http://www.osnews.com/story/7344/Opinion_Why_Users_Blame_the_Spatial_Nautilius Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Wed, 02 Dec 2009 03:00:20 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I guess I don't understand it. To me it was annoying when this "functionality" was all that was available in Windows. Nothing is worse then a new window opening each time I open a folder. That was not liked when MS did it, so why should it be different now? This is not a filing cabinet, it is my computer. My files are organized as they would be in a regular physical filing cabinet. Am I the only one that finds keeping the filing cabinet drawers open when I open another one annoying? I would not do that with a physical file cabinet, so why would I with a virtual one? There needs to be a way to turn that off IMHO. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 07:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I use "nautilus --no-desktop --browser" and it works like it always used to.. no annoying new windows for stuff Sun, 13 Jun 2004 07:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? There has to be something wrong with your setup. I'm on FC2 and displaying the contents of /dev (which has 7531 items) takes on 4-5 seconds. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 07:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I've been using the spatial browser for a while now, and the more I use it, the more it make sense. We should all remember that this is mostly a first attempt at it (I don't think Win 95's file manager was in any way the same...). With time I think the whole idea can be polished a little to make it work better for everyone.

Right now by biggest request would be a button, maybe in the bottom right corner, that will close ALL of the windows that have opened. I know you can use ctrl-shift-w to close the parent windows, and then close the child window you are using, but that is more steps than you need. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 07:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I and many others I know personally love spatial; however, I agree that the option ought to be there to use the browser mode as well. Thankfully, it's already in GNOME CVS. If you really want it now, you can compile nautilus 2.7.1. Or you can throw this on your system: http://gtweakui.sourceforge.net/ Hope that helps. Cheers. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 07:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I'm not positive, but I think a shortcut/menu entry for closing all windows is planned or already implenmented in the 2.7/2.8 branch. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 07:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Download Nautilus from the CVS, or wait for Nautilus 2.6.3 and the "Close All" button will be there. I wrote about this in our previous discussion about Nautilus: It was added just a few days ago:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=142632 Sun, 13 Jun 2004 07:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >"I even know few people who never open more than one
>browser window, viewing all pages in tabs; I hope they do
>not try to glue a daily set of newspapers together before
>reading them..."

Strangely, while i'm browsing everything in tabs in only one browser window i don't glue newspapers together.

Also, i like spatial Nautilus. And for massive file managing a good file manager tool like 'mc'. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 07:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Don't know how to use gconf? Then you shouldn't change the way Nautilitus works" Sun, 13 Jun 2004 07:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Strangely, while i'm browsing everything in tabs in only one browser window i don't glue newspapers together.

That is strange. I also browse everything in tabs in one browser window. Unlike you, though, I glue a daily set of newpapers together. It makes them more portable, I've found. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 07:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I was a "hardcore" KDE user, but after reading about spatial Nautilus it getting my interest what it is.

Now, I use Fedora2... not with KDE... with Gnome but spatial disabled.

Because spatial is in my eyes like Win95 with remembering the position/size, nothing more. Hmm, sorry, bullsh* (IMO)

But it's a great promotion for Gnome 2.6 (which was becomes really good and stable, compared to the buggy 2.0/2.2/2.4 ones) Sun, 13 Jun 2004 08:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? While I agree with you that the spatial interface, and its attempt to be helpful towards user, I cannot agree with you on the fact that users not liking it are trying to stop Innovation or whatever else.

If I am accustomed to a certain way of thinking or organizing stuff, then I, user, don't want to relearn how to do it from scratch, because I was already "productive" before, because the upgrade to another way of doing things forces me an unexpected stop while I reteach my hands how to move between the keyboard and the mouse.

Think about all the flames about playing Quake 1 with the keyboard or the joystick (aaaaargh!), or instead playing it with "wsad" keys as the arrows and the mouse for aiming/shooting... there were many flames, and many broken legs, but in the end playing with "wsad"+mouse became a standard in FPS, and now Return to Castle Wolfenstein ships with it as the default configuration... otherwise people would have had their butt kicked in online games.

So, Tabbed Browsing (imho) is the winner interface for internet browsing (it helps me to spend less time chasing information around), but if for filesystem people will eventually come to appreciate Spatial Navigation because it really saves time, they will use and adopt it en-masse... in the meanwhile users will do what users do, try to relearn a way to do things spending time on it, complain and piss off developers and other busy people and waste everyone's time... and since you are a netadmin you should know it

Gnome made the bold choice to show a new way of doing things, it was PLANNED and mechanically expected that people started to complain. The best thing is to do what, for example, the White Wolf publishing company do (listen to real paying customers) and point people to the nice article by Colin Charles:

http://www.bytebot.net/geekdocs/spatial-nautilus.html Sun, 13 Jun 2004 08:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? ... and spatial should be configurable like Rox-Filer, to open a directory in the same (spatial) window (middle-mouse click)

So it could getting more usable than it is now. I H A T E 1000000 windows on my desktop.

