I've been using rawhide since a little before FC2-test1. And I must say that I am more than a bit taken aback by the new nautilus default mode.
I'm a KDE fan from before their 1.0 release, and it took a long while for Gnome to win me over. But it did eventually, and what won me over was its adherence to the HIG, and the beautiful simplicity of Bluecurve Gnome. i.e. I'm not one of those people who bemoaned the replacement of sawfish with metacity, and I like the "less is more" philosophy of the current Gnome series. Gnome has done a lot of things right.
So I can't help but feel that I am missing the boat when it comes to spatial mode nautilus. On the plus side, I can see that it certainly has a cleaner look. And that's it.
On the minus side, it wants to open a window for every mouse click, navigation is cumbersome, finding what options you do have is a hunt and peck afair. I realize that if you know to "right click-> browse folder" or "nautilus -browser", you can get the old behavior back, but what I don't understand is why spatial is the default. How does spatial mode as the default benefit the new user? To me, this seems to be a case of cutting out too much of the interface.
I realize that this may really be a question for another list, but as the Fedora project could decide to change the default, it seems an appropriate thing to ask in this forum. I almost feel that I should be posting this to bugzilla instead of here.
What are the advantages of spatial that I am not seeing?
Thanks, Steve Bergman
I once saw a screenshot of the gnome 2.5 and there were more icons on the Computer folder. There were icons for cdrom and floppy devices. What happened to then on fedora? What about the acme integration on the keyboard shortcuts?
Last question: Why there isn't a option on the file-manager options to choose the default behavior?
Steve, you forgot one on the plus side: much faster... ;D
Em Dom, 2004-03-28 às 23:35 -0600, Steve Bergman escreveu:
I've been using rawhide since a little before FC2-test1. And I must say that I am more than a bit taken aback by the new nautilus default mode.
I'm a KDE fan from before their 1.0 release, and it took a long while for Gnome to win me over. But it did eventually, and what won me over was its adherence to the HIG, and the beautiful simplicity of Bluecurve Gnome. i.e. I'm not one of those people who bemoaned the replacement of sawfish with metacity, and I like the "less is more" philosophy of the current Gnome series. Gnome has done a lot of things right.
So I can't help but feel that I am missing the boat when it comes to spatial mode nautilus. On the plus side, I can see that it certainly has a cleaner look. And that's it.
On the minus side, it wants to open a window for every mouse click, navigation is cumbersome, finding what options you do have is a hunt and peck afair. I realize that if you know to "right click-> browse folder" or "nautilus -browser", you can get the old behavior back, but what I don't understand is why spatial is the default. How does spatial mode as the default benefit the new user? To me, this seems to be a case of cutting out too much of the interface.
I realize that this may really be a question for another list, but as the Fedora project could decide to change the default, it seems an appropriate thing to ask in this forum. I almost feel that I should be posting this to bugzilla instead of here.
What are the advantages of spatial that I am not seeing?
Thanks, Steve Bergman
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On Mon, 29 Mar 2004, [ISO-8859-1] Andr� S. wrote:
Last question: Why there isn't a option on the file-manager options to choose the default behavior?
This is part of the irksome "it's 'easier' if we sweep all options under the carpet and tell advanced users 'use gconf-editor' philosophy."
Personally, I liked the "beginner"/"advanced" options in Gnome 1.4.
Steve, you forgot one on the plus side: much faster... ;D
I don't think this is due to it being spatial.
thanks, noah silva
Em Ter, 2004-03-30 às 16:22 -0500, Noah Silva [Mailing list] escreveu:
I don't think this is due to it being spatial.
thanks, noah silva
I've tried the spatial and the "classic" modes, spatial appears to be a lot faster . I'm getting used to spatial really faster than I thought, some times it's really better to manipulate files using spatial (almost always :P).
André S. wrote:
Em Ter, 2004-03-30 às 16:22 -0500, Noah Silva [Mailing list] escreveu:
I don't think this is due to it being spatial.
thanks, noah silva
I've tried the spatial and the "classic" modes, spatial appears to be a lot faster . I'm getting used to spatial really faster than I thought, some times it's really better to manipulate files using spatial (almost always :P).
I still detest the spacial mode. The mode seems just like NT4. I opened windows on the long trail of open NT windows. I then moved all the open windows all over the place, closed them, then went down the trail of windows again. The NT windows opened in the location tha they were relocated to. The size was the same as the relocation. I see no difference.
About having to run a registry program to change user preferences. I had to disable autorun in XP. I had to regedit and change the entry to disable the autorun feature.
