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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!"
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 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.
Wave of the future ? More like blast from the past, early win95 did this - and it sucked.
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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)
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.
It doesn't in Gnome 2.6 either. My mom never gets below her home directory. That's exactly what caused her headaches with the Windows Explorer. Seeing all those strange folders named c:\programs c:\temp c:\windows and so on. She never has that kind of clutter anymore.
She sees one icon: Computer. There she finds her CD-Rom drive and her USB-Stick to go.
Everything else is in "Personal Folder". She just drags and drops the file into her USB-Stick folder and she's set. She would have never managed to do this inside Windows Explorer, I can assure you. Spatial is easy. And it is fun. I even cleaned up my MP3-Folders. It was a bliss...
Keep going GNOME!
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".
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
Spatial is easy. And it is fun. ..and regrettably, it does not scale. I don't have very many songs in my iTunes music folder, (1,513 altogether), and yet finding a particular track in the directory tree is a major PITA.
iTunes solves this issue with a simple, high-speed search capability that makes it much faster for me to pick the song by typing a part of its title than I can by navigating through the Finder, even if I already know its exact path in the filesystem.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If you have to get used to it: It's not intuitive. Please understand this. If it has a learning curve that means people need to get used to it, it's not bloody intuitive! Apple Zealots seem to fall for this sooo much.
Now, not being intuitive doesn't mean it's a bad interface. Some programs have non-intuitive interfaces that require (sometimes steep) learning curves: Grapics editors (photoshop, gimp...) 3d Editors (Blender comes to mind for the praise people who have mastered that learning curve heap on it, and the scorn those who haven't: suggesting it's a good design, but not intuitive.), CAD programs, and other complicated ones.
GNOME is going for the philosopy that good= intuitive= simple= striped-down-to- lowest-common-denominator. It's a choice they made. User options are regarded as bad things. The user shouldn't have to think. Which is fine for some users who only do very basic things or just happen to work/think the way the GNOME devs do, but it tends to highly annoy most other people. Honestly, why does almost every servey of Linux users come out with KDE being lots more popular, even in the US? I think it comes down to: KDE offers the user choice. Can anyone name a GUI interface that everyone likes with default settings? I don't like OS X, nor BeOS, nor Windows, nor GNOME, nor (shudder) CDE, nor even KDE's Keramic. I can use all of them, but they annoy me. If you like one of those, use it, but don't claim that it is the one true best one.
Oh, and apparently intuitive's spelling isn't intuitive, nor is it's definition.
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?
Actually, the Gnome team isn't who wrote that silly article. They have been making lots of choices for their users through application of the HID, but they do retain the ability to customize most of the interface in true F/OSS style, so I can turn off the behavior I dislike. If it isn't easy for a beginner to do that, well, it's probably a good thing. It should be at least 25% as hard to get in to trouble as it is to get out.
"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there" - Will Rogers
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.
I'm convinced that 90% of the work going on in open-source is wheel-spinning crap like this. Folks, the desktop has been created and is very useful as it is. Let's innovate some apps that can actually threaten the standing of MSFT and friends instead of retooling themes and icons on a daily basis. Anything else deserves to be stopped out of existence.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
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.
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..
My complaint about spatial Nautilus (and I'm not sure if this behavior can be changed) is that there's so way to easily display all files (including .files).
To do that, I need to go to the menu > Desktop Preferences > File Management > "Show hidden and backup files".
A View menu command would be much simpler, would make perfect sense, and would let me attach a keyboard shortcut to it.
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Exactly - and it's the wrong attitude. Why not leave it an option to have the tree menu off to the side and have a single active window for whichever folder you selected? It's not that hard. Heck, it's already done.
That's one of the reasons I love the Firefox browser - it's often valuded for its tabbed browsing, and I *hate* tabbed browsing. But there's an easy way to add a few lines of user prefs and make even the references to tabbed browsing go away.
They also improved the handling of mismarked MIME-type files, and instead of taking the "user is a luser" attitude, left an OPTION for people to enable this other way of doing things.
You're really limiting your options if you're going to enforce some rigid methodology on users that are often used to a different way of doing things, particularly when you're the underdog - especially for something as trivial and inconsequential as file/folder depth and organization.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
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.
I'm going to try to go easy on the GNOME developers here for the simple fact that I can't do a better job, largely because I don't code.
