life, then PVP, etc) and don't necessarily have to read the titles - you just know that "that's the one I want". That's spatiality.
The reason spatial interfaces on Windows and most Linuxes have failed is *not* because spatial = bad, but because their implementations have generally sucked. The whole point of a spatial interface is that everything maintains its state - it's where you left it and predictable. Linux and Windows (especially Windows) fail in this regard because thye only seem to keep state for a while, or not in all circumstances. Every so often on Windows all the folders lose their state information. That makes a spatial interface impossible to use effectively.
Recently the Mac (where all of this really got started 20 years ago) has screwed it up with its brushed metal windows that interfere with state maintenance in particularly brain-dead ways. Nautilus is the first really good implementation of a spatial file browser in a long time.
To all of the people touting the explorer view, consider this. How often do you need to copy files and end up scrolling the tree pane up and down, clicking through directory trees, or even try opening two explorer windows at once and resize all over to copy? It happens a lot because you're trying to show the entire directory structure in a window at once, and *that* doesn't scale well. However, having one window for one folder does scale. In a spatial model, I open each folder (maybe by clicking through other folders to it, maybe by using a menu or shortcut) and then drag.
Honestly *try* it for a while. Don't like it? Switch it off. Done.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Make me aerodynamic in the evening air
And you just lost most users, because we don't want to use modified click commands for something that should be default behavior.
The point isn't so much what the default is, but rather that it's damned near impossible to change. You have one camp who says "I hate this new feature, and lots of other people do to - it should be easy to change back." You have another camp who thinks that they know best, and that it should be damned near impossible to do things other than the way they believe they should be done. Thanks guys.
The problem with Nautilus and Gnome in general is that the developers are all so-o-o-o hung up on making everything in the code object oriented that they have succeeded in royally fucking up the program. Yes their designs are made up of beautifully designed objects exhibiting real world physical traits, but unfortunately the resulting code is bloated, inefficient, incredibly slow in execution, and mandates ridiculous human interfaces. The devs need to get a grip before Gnome becomes a has been. They need to quit worrying about form and elegance so much and start making function and performance top priority.
I use the KISS formula...
Central theme of the article: preferring a spatial file manager UI is right and not preferring it is wrong, because spatial is good interface design and web-browser style is bad interface design.
Thanks for the religion lesson. Spatial interface fans are the True and Faithful, critics are the Infidels. I get it.
Looking at it another way, some people want the UI itself to act like as much as possible like a collection of objects, while others want it to be more of a viewscreen into the world of objects. I don't see any right or wrong about any of this. The only thing that seems wrong is deciding that there can be only one right way.
I really don't understand what's the fuss about the Spatial mode. Gnome 2.6 release has advertised it as if it is such a revolutionary new feature and/or major paradigm shift. None of which is true. As far as I can recall, KDE had this available by checking the box that says "Open folders in separate windows" under Konqueror->Configure->Behavior settings. I would think that some such settings must have been present for Gnome 2.4 and earlier. I don't use Gnome so I don't know for sure.
I do not recollect one single KDE review and/or product announcement that announced this setting as a major new feature, let alone a huge productivity enhancement. Of course, this was right as it is just a simple user preference check-box. I think Gnome hype about this is an obvious overkill.
I personally think that the kind of presumption that Gnome developers made on behalf of their users is a bit too much. They should have at least made it so that at the first start-up of Gnome desktop - user is asked to make this choice.
just my 2 cents,
Osho
it's difficult to tell the difference between a customer who's scewing up what you're telling him and one who's trying to do what you're telling him when it's impossible because he changed the UI. By the time you figured it out, you've wasted between 10 and 30 minutes (depending on the skill of you're staff). Time is money twice over in tech support. Once for paying the tech, and again for the extra techs you need to keep wait times down.
Oh, and if you do hit that "reset all options to default settings" button, the customer will expect you to walk him/her through resetting everyone of their precious changes. We're talking about people who through a fit when their wallpaper gets changed. Yes, I know they figured out how to change it once, I also know they can't follow simple instructions twice.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I should, of course, take my cues from the article rather than personal opinion! Take this one for example:
"Sometimes they even abuse the physical metaphor of tabbed browsing by opening multiple pages - not subpages of the same web site! - in multiple tabs of a browser window. I even know few people who never open more than one browser window, viewing all pages in tabs; I hope they do not try to glue a daily set of newspapers together before reading them..."
Most everyone I know who uses tabbed browsing uses it to minimise the number of windows used rather than some shoddy 'temporary bookmark' system, but the way the author puts across his opinion is that this way of using a browser is OBVIOUSLY wrong - because he can't see PAST the real world metaphor and see that computers really aren't constrained to emulating 'real' objects.
How about this:
"Don't know how to use gconf? Then you shouldn't change the way Nautilitus works, I presume."
Yes, I can see how not wanting a new window for every mouse click is EXACTLY like navigating a Windows Registry style set of configuration data - just like it in fact. Except not at all.
It appears that this is worse than most opinion pieces on the subject as it assumes the one thing that opinion pieces should not - that the author's opinion is the 'correct' opinion and all else should listen up and realise their mistake.
How long is the longest directory path on your machine ?
How long is the longest directory path of a default install (including gnome 2.6) ?
one of the reasons I dont use nautilus is its poor speed on my PIII 450MHz 386MB RAM machine... so I just stick to command line. Konqueror is still too slow for my computer - but when I used win2k's explorer manager, it was so much snappier. ctrl+C/ ctrl+V was so much more responsive.
but the biggest problem to me is that Gnome packages always seem to break - unable to log in properly/ load the WM properly, or libprint/libgnome libraries having files that exist in each other's packages. Has anyone experienced this? I'm using debian unstable.
my blog
unless you happen to be the UI designer at Microsoft, Apple, and in the KDE/Gnome groups... I think you're going to have to accept usability studies done by all of these organizations.