If anything valuable comes from the default setup that nautilus has adapted is that fixing problems in windows is not like a foreign operating system any longer. Nautilus is becoming sort of a windows OS emulator for file management.
This is not meant as a flame. It is a plead to get sanity back into nautilus, since gmc went away and nautilus is GNOME's file manager.
Jim
I still detest the spacial mode. The mode seems just like NT4. I opened windows on the long trail of open NT windows. I then moved all the open windows all over the place, closed them, then went down the trail of windows again. The NT windows opened in the location tha they were relocated to. The size was the same as the relocation. I see no difference.
About having to run a registry program to change user preferences. I had to disable autorun in XP. I had to regedit and change the entry to disable the autorun feature.
If anything valuable comes from the default setup that nautilus has adapted is that fixing problems in windows is not like a foreign operating system any longer. Nautilus is becoming sort of a windows OS emulator for file management.
This is not meant as a flame. It is a plead to get sanity back into nautilus, since gmc went away and nautilus is GNOME's file manager.
I also detest spatial. I've tried to like it. I've asked others what they like about it and tried to appreciate those features. And I still despise spatial.
I think the really important question, though, is which is easier for new users. And I can't help but feel that spatial makes things unnecessarily confusing to the novice and hides too many features that a novice *would* want. It's a simple switch in gconf. I strongly believe that fedora should ship with spatial turned off by default. More advanced users will know how to turn it on if they want it.
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?
-Steve Bergman
On Tue, 2004-04-06 at 19:06, Steve Bergman wrote:
I also detest spatial. I've tried to like it. I've asked others what they like about it and tried to appreciate those features. And I still despise spatial.
I think the really important question, though, is which is easier for new users. And I can't help but feel that spatial makes things unnecessarily confusing to the novice and hides too many features that a novice *would* want. It's a simple switch in gconf. I strongly believe that fedora should ship with spatial turned off by default. More advanced users will know how to turn it on if they want it.
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?
-Steve Bergman
I just don't get how can anyone possibly think that depriving the user of the file location context (i.e. the file's location in the tree hierarchy) and making it impossible to backtrack up the directory tree is even acceptable. At least it's not just me.
I just don't get how can anyone possibly think that depriving the user of the file location context (i.e. the file's location in the tree hierarchy) and making it impossible to backtrack up the directory tree is even acceptable. At least it's not just me.
Ummm.... I'm not sure that they have hidden context from the user. Though, I have to admit that it does not seem to be that obvious. The 'What's new' guide shows how you can see your location in the directory tree. In case you've missed it, take a look at it once. http://www.gnome.org/start/2.6/notes/rnwhatsnew.html
I'm beginning to _like_ the spatial look a li'l as I am using the new nautilus.... It took me a li'l RTFM though, before I came to this opinion.... Another interesting article (though slightly outdated now) was: http://lenore.newmeja.com/gnome-2.6/GNOME_2_6.html
cheers, Siddharth.
On Tue, 2004-04-06 at 21:52, Siddharth Toshniwal wrote:
I just don't get how can anyone possibly think that depriving the user of the file location context (i.e. the file's location in the tree hierarchy) and making it impossible to backtrack up the directory tree is even acceptable. At least it's not just me.
Ummm.... I'm not sure that they have hidden context from the user. Though, I have to admit that it does not seem to be that obvious.
I'm sorry, this is a non-sequitur. Statement 1 conflicts with statement 2.
Plus, it IS hidden. It requires a mouse click to reveal, and ONLY the parent folder. Yes, you can backtrack this way, bu only one step at a time.
Ummm.... I'm not sure that they have hidden context from the user. Though, I have to admit that it does not seem to be that obvious.
I'm sorry, this is a non-sequitur. Statement 1 conflicts with statement 2.
Sorry... bad phrasing I guess. What I meant to say was... the feature is there. Its not 'gone'. Its moved to a different location, that's all.
If the original intent of the statement was to say that the new location is not obvious, then we both concur. If it was to say they've taken the feature away itself (which is what I understood), then the statement was incorrect.
Plus, it IS hidden. It requires a mouse click to reveal, and ONLY the parent folder. Yes, you can backtrack this way, bu only one step at a time.
There definitely is something I'm missing here.... Look at: http://www.gnome.org/start/2.6/notes/figures/nautilus-parentfolders.png
You can backtrace any number of hops at one go. With reference to the pic I'm talking about, you can go to 'Documents', 'gnome', 'home' or '/' So there is no question of going one at a time.... is there?
cheers, Siddharth.