You'll have to provide me with an argument as to why coding ablility might qualify or disqualify one's opinion as to how your files should be organized if you want me to understand this point of view.
KFG
I have to agree with you here. Both the good points and the bad. There is simply nothing better for browsing deep file hierarchies than the NeXTSTEP style file browser. Hopefully Apple will be adding some more features to it in Tiger.
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.
Spatial Nautilus was born out of all the other users complaining about attempts to reinvent Windows Explorer ("browser-like" file management).
Personally, I'm not too keen on 'spatial' myself, but newbies needing a consistent metaphor (and not every new user comes trained to drive a browser, either) pick up on it faster. We developed the odd CLI/graphical hybrid of the 'browser' because we all got skilled and sick of screen clutter.
Anyhow, if KDE is "the one like Windows" (and they arguably have the better browser, what with KHTML), and Gnome is "the one like the Classic Mac," at least there's finally a reason to pick one over the other for a given install.
I do think we'll get less pissy about 'spatial' arrangements when we have walls worth of display space to organize all the pretty individual folder views, but barring complaints about bloat and resource-inefficiency, all you really need to satisfy all of the people is a 'location bar' and a big red button that turns 'open in new window?'/'open in same window?' on and off.
[Spoken as a WindowMaker user annoyed at the inability to (easily) maximize over the dock and wharf... while respecting, if being bemused by, arguments to never use maximized windows! Okay guys, when you tell me how to fit a ~800x600 image in the ~740x540 pixels I've left... But in other words, people have been arguing this since before the beginning of time.]
"
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 this is different from Win9x how?
I just went down to verify, and if you check "open each folder in a new window" in the appropriate dialog, Windows 98:
a) Opens each folder in a new window
b) Remembers the placement of the window on screen
c) Remembers the size of the window
d) Remembers how the icons are set up
I really don't see how this differs from what Gnome does...
You're only likely to install Linux once on your machine, so why do you want a friendly installer for it? (Translation: Your argument overlooks important considerations. If they want a good configuration interface, they can do like others and have an "Expert" mode or separate dialog.)
If GNOME were designed for usability, why does its file manager want to open up so many windows when I'll end up closing most of them? At least Microsoft has realized that users don't treat local file systems that differently from web pages, and so many interface modalities should be shared.
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.
[discussion about an easy way to view hidden files]
Yeah, I agree. That's one of the things I miss from ROX-Filer - an easily reached, per-directory settable way to view hidden files.
Other things I miss is an easy way to drag things to the parent folder (In ROX, you can drag to the "parent folder"-toolbar button, the one you use to go upward in the file system. Perhaps nautilus could do this by allowing us to drag to the parent list in the lower left).
Another thing in ROX-filer is that the most recently changed files are highlighted, which is sweet.
A fourth ROX-delicacy is that you can easily do shell commands in a little directory-specific mini-buffer. Dangerous but nice. (I mostly used this with the rename script that comes with the perl distribution.)
Something else that I miss is the ability to define bookmarks. (Both local and remote.)
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).
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.
So if only people migrating from Gnome 2.4 and below, KDE, Windows, and MacOS X (that is, a lot of people) would want to change an option, it's not really that important, so you should put a checkbox in a separate program that looks like regedit?
Only people likely to want that, are the non-newbies longing for the "good old days" of "exploring" the filesystem.
I could see people migrating from any of the desktop environments wanting to disable this feature. They wouldn't all necessarily want to, but it's not solely old-school Unix/Linux gurus that want to keep from opening 5+ windows to get to a file.
Is Gnome really only concerned with people have never used _any_ operating system before? I seriously doubt many such people get to use Gnome as their first environment.
On the other hand, I always hated the old Nautilus
I'm happy you've found something you like, but it seems to me that this is an important sticking point for many users, so it deserves a more accessible toggle than digging through options in gconf.
I've come for the woman, and your head.
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!
Point for point: :)
You're only likely to install Linux once on your machine, so why do you want a friendly installer for it?
You've obviously never installed linux.
(Translation: Your argument overlooks important considerations. If they want a good configuration interface, they can do like others and have an "Expert" mode or separate dialog.)
Its called gconf-editor. Thats your "Expert" mode. Gconf editor is set up as a heirarchy, ie. browser mode, so I don't know why people think its THAT difficult to use.
