On Wed, 2004-04-07 at 17:45, Steve Bergman wrote:
On Wed, 2004-04-07 at 18:47, Colin Charles wrote:
> > I'm curious, was spatial just someone's neat idea or is it backed up
by
> > some sort of usability study, or commonly accepted UI principles?
>
> Plenty of usability studies. Read desktop-devel-list@gnome archives, or
Such usability studies (the ones that I saw, at least) used novices or
end-users. Secretaries and the like, people that by the nature of their
jobs only "frequent" a few directories on their machines and use a few
applications.
On the other hand, my wife is an english teacher and only users a few
apps, but if she can't have a tree view of her stuff she'll
rip your balls off.
Anyone who needs to manage a large number of directories, or several
nested directories, will not use "spatial" (GOD! I hate that term.
There's nothing "spatial" about it)
> even usability@gnome. Many websites out there have links to
stating why
> its useful, its not only the OS X feature... Ars Technica had a writeup
> that did bear a lot of influence on the GNOME team though
Which happily / gladly ignores the need of a tree view, which is to me
it is a fatal flaw. Also ignores the popularity of treeviews in
alternatice file managers, source browsers, menuing systems, etc.
As mental masturbation is a fine article, but disconnected with reality.
Could you point me to a specific thread? Searching
desktop-devel-list
and usability archives for "spatial" only serves to indicate that there
was very little discussion and that most of the commentary about opening
folders in their own windows was negative. I saw no mentions of any
usability studies at all.
As to being a nice player, if the nautilus guys jump off a bridge, I see
no reason that Fedora necessarily needs to follow. Spatial still looks
like a UI disaster to me. I hope I'm wrong.
Actually, I think I'm being a nice player by letting them know how wrong
it is to impose a point-of-view that didn't had even a _hope_ of ever
being the majority's opinion. Witness the controversy on the usability
list.
I also must point out that MS Windows had that flat view option for ages
and it never became the dominant setting. Not a single poerson that I
know uses it, except some of the Mac freaks. But these people are sick
:-).