Cutting the crap out of the desktop is a good thing... my gnome feels very efficient and easy.
--------
Free your mind.
I mean come on. This guy is taking the whole thing way too far. A browser is a BROWSER not a book.
And a file manager is a file manager not a real desktop. Yeah, they're based on a nice metaphor, but occasionally metaphors breaks down. I laughed at his whole thing on "some people actually use tabbed browsing for more then one site *SHOCK* because it's *easier*. I usually don't like more then 4-5 windows open (more if I'm coding, then it goes up to like 10, gvim, gvim, gvim), so I can actually read the title on the taskbar. And I don't have to look around for the right brower to click.I can get most tasks (besides coding) done with three windows: firefox (all my sites *tabbed*), and a couple mgetty's. That's it, not looking around for the window I want, it's just right there and easy to read. Get over it. Never sacrifice ease of use for some back assward metaphor. The metaphor breaks down as soon as you start putting folders inside folders
Only system designers can. That's the fundamental mistake in that quote. A metaphor is something the designer uses to make the interface easier for the user to learn, not something the user must slavishly adhere to if they use the interface.
Are you adequate?
Stop trying to justify a bad decision. It's hopeless, nobody likes it and anyone who has files more than two directories deep (i.e. everybody) will switch to KDE.
It didn't work in Win3.11,Win95 what makes you think it will work in linux04.
Grow a brain. Emulate explorer, then improve on it.
May the Maths Be with you!
Lots of directories, even if organized deep actually don't help much after a point if you have lots of entries. They are fine for organizing projects, though.
;-) The problem is both that I never get around to sort all of them, and much more often use google on www to find something than to check my bookmarks.
;-)
I'm actually talking about organizing my bookmarks
Even after sorting a bookmark into a category, there is not enough information to find a bookmark relevant to a (sub)topic.
This sounds like a task for a non-hierarchical file system, or one with a database like query interface.
The first thing the system should do when you create a file should be to ask the user to categorize the file by keywords.
Or maybe a list of keywords could be autogenerated.
I think I would need something that googles my mozilla bookmarks
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
... I'd recommend you spend some time using it to actually _manage_ files.
As one of the gnome devs points out, when people test a file manager, they often go and browse around their files. If they do this using spatial, they'll come to the conclusion that it sucks. But that's because spatial _does_ suck for browsing files - if you want to look for something, use the file browser (it's right there on the main menu).
But spatial is incredibly good for day-to-day file management. I finally got round to reorganising my home directory yesterday, and it's incredible how easy spatial made it (after all, file reorganisation is a task which you _want_ loads of windows open for).
So, before you attack spatial nautilus, try reorganising a few directories with it, because that's the sort of task it really shines for.
Nope, you can't share filters because chances are that your mom and my mom use vastly different vocabularies. (And in my particular case a language spoken/written only by fewer than 100.000 people in the whole world).
The only reason spam-filter sharing works is that spam tends to:
Also, there are only two categories (which can therefore easily be set up beforehand), spam and non-spam. Anything which is not classified as spam just automatically goes into non-spam, it doesn't even need to be 'classified' by the algorithm as non-spam, so the filter needs no training to know what non-spam is.
But in answer to your question: Yes, you do have to create an initial hierarchy. Bayesian classification techniques don't actually understand your documents, they only filter them into predetermined categories based on similarities. But doing initial setup and categorizing a few documents is hardly an insurmountable task.
HAND.
The next unstable release of GNOME 2.7/2.8 will have the button.
sri
Geek Code Version 3.0 GSS d? s++
Because I actually use spatial Nautilus, whereas I almost never used browser-mode Nautilus. All it needs is the option to go back to browser mode to be visible in the GUI (which it will be shortly, I believe) rather than through GConf only, and then everyone can be happy. On such a divisive issue it's clear that it's the Right Thing to put in a preference.
Miri it is whil Linux ilast...
If I get this right, and spatial navigation is nothing more than showing every directory in it's very own window, then this innovation is really very old.
Actually, it can be a good thing. With many file managers, you can have it both ways. ROX for example, would open another window for everything if I use the middle mouse button instead of a normal single left click.
I've been using this to sort files on a regular basis, but I too have very deep directory structures (e.g. ~/library/media/text/books/Author/ or ~/library/media/images/Art/Author/ often with more directories used for category organisation and so forth).
Besides, I haven't ever used any graphical Filemanager that was as fast or as slick as Rox is, so....
Leopard cub
Apparently, Radoslaw thinks everyone who doesn't like the new uber-spatial FS browsing is just too dumb and unorganized for it. When did "technology should adapt to its users" get abolished? And puh-leeeeze what's that about the drawer metaphor? The last time I saw a drawer with over 40,000 socks and subdrawers in it was, like, never!
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
note: The quick 'n dirty shell commands are to great extend badly in need of optimization, but it surely makes my point understandable. Off course do directories at level 17 contain all directories below, so not counting those would bring down the number of directories; but on the other hand those also contain stuff I need so
Define 'works'.
Finding a file is not the same as driving. Next!
A filing cabinet is not the same as files on a disk. You can index/organize files in countless ways in a file system whereas you can only have one particular organization with filing cabinets. Next!
Oooooh, I does two things which are of no use to me. These 'features' are only great if you care about the metaphor instead of caring about the user (imagine such a thing!).
