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How To Deal With The Spatial Paradigm

Posted by timothy on from the tradedja-for-a-paratwenties dept.

PostThis writes that there's been "a lot of talk about Gnome's spatial Nautilus lately and so Christian Paratschek puts everything into perspective weighing in the pros and cons of this particular user interface paradigm. In any case, there are always alternatives."

1 of 38 comments (clear)

  1. Newbs by Laxitive · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So, I read the article. And the author makes a reasonable point about newbies being more accustomed to the spatial metaphor. I'm not going to dispute that. It might or might not be a valid claim.

    The question I want to ask is: what about those of us that are NOT newbies? The author states early on that he tries to avoid anything that would expose the filesystem tree abstraction to the end user. Maybe you could argue that it is good for newbie users, maybe not. But it DEFINITELY isn't good for non-newbie users.

    Look, the filesystem is a TREE. That's what it IS. Any metaphor that you try to make the filesystem fit some other pattern will only take you so far. A tree is a very nice, clean structure. A lot of its expressive power is lost when you try to impose some strange alternate metaphor on it. When you deal with the filesystem as a tree, any operation that maps well onto trees, you can map well onto filesystems. It's a powerful abstraction.

    And quite frankly, don't we WANT newbies to be learning the actual behavioural properties of the tools they use, rather than an artificially constructed interface which we deem them more able to use? Won't this lead to more intelligent users?

    Personally, I think it's insulting to people to say that they can't "deal" with basic abstract structures. It's not THAT complicated guys. And we're not that smart for knowing how filesystems work. MOST people in the world can grok the concept perfectly fine, you just have to teach them. Perhaps some people feel threatened by that?

    I was an avid gnome user. I stopped using it once I noticed the clear trend for gnome to assume that I'm dumb. That I can't deal with certain choices - which are better made by the developers than by me. Limiting excess in choice is fine.. but there is a fine line between reasonable limits, and top-down control. I think gnome crossed the line a ways back.

    Keep your spatial browser. I'll keep my trees.

    -Laxitive