If GNOME were designed for usability, why does its file manager want to open up so many windows when I'll end up closing most of them?
Double-middle click to open the folder and close the current one. Ctrl+W will close the folder. Ctrl+Shift+W will close all parent folders. It only opens the folders you ask for.
At least Microsoft has realized that users don't treat local file systems that differently from web pages, and so many interface modalities should be shared.
No, microsoft realized that YOU don't. First off, when I use windows at work, I use the My Computer spatial style, not explorer. Second of all, for browsing, I use tabs. I open everything in individual tabs, not individual windows. My web browsing habits are COMPLETELY different. Web browsing for me is lots of reading, following different threads in message boards, and the occasional download. File browsing is moving or copying documents from one folder to another, both of which I want open, or opening an individual file. Frankly, thats two seperate tasks that I handle in two seperate ways.
- gtaluvit (prnc. GOT-tuh-LUV-it)
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!
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...
Yes but in bothe KDE and Windows XP you're presented with a clutter of options. It isn't simple and clean. In nautilus it's obviously presented when you click on the computer icon, no having to crawl through some strange sidebar with it's cryptic icons or go through some hierarchy of My Crap and random other garbage they decided to throw in (Control Panel in the explorer tree?).
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.
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.
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"
That's EXACTLY the behavior I hate most about the MacOS. I shouldn't need a hex editor (i.e. ResEdit) to go and and tell a file what application it is for. If I tell my application to open a file, I want it to try, and only fail if the file is in a format it can't handle -- not just beacuse some flag got messed up in downloading.
OK, fine. I'll just take all of my thousands of digital photos collected over the years, which are now organized in nested directories so that I can easily find photos of my kids that I took last November, or of fireworks at Sagami-ko, in the mountains of Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan in 2001, and dump all those pictures into one big folder so that Spatial Nautilus can deal with them better? Riiiiight...
Ummmm, yes. But use iPhoto to find stuff.
If there's one thing that got me thinking about a mac 'way of doing things' (after I bought my first mac 3 months ago), was the fact the in all my tinkering in the first month, I rarely handled actual files. And that's after moving/creating thousands of MP3s (in iTunes) and hundreds of JPGs (in iPhoto).
What every computer user needs is not an all-encompassing file browser, but good apps for organizing and searching your data - depending on what data it is. iTunes does this by letting you enter all the relevant fields and letting you search them on-the-fly; iPhoto lets you view all the images and enter keywords (place, person photographed) for for later searching. Both have 'folders' (although not nested), if you want to group some items together.
In short, most of the files created can and should be organized in other ways other than nested folders. As for me, I'm still crossing my fingers for a fully-indexed metadata filesystem for the mac (at WWDC), so I'll be able to keyword all the other stuff (HTML, Word, PSDs), and hopefully search it as easily as in iTunes...
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.
User options are regarded as bad things. The user shouldn't have to think.
This is exactly right. Options are bad. When Sun asked new Gnome 1.4 users to change settings, such as Panel properties, the users were confused by the range of options available. As a result, a lot of the users either failed to carry out simple configuration tasks, or took a long time to get the right result.
The Gnome HIG demands simplicity of configuration because without simplicity, configuration tasks become impossible for some users, and more difficult for all.
Have you looked at the KDE control centre recently? Complexity is abundant. There are a lot of options, but very few truly important ones. Because the KDE team want to give every niche, every 'power user's preference' equal importance, it remains extremely difficult to identify and distinguish the significant prefs. (Lack of instant-apply doesn't help.) At least, this is how it seems to me.
Remember that even a 'power user' may have trouble with complexity, because preference dialogues are not often used. How many times have you wanted to tweak a setting slightly in an app you use every day, and suddenly become surprised by the sheer number of preferences? That negative experience is common in non-Gnome apps (XChat, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Knode) but really quite rare in Gnome.
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
I had a teacher in college (1992) that said you should never have more than three folders deep on a Mac. Did not make sense to me. I was doing graphic design at the time and made use of a lot of prior artwork and graphics in my current projects. keeping all the stuff organized involved lots of layers and linking to other folders, via aliases. Yeah, it took an extra minute or two to set up a new project, creating several new folders and links but once done, was really fast to sit down and jump into what ever I wanted to work on.