Here's a free hint: Computer interfaces are not constrained by the real world (well, beyond capacity and the physical constraints on input/output devices)
Rather than me just knowing beforehand that I want to go into the "src/whatever/lib/" directory and using the alphebetical listing to find each of those quickly. This gives med O(log N) time for each directory selection as opposed to O(N) time for each directory selection w/spatial unless I magically just happen to remember where it is 'spatially' and nobody's decided to reorganize things because they like some other spatial layout better (this is a real problem with shared folders). Another issue is that only nautilus cares about the 'spatial' metadata, so if I (god forbid!) want to use the command line, I still have to remember the file system paths to my files 'non-spatially' (i.e. remember their names). Mixing two metaphors/paradigms is not a good idea.
Now, if you'd care to make some real arguments for spatial navigation, be my guest, but what you gave us was hardly very convincing. Hint: Argument from authority (ie. the 'GNOME developers know better than you') or straw men ('oh, but just look at how we do things in the real world') are not real arguments.
HAND.
I completely agree.
Luckily, the GNOME developers have come to realise that, too. There will be a brower-mode setting in the Preferences of Nautilus in GNOME 2.8. It's already in CVS.
Fluxbox is a window manager. We're discussing the file manager.
Feel free to bring up Fluxbox in arguments against Metacity (which I think should be replaced by Openbox, anyway).
I tried it out, and sure enough there IS a file-browser.... I have to admit, I've been using Gnome for a long time and I had no idea. Heh, nifty. Ok, back to my command line to do real work now.
You're ignoring another group of users, namely the ones who know just enough about the way they like to use the interface to know that they would like to use "browser" mode instead of "spatial" mode, but who might still be too intimidated to use gconf (since that's where "the esoteric and possibly dangerous" options live).
That is the stupidest 'shortcut' I have ever heard. Do these people not realize that on most mice, the 'middle' mouse button is in fact the mouse wheel (which of course also acts as a button)? It is much harder to double-click the mouse wheel than it is to double-click any of the other buttons, simply because you have to be very careful to avoid scrolling the wheel as you click. Yes, you might argue that this is the fault of the mouse producers, but ignoring reality is just stupid.
HAND.
In 2.4.2 you had the spatial metaphore, and browsing capability at the same time!
It remembered the size and postion of each directory.
It gave the option of leaving the parent directory displayed, or to close it, when you clicked on a sub directory.
You could press f9 to get the side panel, and press f9 again to hide it.
You could select an image in a directory, and open the image in a new view, resize it. You could then open the same image later and it would retain its previously altered sahap.
The current implementation is definitely a backward step,m and less useful, not to mention intensely irritating! IMnsHO
Basically, it gave people the choice of using the best options for them!
-Nivag
Beside that Gnome people managed to hide the 'switch off' switch deep down in GConf.
Surprising that a bunch of UI experts who are so much smarter than everyone else would go and hide the option they should know most people will want way down in some hard to find place.
When you break how a program works on purpose you should make it clear how to fix it.
That wouldn't be apps/nautilus/preferences/window_always_new, would it? The one that's turned off here? While nautilus still opens a new window for every folder?
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
But as long as nobody's using them, it doesn't really matter all that much...
:(
It seems Reiser4 will add support for arbitrary meta-data like this and make it easily accessible through the already existing UNIX open() interface, so hopefully this will change. Probably not for a few years, though...
You still need some sort of efficient indexing of the metadata to be able to search it quickly and efficiently, but w/Reiser4 you could quite conceivably do this using just shell-level scripting... which would be nice.
HAND.
Sometimes they even abuse the physical metaphor of tabbed browsing by opening multiple pages - not subpages of the same web site! - in multiple tabs of a browser window. I even know few people who never open more than one browser window, viewing all pages in tabs; I hope they do not try to glue a daily set of newspapers together before reading them...
I use Firefox with tabbrowser extensions set to lock the browser down to one window. I often open a lot of tabs and work through them. According to that writer, I'm abusing my browser because I'm doing something I couldn't do with a book or a newspaper! So by analogy we should never use grep because we can't grep printed matter?
And by the way, most filing cabinets only let you open one drawer at a time (for safety reasons).
On my home systems I have over 200,000 files, now I know thats a lot but how exactly am I meant to be able to keep this in a shallow structure and still keep it usable?
If you want to encorage shallow stuctures maybe you should start by making large listings at least usable!
This sort of shit is why I refuse to go back to Gnome.
GPLv2: I want my rights, I want my phone call! DRM: What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
Urgh, yes. I love the way the writer *assumes* that everyone loves it when the computer interface is a methaphor for a real-life system (nearly a direct quote), and that if something breaks the metaphor the user's head will explode. I want my computer to be a *computer*, and do things that a computer does which a wodge of papers in a drawer can't do. And the whole book/filing cabinet thing is equally retarded - I think of websites as websites, and of my filesystem as a filesystem. And they are really the same thing, and what is good for browsing one is usually also good for browsing the other. I don't use a graphical file browser at all, since I find command-line file manipulation to be much easier for complex tasks, but if I did, I would want a file browser which works the way that I like my web browser to work - something which opens things in the same window by default, but which allows you to open something in a new window as an easy option. The only difference is that in a web browser I want everything in tabs in the same window, whereas in a file browser I would want separate windows, so that I could drag things between them.
(my lengthy whine)
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Not that I'd like to slap the world again but 10 years ago RISC OS users were using both Spatial and non-spatial windows, it's fantastic really using a 3 button mouse left mouse opened in a new window, right mouse button opened it in the same window, flexibility, controll and i've never navigated as fast since.
:)
ROX Filer Implements this system but with double middle mouse click to open in a new window, Though I still maintain it's not as good as the classical RISC OS filer since it lacks the ability to right-click on the close icon to open the previous window and instead requires a toolbar to facilitate this (issues with X11 mostly), it's still a lot better than most file browsers for Linux
It just occured to me why I dislike the "spatial" nature of the new Gnome.
#1) It is just like DOS. You can only be 'active' in one directory at a time. Deep dir's were hell, but shallow ones were kinda quick and easy to copy/move files around and open them.