You can backtrace any number of hops at one go. With reference to the pic I'm talking about, you can go to 'Documents', 'gnome', 'home' or '/' So there is no question of going one at a time.... is there?
Actually, you are right. I stand corrected.
On Tue, 2004-04-06 at 23:06, Steve Bergman 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?
Spatial file management has a long and time-honoured history, including the Macintosh and Amiga file managers. There are strong HCI reasons for using spatial interfaces, too. Some of this is covered in this Ars Technica article:
http://www.arstechnica.com/paedia/f/finder/finder-2.html
On Wed, 2004-04-07 at 03:59, Ben Steeves wrote:
On Tue, 2004-04-06 at 23:06, Steve Bergman 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?
Spatial file management has a long and time-honoured history, including the Macintosh and Amiga file managers. There are strong HCI reasons for
It was also easy to turn off in the Mac and get a tree view. Don't know about the Amiga.
On Wed, 2004-04-07 at 04:06, Steve Bergman wrote:
I also detest spatial. I've tried to like it. I've asked others what
they like about it and tried to appreciate those features. And I still despise spatial.
Me too. Spatial mode is simply wrong as default in my opinion, it's the first thing I hated from old winblows interface.
Just my two cents of €, Alex
On Wed, 2004-04-07 at 12:06, Steve Bergman wrote:
I also detest spatial. I've tried to like it. I've asked others what they like about it and tried to appreciate those features. And I still despise spatial.
And everyone else seemed to - change is hard, but everyone gets used to it. Mac OS X is simple today and simplicity is key - there are plenty of arguments as to why to go spatial
I think the really important question, though, is which is easier for new users. And I can't help but feel that spatial makes things unnecessarily confusing to the novice and hides too many features that a novice *would* want. It's a simple switch in gconf. I strongly believe that fedora should ship with spatial turned off by default. More advanced users will know how to turn it on if they want it.
No, because GNOME 2.6 ships with spatial mode Nautilus turned on, and a key to being a "good member" with regards to Fedora is to not fiddle too much with what upstream is providing
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 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
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 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
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.
-Steve
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 :-).
On Thu, 2004-04-08 at 08:45, Steve Bergman wrote:
Plenty of usability studies. Read desktop-devel-list@gnome archives, or 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
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.
Well, a link was posted: http://www.arstechnica.com/paedia/f/finder/finder-2.html
Searching around that might help too
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.
Fedora aims to keep in line with mainstream as close as possible - if you hate the view, take it up with the GNOME developers
(whom will promptly most likely ignore you on d-d-l, since its been discussed and beaten to death)
On Mon, 2004-03-29 at 07:35, Steve Bergman wrote:
I've been using rawhide since a little before FC2-test1. And I must say that I am more than a bit taken aback by the new nautilus default mode.
I'm a KDE fan from before their 1.0 release, and it took a long while for Gnome to win me over. But it did eventually, and what won me over was its adherence to the HIG, and the beautiful simplicity of Bluecurve Gnome. i.e. I'm not one of those people who bemoaned the replacement of sawfish with metacity, and I like the "less is more" philosophy of the current Gnome series. Gnome has done a lot of things right.
So I can't help but feel that I am missing the boat when it comes to spatial mode nautilus. On the plus side, I can see that it certainly has a cleaner look. And that's it.
On the minus side, it wants to open a window for every mouse click, navigation is cumbersome, finding what options you do have is a hunt and peck afair. I realize that if you know to "right click-> browse folder" or "nautilus -browser", you can get the old behavior back, but what I don't understand is why spatial is the default. How does spatial mode as the default benefit the new user? To me, this seems to be a case of cutting out too much of the interface.
I realize that this may really be a question for another list, but as the Fedora project could decide to change the default, it seems an appropriate thing to ask in this forum. I almost feel that I should be posting this to bugzilla instead of here.
What are the advantages of spatial that I am not seeing?
Nothing has been cut out. You can get the old behavior back by setting a gconf key to always browse. That way you will have the old behavior.
Now, for the second part. There are advantages to spatial, if you are willing to use that mode the way it is intended to be used. The most important is that it remembers the states of all you windows, and therefore enables you to set up browse states for each directory by simply changing the views and dragging the edges to make it a certain size, and put it in a certain position. so, directories viewed in nautilus are treated as objects with properties which the user sets.
Now, after a while, when a user gets used to using his desktop, he will remember the positions of all the directories he works with.
That is the short version of it.
