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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!"
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
OS X could easily be spatial
OS X is (optionally) spatial. There is a preference option to set the "open-new-window" behaviour, or not, depending on how you like it, or not.
I'm surprised there's no clear option for doing so with Nautilus given that this "spatial" approach is so often a love it or hate it thing.
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.
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
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'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.
Windows has never been truly spatial, not even XP I think.
If you want a good example, you'll have to go back to Mac OS 9 etc. When you open a folder, it opens up in exactly the same position, size as when it was last closed, all the icons are in the same sorting order or position as when they were last time.
Mac OS X finder is a load of crap in terms of being spatial. It's unpredicable half the time, and that defeats the entire purpose of using spatial orientation in a folder system.
Make me aerodynamic in the evening air
Why do I like it? because if I want to copy a folder in a browser-type file manager, I have to select the files/folders, press Ctrl-C, try to remember exactly how many times I need to press the 'Back' button to get back to the folder I want to copy the files into, and press Ctrl-V to past the files.
Not in Konqueror. There I just hit Shift-Ctrl-L (not sure if this was the default keyboard shortcut since I've been using it so long and have customized quite a few of them) to split the window into two vertical panes and navigate one of the windows to the destination or source depending on where I am. Then I hit Shift-Ctrl-R to close the extra pain again when I'm done. If two panes aren't enough I can hit Shift-Ctrl-L or Shift-Ctrl-H to split any of those into as many sub-panes as I want. Heck I can even open a terminal emulator with F7 which can be linked to any of those panes (i.e. follows the cwd of that pane) and which accepts dragged files or folders as parameters for clt's.
And don't tell me that that's "just like in Windows".
Cheers,
Chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
Well, regardless of who wrote that, it's an example of the rampant "if you don't do thing _my_ particular way, you're a n00b/retard/luser/fossil/whatever. I couldn't care less about what _you_ need. Just learn to use whatever I felt like coding" mentality.
m e_ framework/some_project/util/xml/handlers/content
If for the authors of that article shallow directories are ok, more power to them. But here's a real life example (with the corporation and project name changed to protect the innocent;) of a directory I need to get to. It's from a java project:
~/workspace/some_project/src/de/some_company/so
What am I supposed to do? Dump the files of all projects together in my home directory, so I can save the "/workspace/some_project" part?
Yeah, that'll make it so much easier to check in only the some_project files in CVS, when they're mixed with other projects and with every single config file and directory from other apps. E.g., I'm sure everyone will understand if the config file for the game Pingus suddenly appears among the sources I checked in. (Hey, it was something to do between projects, ok?:) For that matter, I'm sure they'll understand that my whole browser cache and history needs to be in CVS in every project too.
Or maybe unilaterally also dump the "src" (and other directories in each project too), regardless of what the rest of the team decided?
Or maybe I should tell them that they should stop using packages too, for that matter. Yeah, those projects will be so much easier to use with all the files dumped together in a big mess. EJBs, facade classes, xml content handlers, whole hierarchies of data objects, wrappers, singletons, factories, properties files, deployment descriptors, etc. Yeah, when you need to find the sax event cache classes, and only those, it's soo much easier if they're not in their own package. Not.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.