#2) The entire "browser" style has lasted only because Suzie Soccermom has never learned that by using a "Tree-view + detailed list" is easier, (damn Windows default settings).
#3) IIRC Xtree, Norton Commander and Dosshell were all designed to quickly & easily allow of folder/file manipulation at the deep level. This is a huge improvment over the existing DOS CLI.
Is this really just a case of: "What is old is new again"?
Like a previous poster stated. Spatial systems would work very good for large numbers of files, if the OS did all the sorting for you. (Didn't MS try this with "My Documents, My Pictures, My P0rn..." and we all hated them dearly for it?)
Here's a novel idea, let's make the choices EASILY switchable. Include 999999999 different choices and let the end-user decide.
Damnit that's the mess that we have with any linux distro installer.
Ok, how about the Model-T Ford method: "You can have any colour you want as long as it's black."
Apple beat us to that one too.
ok I give up. Maybe I just go "roll my own". And no I am not talking about linny.
=) I love Mondays
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
...the big "wohoo" over Nautilus is that stuff is where you left them, same place. Well, god damn. And I thought my (large and deep) directory tree did that. Not only that, but in alphabetical order too, so I know that if I'm looking for "Abba" I'll look at the top and "ZZ Top" I'll look at the bottom. And a new one coming in the middle doesn't really change that.
I've got somewhere around 300,000 files on my computer. Far beyond 100,000 of those are files I'd navigate to (some are internal program files, but still). Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to organize that in a shallow structure. It's simply not going to happen.
I would like a SQL-like filesystem, something like WinFS. But there's no way it'd get any shallower that way. I'd simply have multiple large and deep trees for different (and impossible to express as one tree) properties. Like "Projects/Project X/Project X Advertisement.doc" and "Sales tools/Advertisements/Project X Advertisement.doc" both pointing at the same file.
I'm pretty desktop-agnostic to begin with, I've been using RHL with Gnome for quite some time. But now I'm currently using KDE. And by the looks of it, Gnome is developing away from what I want it to be, not towards it. Of course, that's their freedom. I've exercised mine to go with something else, that's mine.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Hard Disk Drives
Local disk (C:) | Local Disk
Dev-RAID (D:) | Local Disk
Devices with Removable Storage
3 1/2 Floppy Drive (A:) | 3 1/2-inch Floppy Disk
DVD Drive (E:) | CD Drive
Removable Disk (F:) | Removable Disk [Flash Drive]
Network Drives
volumename on 'server' (M:) | Network Drive
Other
Control Panel | System Folder | Provides options for you to customize the appearance and functionality of your computer.
Mobile Device | System Folder [Pocket PC]
If this pattern continues, I predict that a full GNOME fork will appear within a year.
No paying customer is going to tolerate the Gnome geeks attitudes. Big Linux vendors will probably step in and support a non-asshole crew that does the fork. Just like Xfree86.
You have three icons on your desktop.
My Documents, that plops you into your "home" directory
My Computer, which delves into your filesystem with your harddrives, removable drives, network drives, etc.
and finally
My Network Places
Which opens up a catagorized view with items like "Local Network" which contains local network shares you've used recently, The Internet with shortcuts to FTP Sites, and "Unspecified" which have recently open directories or shares that don't fall into the above categories, mine has two folders on our intranet server, the administrative share of a server, and the share to one of our servers that stores utilities and app installers.
The Windows UI might be easy for you, but I have trouble finding the "preferences dialog". When it comes to Winblows, I'm lost and generally can't find the answer with a quick Google search.
my grandmother can figure this out
I love the spatial file manager - and I totally agree with the author - It always made sense for me to keep my files organization flat as possible and spatial fits me perfect.
It drives me nuts when someone is having trouble on one of my servers and they have a file that is like 15 to 20 directories deep that I need to look at when it doesn't have to be.
To me it is sort of like NDS or LDAP - you always want to try to stay as flat as in your design possible for speed and efficiency.
But the common joe/jane just doesn't get it and until they actually sit down and try to learn things they never will.
Windows has taught everyone some very bad habits i.e. - just reboot and the problem will be fixed.
and we network/sys admins will be undoing those habits for years to come.
Religious: I think by using this word you meant losed minded and adverse to change or different viewpoints. Zealotry. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe you meant the following.
I religiously use a file manager and as such I want it fit the way I think, and I don't want to have to dig through a huge list of variables in gconf-editor to find something that is so important to me.
Nostalgia: Users of previous nautilus versions can be nostalgic of tree view while users of earlier MacOS's can be nostalgic of spacial view.
So it isn't all nostalia seeking users who want to banish tree view completely, some are just fine being nostalgic with spacial view.
I believe the backlash is due to the very condescending and somewhat ill-informed article in OSNews, and also due to the (therwise very nice) article available here [bytebot.net], in which the impression is given that you need to open gconf-editor if you don't want spatial.
Whatever.
That impression is correct. If you don't want spacial *at all* then you have to use gconf. If you don't mind some of your windows coming up spacially then you should be good to go.
The backlash precedes and is much more than these two articles. In almost every article about gnome 2.6 or nautilus there have been comments expressing a need for an option in the nautilus preferences. Unfortunately, some people are not constructive and others are rude while expressing their views. This has been happening since the change was made and is a result of the fact that people that used nautilus all this time were suddenly forced to change and given no obvious way to fix things. Since nautilus has historically been used in tree view, to change with no option given, ticked a lot of people off. I could understand if the change was trivial, like getting rid of the throbber, no need for an option outside of gconf for that. However, this changes the way people get their work done (It may make you more efficient, but not me) and even if I wanted to dip my toes into the spacial pool I shouldn't be forced to learn everything at once and I should be able to move between the two environments with ease.
