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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.
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.
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
"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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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....
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.
It's like the metric system
As in it's not like the metric system? The metric system is mathematically elegant, but the spatial nautilius is just oversimplified. An oversimplified approach to a rather complex task. It's an abstraction level below the browser nautilius, and one step to low. Clutter.
we don't want it now because we're not used to it, but everyone knows it's better than the English system.
As in clearly not everybody knows it's better than the browser nautilius?
Troll? Yes, probably.
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
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?
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.
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.
"middle-click the folder and Nautilus will open it in the same window"
Actually, it doesn't. It opens it same as normal, then closes the parent window. The difference is that unless you're very careful the windows will be in different locations and different sizes. Both are really annoying when you're trying to get to a directory that is pretty deep quickly.
Also, most people's middle "button" is my mouse wheel, and double clicking that makes little sense and can actually be somewhat difficult.
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.
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.
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.
If there's an option you're likely to want to change, or modify, put it in the damn application, not in the registry style gconf-editor.
The article was considsending. The Gnome group seems to think they're smarter than me, and that if their system doesn't work with me, then I should look elsewhere, and so I have.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
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!
No he doesn't. He tells you that there's one field in GConf that will do it, doesn't say what field, then goes and insults anyone who hasn't had the need to open it before.
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.
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...
From a usability standpoint, thats the right idea. The option isn't something you're likely to change, and if you do want to change it, its something you're likely to change once. For that reason, its in gconf. Gnome is designed for usability, not to have every option available under the sun given to you. It simplifies the interface so you don't have to wade through all the options just to get to something you may change fairly often. If you're interested in modifying every aspect of your desktop down to the smallest detail, get FVWM.
- gtaluvit (prnc. GOT-tuh-LUV-it)
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.
That's preposterous. This is not something that only the good old boys are going to want to change. New users to GNOME and Linux will want to have this level of customization too.
My father is a good example of such a user. I see him using Windows Explorer with the tabbed view constantly. He organizes his files very carefully, and he thinks about them in a tree-like structure. But he is not going to want to climb through some kind of registry editor to make this change, since in Windows it has always been as easy as Tools | Folder Options. That's right, it's a preferences dialog right off of the window itself.
Keep the dangerous and esoteric preferences in gconf. But put the common, safe ones in a preferences dialog. Remember: the customer is always right.
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!
-
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.
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 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
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.
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...
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.
But that only works because roadways are relatively static. You don't have to worry about someone suddenly adding twelve stoplights, three left turns, and a stretch of one-way road between the last time you drove and when you're giving instructions.
With a shared data environment, though, you don't have that control. What was the forth folder down alphabetically is now the sixth as a new project comes in; or management decides your folders should be subfolders to match the latest reorg. (Or someone not in management--some people can't resist making improvements regardless of how much of a hassle it is for the rest of the team.)
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.
No.
Using the "browse filesystem" feature requires right-clicking and making a selection from a drop-down menu. Using spatial view, by contrast, requires only a double-click. In other words, there is under the current situation a small penalty attached to browser view that becomes non-trivial when compounded over multiple instances.
Why is it such a big goddamn problem to add a "browser-view-by-default" menu item to fscking Nautilus? What is the major malfunction of people like you such that you're so goddamn opposed to making it trivial for users to do things the way they damn well please?
The Gnome team seems to forget that in between "newbies" and "31337 h4x0rz" is a large middle ground of "power users" who may not be up to programming and shit, but who understand the behavior of the apps they use in fairly sophisticated ways.
Windows does not win because it bends over backwards for newbies. (Apple does, and it loses). Windows wins because it aggressively cultivates power users. These are the people who shut off spatial view as soon as they booted up Win95. They are also the people who drive purchasing decisions.
Do not fuck with them.
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
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."
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.
... 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.