Guess it all depends on how you think about working. Do you have a plan or methodology for getting things done or his your head all full of your newest project and how much fun it is? If people would step back from what they're doing and think about the big picture and how to get things done, things could go easier, regardless of the tools you use.
I drank what? -- Socrates
The fact that they have had to go such great lengths to defend the utility of such a simple "innovation" really ought to tell the innovators something. Or would if they were capable of listening.
FreeSpeech.org
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."
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
Do you not have to make the initial decision on how mail should be catagorized, i.e., create the heirarchy, before you can train the filter to it?
Mail is also fairly easy. First off, you know it's mail. You don't even have to train the filter to it. Secondly, we're dealing with a very limited range of possibilities really. Stuff from mom. Ok, that goes right to dev/null. "HOT TEENAGED SLUTS!!!!". Ok, that goes right to the important-respond right away folder. And we can all easily agree on those catagorizations too so we can share filters.
Mail also comes in huge batches which is really the only reason you need a filter to handle it for you anyway, because of the sheer labor involved.
Three different text files named "Little_Fugue_in_G" containing all the same keywords/phrases is a bit stickier. Your human mind can instantly differentiate each one and decide where it belongs. Your filter is going to barf and never have another shot it for training purposes. Outside of mail the variety of files is nearly infinate with few clues as to where you might want it to go.
You're also going to need to run your filter in reverse to retrieve files, querying it for everything. Or you could just click on "Lyrics" then "STYX" then "Little_Fugue_in_G".
KFG
Well... yes. Because if it's done "right" (not that I'm implying that it ever has been, so far), then the one is a lot like the other except that you can have the same file in multiple metadata-category "folders", and some good things (date, size, whatever) are provided without your having to do anything manually.
Sure, I put my photos into folders, but the problem with folders is that it's a single-inheritance sort of thing. I can put a picture taken at the park in a "Park" folder or a "Jun 2004" folder, but I can't put it in both unless I have a bunch of Park folders under different months, or a bunch of Jun 2004 folders under different categories.
If I had a really sweet file browser, though, I would drag the pictures into "Park" when I copied them off of my camera; the system would already know when they were taken. If I want to see the pictures from June, that's easy; if I only want to see pictures under Park, that's easy too. If I want to see pictures from the park in June, applying filters should be a dead-easy operation. Of course all this assumes that either you're running on a filesystem that handles large directories well, or that the application does clever things with hardlinks, but both of those are entirely possible today. Really, metadata is just awesomely more convenient than folders.
But (parting shot) spatial is just another attempt by GNOME to make it harder to actually get anything done.
That's funny, because if you have a folder in list view, with all the subfolders expanded, you can do the same thing.
Select my home directory: one click to raise the window, one to pick my home directory.
Select my Music folder: click and drag to get it in sight, double-click to open the music folder (which happens to be a link in my case.)
Click on the segmented control to choose the list view.
Ok, I've got 241 subfolders in there.. To expand them all, I could write a little apple script, or flip the disclosure triangle for each one...
Well, looks to me like it's already more work than typing the search terms I want into the search field in iTunes, but when I also allow for the fact that iTunes is searching on the MP3 tags, not the filenames, and the names of my music files don't have all of the info on which I care to search.
Apple's been dumb as hell not making the Finder more aware of metadata (even Windows can read ID3 tags and display them in the file manager), but the basic idea's there.
Ok, how many different file types should the finder open and index every time a new one is created? How much space should we give up for indexing?
Maybe what Finder does and doesn't do has something to do with prioritization and limited resources.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The guy is a total nutjob.
What does he do when a site has subdomains, or mirrors, he probably has a nervous breakdown trying to apply his retarded metaphors to that.
I use tabbed browsing for one main reason - it keeps all my open web pages in one place, with one button on the taskbar to access that collection. With multiple browser instances and a reasonable number of other applications crowding my taskbar I would reduced to clicking the browser instances one at a time to find the one I am looking for - and they all contribute to taskbar crowding.
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
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?
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.
Fair enough, but why not, then, have a unified meta-data search for all document/file types? The "OS" could just index everything and you could perform metadata searches on all your documents/files...