So anyway, as far as I know, this ruckus has been good for nautilus because the needed changes have been made.
Now all I need is for nautilus to allow right click dnd for copying files.
that the people running OSNews are terrible writers.
Everything I've seen posted here from that site is amaeurish or just plain juvenile. Are they trolling or eneducated?
Gnome's should stick to gardening and sitting on toadstools. If they into your PC they will turn into gremlins that demand you do things thier way.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It is blatantly obvious that the GNOME team has not done real usability studies (i.e., research done in such way that it could be published in a peer reviewed academic journal). The 'usability study' myths spread by GNOME geeks prove this.
'Usability' is not some magical quality that can be claimed by software developers. If users find software difficult to use, then it is. Usability research is only a way to find out this fact.
I keep all my important documentation in a database accessible via web browser; its completely searchable and I can create whatever metaphor I find suitable - not to mention the ability to store metadata along with the files. Backup and restoration is easy too.
For the few files that reside on my workstation disk (mainly configuration files) I use my handy dandy command line interface - or emacs. The few nonconfiguration documents I use sit in my home directory - merely as a weigh station on the way to being uploaded to the database.
Organization of my directories on disk is a no-brainer when the home directory is essentially a 'scratch' pad.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
The argument is not over whether spatial is good or bad, but over the fact that they don't provide an easy way to switch back to the old method... rather they claim that they know what is the "right" way to organize your files and you should be changing that.
As someone pointed out, even Windoze provides an easy way to switch back whenever they make UI changes.
Yes there is KDE or Fluxbox or whatever, but it isn't practical to just switch desktop environments at the drop of a hat for most people.
Methinks Comrade Radoslaw is wearing his underwear a little too tight.
Let's get one thing right, right now, right here all you programmers and system analysts:
The user is your GOD! YOU serve the USER. YOU make systems and appplications that give the USER maximum flexibility. What the USER wants is paramount. If you think the user is abusing your metaphor (sheesh!) it's because your mind ain't right. Get right with your god. Listen. Serve. Adapt. Obey.
Yeah I know I'm flaming but this is no troll. I'm just sick and tired of the insanely arrogant attitude that SOME (I emphasize some, but it's too many) developers have towards the people who feed and clothe them.
One bright spot in the gloom of the high tech bust is that it drove some of these characters into careers more suited to their attitudes, like being prison guards.
Insert witty sig here.
I doubt that - as has been pointed out ad nauseum, it's good for shallow directory structures and hell for deep ones. But that means that there is a large camp that will want it sometimes but not all times. That's why Mac has both (plus an excellent frame-based version), and it's trivial to switch back and forth.
Also, since the way to change is extremely poorly documented (I expect intentionally), many new users - including (but not limited to!) the noobs that gnome is supposedly cultivating - won't know how to change it.
I think it should be prominently displayed, as even people who like spatial will need the tree version sometimes. Failing that, it should be in a preferences tab somewhere, even if it's not on the main tab.
For a modern desktop environment, if someone needs to use an external utility to change the features of a program, you as a developer have FAILED.
They don't offer any flexability to the user. Everything is done the way they feel is best. There are a lot of ways to perform a given task. They should offer the users more flexabilty. Windows is this way, OSX is this way, KDE is this way, even Gnome-1.4 was this way. The deveopers of Gnome are becoming desktop dictators. It's really sad. Gnome could have been so much more.
According to Webster "a metaphor is the transference of the relation between one set of objects to another set for the purpose of brief explanation; a compressed simile; e. g., the ship plows the sea. --Abbott & Seeley. 'All the world's a stage.' --Shak."
The purpose of a metaphor thus, is not necessarily to think of the relation in question as the metaphorical relation, but to clarify a relation by referring to a metaphorical relation.
To force a metaphorical relation in favor of an actual relation is just plain sillyness.
I never liked the folder metaphor, because I think it severely distorts the semantics of a directory. Whereas the concept of a computer directory very closely maps to the concept of other well-known directories, like, for instance, a business directory, the concept of a filesystem folder resambles a real folder in nothing:
Have you ever organized a big amount of personal (or an even greater amount of company) files without the aid of relational databases or the good ol' directory concept?
Clearly you have never sensed the advantages of a hierarchical directory structure, or you'd realize that having 10000 files in one folder does not only decrease your performance because it complicates finding your files, but that this also decreases the computer's performance because it has to actually scan an do something intelligible with all these thousands of files. Who were you accusing of "bad file organisation coupled with a bunch of old bad habits" again?
A directory does not require a metaphor, because, as long as directories will be around, they'll be easy enough to explain through the concept of ... a directory.
Now that I have explained why the folder metaphor is one of the most worthless modern desktop metaphors (Don't get me started on the 'desktop' metaphor.), it's time to explain why spatial file management is a bad idea as well, if each folder is supposed to represent a drawer:
I don't like real-world drawers, because
Real-life drawers seem to be most usable when they're subdivided using smaller containers like those used for separating forks from knives and the likes.
I adjust my user interface to the task at hand:
Morality is usually taught by the immoral.
Would it be easy to write a competitive file manager , that integrated with GNOME or is nautilus hardcoded into everything? (If yes.. why?)
Ok. He wants a real world metaphor. Try a cross between a landfill site (one for a city of several million), a library of congress, and a recycling center.
That's the mess of "my documents." I could only hope that some could invent a "recycling center" that would scan my documents (the landfill), put intelligent metadata in there, and place it in the proper folder place in my personnal "library of congress."
Well, you're not really an average user, either, then. And, as a developer, you shouldn't have any trouble or fears about turning off the spatial setting.
I completely agree that the author wastes time trying to make us like his metaphor, when using a computer shouldn't be like using a desk. Obviously, the author hasn't seen my desk!