Also, a little trick, if you have a middle mouse button (who doesn't have one these days :) ), double middle click opens a new window and kills the parent window immediately. So you never have extra windows open, or you can always kill parent windows once you get to the directory you wanted to browse to.
Hi,
I agree that the spatial mode is way too spartan, but that wasn't the main idea. The idea was simply that each folder has certain properties, a background, a position, etc. This was already somewhat true in the browse mode, but is easier to see in "spatial mode". Mac OS 6-9 used this scheme, as did OS/2. I don't think this means that the toolbar has to be done away with though, it could simply have different items in it. In particular, I would like the zoom and "view as..." widgets there. I suppose people in hell want ice water too...
On Sun, 28 Mar 2004, Steve Bergman wrote:
I've been using rawhide since a little before FC2-test1. And I must say that I am more than a bit taken aback by the new nautilus default mode.
I'm a KDE fan from before their 1.0 release, and it took a long while for Gnome to win me over. But it did eventually, and what won me over was its adherence to the HIG, and the beautiful simplicity of Bluecurve Gnome. i.e. I'm not one of those people who bemoaned the replacement of sawfish with metacity, and I like the "less is more" philosophy of the current Gnome series. Gnome has done a lot of things right.
So I can't help but feel that I am missing the boat when it comes to spatial mode nautilus. On the plus side, I can see that it certainly has a cleaner look. And that's it.
On the minus side, it wants to open a window for every mouse click, navigation is cumbersome, finding what options you do have is a hunt and peck afair. I realize that if you know to "right click-> browse folder" or "nautilus -browser", you can get the old behavior back, but what I don't understand is why spatial is the default. How does spatial mode as the default benefit the new user? To me, this seems to be a case of cutting out too much of the interface.
I realize that this may really be a question for another list, but as the Fedora project could decide to change the default, it seems an appropriate thing to ask in this forum. I almost feel that I should be posting this to bugzilla instead of here.
What are the advantages of spatial that I am not seeing?
Thanks, Steve Bergman
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On Tue, 2004-03-30 at 17:25, Noah Silva [Mailing list] wrote:
Hi,
I agree that the spatial mode is way too spartan, but that wasn't the main idea. The idea was simply that each folder has certain properties, a background, a position, etc. This was already somewhat true in the browse mode, but is easier to see in "spatial mode". Mac OS 6-9 used this scheme, as did OS/2.
So did the Amiga, which is personally why I was glad to see a spatial filesystem browser in Linux. It seems odd that so many filesystem managers try to work like Windows Explorer. I never got used to that form; I always preferred spatial and I still do, even though Nautilus' still has a few warts (ex: click on a Windows Network host, then click on any of the shared resources, and you'll get an "The action associated with "share" is invalid" message. If you associate nautilus with it, you'll get an error message "'Nautilus' can`t open 'jazmin' because 'nautilus' can`t access files at 'smb' .locations". Whoops :-)
I don't think this means that the toolbar has to be done away with though, it could simply have different items in it. In particular, I would like the zoom and "view as..." widgets there. I suppose people in hell want ice water too...
By implication, people using Nautilus are in hell :-) Just kidding. I like spatial mode. And there's nothing stopping anyone from never seeing spatial mode if they don't want to!
I had a similar problem using "connect to server" and then putting in a "sftp://" URL. When I try to open it... error ;<
On Tue, 30 Mar 2004, Ben Steeves wrote:
On Tue, 2004-03-30 at 17:25, Noah Silva [Mailing list] wrote:
Hi,
I agree that the spatial mode is way too spartan, but that wasn't the main idea. The idea was simply that each folder has certain properties, a background, a position, etc. This was already somewhat true in the browse mode, but is easier to see in "spatial mode". Mac OS 6-9 used this scheme, as did OS/2.
So did the Amiga, which is personally why I was glad to see a spatial filesystem browser in Linux. It seems odd that so many filesystem managers try to work like Windows Explorer. I never got used to that form; I always preferred spatial and I still do, even though Nautilus' still has a few warts (ex: click on a Windows Network host, then click on any of the shared resources, and you'll get an "The action associated with "share" is invalid" message. If you associate nautilus with it, you'll get an error message "'Nautilus' can`t open 'jazmin' because 'nautilus' can`t access files at 'smb' .locations". Whoops :-)
I don't think this means that the toolbar has to be done away with though, it could simply have different items in it. In particular, I would like the zoom and "view as..." widgets there. I suppose people in hell want ice water too...
By implication, people using Nautilus are in hell :-) Just kidding. I like spatial mode. And there's nothing stopping anyone from never seeing spatial mode if they don't want to!
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