Uhm... by "new one", do you mean "new file type" or "new file"? If you mean file type, then the Finder should ideally index everything which it understands metadata for. Better yet, make it a part of the OS X compatibility guidelines, that any new file types created/used by a program be accompanied by a program/library with a fixed, well-known interface (this could be as simple as just listing KEY:VALUE pairs on stdout) which can extract keywords/metadata from any file of the given type. That way, Finder doesn't have to understand any files 'foreign' to itself, it just calls up the metadata extractor program/library which is registered for the file type.
Any reasonably new machine has gigabytes upon gigabytes of free space. If you don't have the space, then it shouldn't index. You know, this can be detected auotmatically. Duh.
Oh please. There's no reason metadata indexing can't be done in the background. (In fact, a program called mairix is doing it for my mail right now and at nice +19 I hardly notice it.)
HAND.
You have to decide for yourself which drawer is appropriate to store your socks in, or even whether storing them in a drawer is appropriate at all.
... "Oh... we díd mention there's this thing called gconf-editor, did we? I'm pretty sure of it... It's a pretty cool feature: you can change all these settings no-where to be found in edit->preferences; you should really check it out") although I don't have any gripes with spatial.
Yes, but on the other hand "~/socks" might be enough instead of the "/house/bedroom/left_closet/undies/socks" (I sure use(d) this system).
I can't count the times when I had to search for my VB.NET project (yeah yeah) in "h:\-=SCHOOL=-\Project\...\", "c:\documents...\desktop\project..." or "c:\....\my documents\...". After a while of messing around in linux I started putting everything (whell.. a lot, anyways) in ~/ . Saved me a lot of hassle.
I still use nautilus the classical way ("You don't know how to use GConf? Tough luck!"
Perhaps the "smart" behavior could be created by using a distributed bayesian filter against the contents of a file.
Absolutely! And improvements to conventional bayesian are in the works (or at least in the concept stage) but this is a prime use for this type of classification.
One of the key differences though is in attaching a name like 'spam' to the collection. Classifying can be automated, but when you need a name for the collection, some of the traditional organization problems arise again.
"For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism."
Bayesian, huh?
So you are advocation to let a unintelligent agent place your files _randomly_. Bayesian filters works with spam (and viruses) because they often are duplicates, or near duplicates.
The only thing a bayesian filter could sort on your harddisk is to group originals and backups together.
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.
[snip - lots of good reasons why spatial isn't right for everyone]
It seems to me that the gnome project has been making this kind of decisions for a while now. I used to be able to do lots of things to change nautilus. These days it seems all the configuration settings have gone away. More and more it looks like windows: "you can change what little we would like you to change, for the rest go look in the registry and hope you are lucky." This is very much accepted by the windows crowd, they stick to the tasks described in the article most of the time. Those of us who use our computers for more specialized tasks will have to go out of our way to configure our computers to our likes.
The ideas described in the article are indeed a means of getting my grandma to use gnome, and I'm pretty sure that she will like to use a computer where she does not have to worry about things like bitrates and file hierachies. Me, I stick to enlightenment where I can change the stacking of windows, border type for when the developer of some third party app screwed up, as for file browsing im stuck with the gnome 2.4 nautilus until that day when enlightenment 17 stops being vaporware or I find something more configurable. I am not going to be using shallow file hierachies any time soon, and naither are any other people doing specialist work on their computers, I think.
It seemed that F/OSS was all about choice, the gnome people seems to be taking more and more of that choice away from us in the name of usability. So I choose to use something else. All power to the gnome developers for making "grandma's computer," but it's not for me.
Too bad you didn't just create an Explorer "Favorite". Just like in IE, Explorer gives a user the ability to create a shortcut to a directory. That way you can press Alt+A, and then the first letter of the location you want.
I guess I should clarify (I thought it didn't come out well) that for the simple task of looking for a file in order to open it, spatial Nautilus is a bit much. I middle-click my way through the filesystem so I don't get window clutter -- which makes it almost like a browsing experience, because I only ever have one window open. But for more complex tasks, like moving or copying large piles of files, I like the fact that I may very well have opened my destination window already a few clicks ago. Like I said, I'm a spatially-oriented guy, not a timeline-oriented guy. I think the 'back' button on a folder window is one of the most counter-intuitive things around -- for me. (And I stress the 'for me' part.)
Okay, partly I like spatial Nautilus because I can pretend I'm as cool as those Mac guys too ^_^
Standing at the very edge of my imagination, I peered into the inky void and realised -- I couldn't think up a new sig.
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