One of the many advantages of using a computer when working with documents is the fact that you can organize files in nested folders. Of course it would be a crappy way to do it in a physical desk drawer, since folders don't cram well into other folders, but that doesn't make it bad organization in the computer world.
It's like the 3-d desktop people who say that the visual experience of using a computer should be like using a desk. No way! The limitations of a computer monitor/mouse/keyboard make that impossible. It's much easier and more natural to turn my head to look at the contents of my desk than it will ever be to pan the view on a monitor up/down/left/right. Let go of the metaphor. The whole idea of innovation in computing is that people can go beyond the limitations of the physical world by doing things in new and different ways. A 3-D desktop such as the one at www.spatialresearch.com is much more usable than SphereXP (www.hamar.sk/sphere), because they've let go of the physical world metaphor, in order to find new, better ways to do things instead of making the computer act like a desk. Chaining everyone to a real-world metaphor just inhibits innovation.
And whoever thought that double middle-click and shift double-click are good ways to do anything doesn't belong on a team that tries to make products usable!
Free software.... the programmers are free to produce what they like, and I sincerely thank them for making Gnome available to me for the past for years. But, alas, the time has come to say goodbye.
When I compiled Nautilus-2.6.0, I thought this new window thing was a bug... something I'd hunt down and fix when I had a couple free minutes. This article just puts that "bug" in context with the last couple of years. I've been watching Gnome bloat, detegenerate, and deteriorate. I thought it was partly me - I've been using versions which were, although presumably stable, ahead of the distros ever since anti-aliased fonts became available.
There've been some bugs. I haven't had a version of Nautilus that didn't seg-fault for some reason or another since gnome-1.3.2. And please don't try pinning the blame for that one on me. Come to think of it, did gnome-1.3 even use nautilus? Maybe it got its stability from using the ol' gmc file manager.
I could go on. Gconf. Metacity. the panel. gdesklets are perty, but no big deal. Yes, I originally settled on gnome over kde because it was slim, modular and customizable. And it worked. Well, one, two and three have been dying for the past two years. And now number four is following along the path to the graveyard.
So, I'm tarring up my ~, and moving to xfce4. See you on the other side! Gnome developers, take note! Maybe I'll have a look at Gnome-3.1 when the day comes.
From mwm, then fvwm, windowmaker, enlightenment, gnome, and finally KDE is the path of window managers I have taken over the years. I spent the most time on fvwm and enlightenment, (which looks like a memory hog but was amazingly efficient).
I use KDE now, because Gnome started out okay, (as long as you didn't run nautilus to eat up all of your memory and slow the whole thing down). However, gnome appears to be getting less customizable over time.
The menus are more painful to manage/change and the UI is more difficult to simplify. Even with themes, the toolbars are huge and stupid. Nautilus still takes up more resources than it returns in efficiency or enjoyment. The worst part is that apps developed for gnome look like garbage in other wm's, like enlightenment unless I start the gnome settings daemon.
Gnome 1.x was just fine for starters and I didn't expect much. At least with gnome1 I could customize menus and toolbars easier. Gnome2 blows.
Forget about analogies with the real world objects. Computer files are nothing but real life objects. They have different types, they are very easy to move around, and there are way too many of them.
File manager must provide convinience, and not an analogy.
Try copying bunch of files from one dir to another using keyboard in good old mc (Midnight Commander - grandfather of gnome file managers ), and then try doing same using mouse in spatial Nautilus. Whats faster and easier?
Using lots of different OSes over my 15 years of career in IT, I've seen it all, and I can attest that nothing beats simplicity and convinience of two pane file managers, originally introduced by Norton Commander. Proper GUI version of it is whats needed, not spatial-shmatial garbage.
Note that simple-minded users who may require this spatial mode are extremely unlikely to use any file manager at all. All they are going to do is open the word processor and save files in single directory. They almost never do any File management. It s a pity, that gnome developers can't see such a simple thing.
Property of AfterStep Window Manager.
I think this whole issue shows more about people's attitude to change than anything else. IMHO The majority of the world fears change, yet change is the one thing in life you can absolutely guarantee. Being a change junkie, I love the new spatial nautilus :-D
I dunno...I hate how Windows tries putting everything in one window. I want it to open a new window for each folder. It's a LOT easier for me to think about it then.
Of course, I tend to do things en masse a lot more between folders than I suppose most people do.
And I still have a file structure that can get fairly deep (D:\Media\Music\ogg\Dream Theater\). It's just that I actually use categorization to make it all manageable.
Not that my stuff is all that organized, anyways.
But it should be an option that is easy to see.
And why the hell do we keep calling it "spatial" browsing? That evokes, to me, a 3D-ness to things that it doesn't have. Windows has been doing this for years!
Gah! Idiots, all!
Sokol could have been more diplomatic and clear. He's not dissing users, he is dissing reviewers. There's a big difference.
In any case, what's really to complain about? Gnome is free software. If you don't like it, fix it or don't use it. If the developers of Gnome have been good to you in the past but are now running down a path that you don't like? Just be happy for the good things they did for you.
I don't understand the bile and anger that the Gnome team is getting for doing what all free software should. Free software is a DIY thing. Gnome developers think what they are doing is what newbies want. That's their business and you, as a power user, should know several alternatives to make yourself happy. If Gnome is broken, you get to keep all the pieces.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Is it the spatial navigator so much as the awful directory structure that buries things 10 folders deep?
Who figured this out? An academic researcher? Some corporate R&D person? This is blatant failure to use common sense. Most people love when machines work in a way that is easier than the behaviour of real-life objects. (Hint: think deeply about why do people want machines?...)
