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!"

Comments

Re:Spatial browsing can be good if...

[Snad]

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.

here's a flash demo of piles in action.

[tentimestwenty]

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

For those who don't know what the fuss is about:

[WoTG]

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.

Re:Spatial for shallow, Browser for deep.

[orcrist]

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

Re:Huh?

[Moraelin]

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.

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/som e_ framework/some_project/util/xml/handlers/content

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.