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Gnome 2.10 Sneak Peek
spectre_be writes "Davyd Madeley wrote a Sneak Peek at Gnome 2.10, scheduled for release on the March 9, 2005. Looks like the new release-policy is starting to pay of, as several existing utilities get enhancements and a couple of new ones are added. Also (finally) a mozilla-stylee type-ahead find has been implemented in Gnome's Open/Save dialog. Together with OpenOffice.org 2.0's scheduled release and Novell's Mono coming up to speed, will 2005 prove to be the year of Gnome?" Update: 01/18 01:40 GMT by T : Oops - the "2-point" got chopped off in the headline; still a while until GNOME 10.
I'd agree, and I hate GTK 1.x. The old file selector allowed you to filter file lists, so you could type "*.mp3" then hit tab so only mp3 files would be shown. This is not possible in the new file selector, and the Mozzila style searching is not an acceptable substitute.
This regression is probably a result of the GNOME developers simplicity-at-all-costs attitude, and they probably want filtering to be done by the application, eg. the mp3 player shows only mp3s, and using the MIME type system instead of extension. This might seem a superior solution, but actually it is not. The old file selector allowed any combination of wildcards in the search, so you could do things like "*report*" or "Track??.mp3". I think it even allowed regular expressions. This is a much more powerful system, and it didn't confuse newbies because they didn't know it existed.
However, you can rest assured that the GNOME development team thought long and hard before they decided *not* to include [different backgrounds for different workspaces]. It takes a lot of guts to say, "no, this isn't really necessary."
No, it doesn't. "I don't need this, therefore you don't either" is an incredibly easy line to take. It takes no guts to say it. Nor does it take guts - only time - to put in the effort, research the issue, and find out what your end users (both novices and experts) have to say.
What does take guts is to back down and admit that you were wrong, if your research does not agree with your expectations. And what I see in the GNOME development team - and their detractors - is not guts but religion. The GNOME team worship simplicity. The question they ask of any proposed feature is not "will this be beneficial to our end users", but "does this fit in with our design aesthetic".
I'm not criticising that. Simplicity is a valid goal, and it's one that KDE has not chosen, so it reduces the duplication of effort that so many people used to whine about.
However, it seems somehow implausible that the GNOME team considered this particular feature long and hard; given that it seems like a logical extension of the spatial metaphor, it seems to me that its absence can only suggest that they barely considered it if at all. Can you point to the relevant messages on the appropriate mailing list? I'd be interested to see what research they actually did, and what were their other arguments against making different workspaces visually distinct.