Most of the time, people don't sort drawer contents because it is a chore (it is just easier to throw it in unsorted). I would love to have physical drawers where I throw a piece of clothing and it neatly sorts itself (and I strongly doubt I'm the only one who would like such a wondrous device -- btw: wifes/moms don't count as these "devices", they have way too many side effects)
In very few cases I want a specific arrangement (because a specific arrangement implicitly carries the obbligation to manually arrange items every time). Those few cases perhaps justify having the spatial interface as a choice for specific folders.
Otherwise, designing the inefficiencies of the real world into our machines too, it is outright masochistic (or sadistic, depending which side of user/designer you're on).
Gnome designers, if you keep doing this, I'll hire a PI and expose you in leathers and whips for the world to see :P
Sometimes they even abuse the physical metaphor of tabbed browsing by opening multiple pages - not subpages of the same web site! - in multiple tabs of a browser window.
... opening the appriopriate album folder and double-clicking a file icon
Soooorry! Don't want to abuse your metaphor! Thanks for slapping me on the wrist and telling me "tsk, tsk!" I mean, just because I DARE to open multiple sites all talking, GASP, about the SAME SUBJECT! Yeah, I'm glad that you think it's better for me to have 5 different instances of Moz open when I'm comparing prices on hardware, because we wouldn't want to group things by, say, RELEVANCE. You know, I wouldn't want to bookmark a bunch of tabs and call it "Mobo Price Search". I'll take it easy on the fucking PHYSICAL METAPHOR and make sure I have 5 bookmarks, each with 1 or 2 pages, saying "Pricewatch Mobo Price Search", "NewEgg Mobo Price Search", "blah blah blah". Yup, that's what I want, because YOU think it's better!!!!
I even know few people who never open more than one browser window, viewing all pages in tabs; I hope they do not try to glue a daily set of newspapers together before reading them...
Yeah! Those fucking idiots! How dare they use them however they want! They're so dumb, they probably piss down their legs! Heck, I saw one of them CUT the tamper ring off a gallon of milk! Doesn't the dumbass know you're supposed to TWIST it!?!?
I mean, it's not as if humans are good at spatially remembering the location of information. I know that I simply CANNOT remember where in a book a given phrase is. I have to scan each page to find anything! I mean, it's not like my puny brain could remember that the anandtech tab is about 8 down the list, and that penny arcade tab is about 13 down. NO! I get all confused! I'm just a poor, lonely, confused, cave man cringing from all the strange sights and noises that I cannot comprehend!
On another topic: MS has been "remembering the layout of folders" for years now, without opening another window. You telling me that the only way GNOME can get that to work is by opening another window?
what's the closest real-life representation of a web page?
Here's my answer:
I DON'T GIVE A FUCK!
I want it to be easy to use on a computer and not be ARTIFICIALLY CONSTRAINED because you can't map it 1:1 with a physical fucking object.
motherfucker.
god this shit pisses me off. it's ivory tower elitism at its worst, being practiced by a basement-dwelling pleeb.
Folder structure should be simple and as shallow as possible
No Way! You should have ALL your files in ONE folder! If you start grouping your files with logic, like, say Music->Artist->Album, or Downloads->Drivers/Apps/OS->blah-blah, the next thing you'll know, you'll have folders 10 deep! What an atrocity! They need to be flat! FLAT, I say!
Please, don't stop all these good ideas coming back again.
You can try anything you like. I'll be happy to give it a try, too. But saying that a nice, logical, hirearchy of folders and files sucks because it doesn't perfectly match the "original desktop metaphor" is simply silly. Instead of constraining file layout, maybe it's the metaphor that should change? And, if it truly is a better way (more intuitive, easier to use, etc) then it will be adopted. But, attacking people for using a feature how they want, rather than in the way that you think it should be used, will not warm people up to trying new things. Show us how good it is, don't patronize us for using the tools we have.
Over time, the user thought process changes. People don't work with computer folders the same way that they work with files and drawers -- this, IMO, is a good thing. Computers aren't bound by the same laws, and the interfaces don't have to be, either.
I have grown quite accustomed to tabbed browsing (thanks to mozilla, and firefox). I hate the idea of keeping everything in separate windows based on which site I'm visiting. I browse with everything in the same window (separate tabs), based on the tasks I'm working on. For example, right now, there are four different slashdot stories (the ones I'm interested in reading) in four different tabs. When I finish with one, I'll close it and move on to the next. If a link sparks my interest, I'll open it in a new tab (set to open in the background) and move on to it next.
In another browser window, I have another browser session waiting for my attention. What would be really neat is if I could save these browsing sessions like files and open them at a later date.
If my file manager worked like this, I'd be thrilled. I'd love to have different folders open in different tabs for a related work session and drag-and-drop files between them by hovering over a tab (which would then become active so I can drop files into that folder). Again, I'd love the ability to save the state of the tabs, so that those common file-management tasks are facilitated more readily.
THAT would be real progress. Even better -- abandon the strict file hierarchy altogether, and instead use a database system that allows you to combine the hierarchial file paradigm with labels (anybody use gmail?). A single file might seem to live in a variety of places... For example, if you have some business graphics, you could browse to it from the "business" branch, or the "graphics" branch (both root folders). Attempting to work this way with symlinks and shortcuts is messy, at best, and nobody wants to create a complicated query just to find a file they could have openned with three keystrokes, given a decent thought-hierarchy file browser.
It seems to me that the user interface should mimick the way we think -- not the way our physical office works. That's the advantage of a computer -- we can make it work better and faster than related physical processes.
MakePassword.com Mp3 Blog
Is why everyone seems to think that short directory hierarchies are so helpful....
l /prop osal.pdf.
p osal.pdf
;-))
I run a small consulting firm in North Central Washington. Incidently, I run Linux exclusively internally but that is beside the point.
