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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!"
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
"
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...
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.
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!
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...
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...
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."
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.