I have to keep track of often complex information on my business. For many of these tasks, I use my own apps built on PostgreSQL. However, often I need to store files in ways which make sense. So I may need to have a directory path such as:
~/metatron/customers/Books_and_Gifts/firewal
Although this file is also stored in the database attached to the firewall sales lead, it is important that I can maintian and manage these sales leads, proposals, project docs, etc.
So I use deep hierarchies because that is what makes sense. Instead, I guess I could use long file names and short directory structures, replacing the above path with something like: ~/metatron/customers/Books_and_Gifts.firewall.pro
However, I think that the deep hierarchies generally work better for me due to the complexity and quantity of the information that I have to handle (it is easier to suggest a long hierarchy than to enforce a long naming convention, and it also requires less typing
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
and you suck! As does Gnome 2.6.
Anyone know whether drag'n'drop is possible with wxWindows?
If it is then I see a bright future for slashManager.
Indeed, that Radoslaw Sokol dude has made OSS a huge disfavour. Can one be more arrogant? Complaining about users who "abuse" tabbed browsers by opening a completely different page in a tab, rather than opening it in a whole new instance of the browser. Oh cry me a river, pal...
And oh yeah, we who favour file browsing seem to be too stupid to get the analogy of the drawer. But wait, I usually look at my drawers from above, so in top view, they actually replace each other. Couldn't this be an argument for the rightness of browsers-style file managers?? Got you...
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)
Gnome 2 should have shipped with an optional "power user control centre" type app that provided the tweakability users now miss.
That is a great idea. Of course it would be TOO similar to TweakUI. Can't go copying MS again can we.
How would Jesus browse his hard drive?
I love C++
1.) For spatial anything, you need a big workspace. If you've seen the Sun StarFire video you know what I mean - a screen the size of a drafting table, or even bigger, with resolution fine enough that you don't notice the dots. Then specific things can have specific homes. But even at 1600x1200 it's usually impossible to avoid stacking windows on top of each other. At home I use dual 1280x1024 monitors, and this much space begins to afford "homes" for things - along with multiple virtual desktops. I tend to use a desktop for email and generic browsing, plus one per active project. (Active being a relative term; sometimes a desktop goes untouched for weeks, and I hate having to log out, because then I lose the context of what I was doing. Session management has room for a huge amount of improvement.)
IMO tabbed browsing is a workaround for this; before it was available, I used to open links in new windows all the time by middle-clicking. But then my desktop gets quite cluttered. This probably has a psychological reason - maybe I'm a linear, methodical thinker. Some people like to interrupt one train of thought, read something else, and then use the back button; others like to postpone links for future research. That's what tabs do for me - put a page "into the future" to be read after I finish what I'm reading. But this hasn't got much to do with file management.
2.) I agree with the comment that if folders represented search results, this idea would be much more useful.
3.) When you double-click My Computer, you get one folder window, not a tree. As someone who prefers the tree, I find this slightly annoying (although I appreciate the reasons for it), and always have to right-click and select Explore. (And if My Computer is not visible I will sometimes explore the Start Menu or the trash, just to get a tree view showing, and then go somewhere else.) (I'm speaking mostly of my usage of XP at work, since I do very little with Windows at home, and have not given MS any money in years.) Furthermore you have a choice, either in those simple windows or in the tree view, to remember each folder's settings, including icon positions and view style. It can be downright Mac-like if you want, and I notice that most users (especially ones whose experience doesn't go all the way back to Windows 3.0 like mine!) tend to use it in this way, and avoid the tree. So I don't know what he's talking about, deploring how users like the tree view so much. I thought that was just me. Anyway it's not his business to tell me I'm wrong for liking it.
4.) Starting with System 7, even MacOS permits showing a tree view inside a window. So I think Nautilus should do something similar. Remembering each folder's settings is a good idea; and if you like to view some folders as trees, and others as large icons, and others as previews, and others with custom backgrounds (like in OS/2 Warp), so be it. There's no point in restricting users to just one paradigm, otherwise yeah they will complain about it, because they're used to more freedom, and freedom is a good thing.
Anyway if the new Nautilus has successfully replicated a user experience even as good as System 6, then that's a giant leap for Linux. Makes me want to try it out. For now, at home, usually I still do file management at the command line, partially out of habit and partially because of quirks in the existing file managers that make them seem less than usable in some situations; whereas at work, I hardly ever do that, and the file manager works just fine. I've been looking forward to a small, fast, usable file manager on Linux (at least as good as the System 7 finder) for about 10 years now, and have yet to find one I totally like. But it sounds like Nautilus still fails on the "small" and "fast" bits.
Gilmoure wrote:
I had a teacher in college (1992) that said you should never have more than three folders deep on a Mac.
Back then the Mac was the graphical OS and IBM PCs/clones ran on a DOS command line interface while Microsoft Windows and IBM OS/2 were fighting it out to be the PC GUI-based OS (ignore that Windows was just a GUI for DOS).
Never is a strong word to use because there are always exceptions.
But the basic rule in user-centered design for limiting menus (and by extension folder/directory trees) to three deep has to do with difficulties people have finding specific items when you bury them deeper than three.
As far as folders go, you may have your own filing system, but if/when someone else needs to find that one bit of information in the project that you set up they will likely have a hard time doing so. Or what happens when you need to find a particular item from a project that you completed 10 years ago? Human memory is notoriously fallible.
That is the rationale behind the 'rule of three.' Your prof should have explained it more clearly than making an absolute statement like he did.
But... the future refused to change.
User is found guilty of abusing an underaged metaphor showing complete diregard of her honour. -"I was just helping him by representing a book, he was nice and kind, but then he, he..."- explained the poor metaphor before breaking in tears. The indecent user admited shamelessy -"I liked the book metaphor and she seemed to like me, i wanted to try something new and she was perfect for it, i didn't thought it was wrong"-
But... the future refused to change.
you are a muslime murderer.