Mozilla/Opera have tabs so you have only one window open, spatial goes the other way, this is not the right one. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 08:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Why should I be forced to abandon an efficient method because I am not up to speed on the undocumented terminology, meta-clicks, and commandline options of a browser?

That is pure arrogance. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 08:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? when i read the article, i found something really "funny" about it. it advocates the spatial browser, by accusing the users of "bad habits". what where the author thinking about?

there have been some application for the computer that have survived years and years, just because they let us make things easier, just by NOT emulating reality. take as an example Norton Commander (and it's current incarnations in Windows/Total Commander, Midnight Commander, or any other workalike): why on earth would someone want to use Total Commander instead of windows explorer, while the explorer have further use of the "folder, file" methaphor? well... in my case, because it gets the work done, faster and easier! take as an example the "invert selection key", something not implementable in a 1:1 metaphor of real life. we don't have a "get all this files, but that little one in the middle" in our real life drawers. but indeed, selecting ONE folder, and then negating the selection is something extremely useful (e.g. for a massive file deletion).

there are a host of this examples, being the "NC metaphor" one of the most strinking ones. but the idea behind is: why do i want to emulate real life when i can get things done easier another way? ok, it might take a little more time to get accostumed, or even to learn, but well... we didn't even found basic math or correct syntax particularly intuitive when we learned it at school, did we? Sun, 13 Jun 2004 08:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Does anyone seriously want your computer to remember the last position a certain folder's window was placed? Does anyone seriously want to have to manage new windows? What's the use of any of it?

To me, the most comfortable form of file management is the single-window filemanager and wonderful "copy/move by context menu" that Tracker in BeOS provides. I can double-click my volume on the desktop to open a new window ... navigate to the folder I desire, and do all my file management from within that one window with minimal clicking and fuss.

To each his own, I guess. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 08:10:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Because sometimes things need to be changed. I mean, who still complains that his computer doesn't boot into BASIC? Sun, 13 Jun 2004 08:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? When GEOS first added a desktop based file manager, it used a spatial implementation (mainly because the older file manager it was based off had an MDI interface, and created a new window whenever you opened a folder).

The #1 request for the next version of GEOS was to make folders open into the current window rather than create a new window. There were two main reasons for it:

1) The vast majority of the time, when you browse to a sub folder, you don't care about the parent folder anymore. Opening a new window just created extra clutter. Having to hold down a key while using the mouse to get the behavior you want 99% of the time is annoying, and just plain bad interface design.

2) Opening a folder would cause the new window to appear in a different location than where you currently were working. Again, due to the fact that you rarely want to continue using the parent folder, this caused an unnecessary disruption of your workflow.

When I got a job working on the GEOS source, I spent a lot of time improving the file manager. The only big change I did was making an option for folders to open in the same window or in a new window. Past that, all I did was various polishing (the original version was done on a very tight time schedule). The end result was a *huge* amount of positive feedback.

Also, before saying spatial makes more sense, try finding the *really* clueless computer users. As in the people that have owned a Mac for 10 years but still have trouble doing much more than signing on to AOL. They get really confused by all the new windows opening up as go through their folders. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 08:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Just a note here: Spatial Gnome for me does not feel like Win95 (or earlier) but instead just like AmigaOS. And that is a good thing as that is the OS closest to my heart! Sun, 13 Jun 2004 08:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? It is gconf-editor. The GNOME developers have to stop abusing it and write proper configuration dialogs. Being usable does not mean removing all the options and being forced to use an application in one way, its about being able to be flexible to be friendly to the user. If they had put a big shiny checkbox saying "click here to disable spatial" then all the whiners would shut up and get on with their lives.

So, Although I liked spatial, the lack of options in GNOME has made me run back to my beloved uber configurable world. Even XFCE, which is very minimal lets you configure the hell out of it from the GUI. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 08:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Well, there is nothing wrong with gconf (and the gconf-editor is just a GUI to browse the settings).

All settings are stored in Gconf, not only those that doesn't exist in the GUI of the application. It's a very powerful and convinient way of storing/retreiving/monitoring preferences.

going off-topic:
A lot of the flames about gconf/gconf-editor seems to come from people who has no knowledge of it what so ever and directly associates it with the registry hell in windows. The only similarity between GConf and the Registry is the fact that both provide a tree view of the settings... Sun, 13 Jun 2004 08:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? there have been a lot of articles around telling oh how great this new spatial browsing is and how much its not like windows 95. i would like to point out that if this much evangelizing is needed, perhaps it should be rethought? i tried it (or rather ran into it and was annoyed by it when i checked out gnome 2.6) and frankly the "folder is the window" is just opening each folder in a new window. there is no difference. get over it.

in windows go to folder settings or whatever. click open each folder in new window. also enable the remember each folder or window's (i forget i havent used windows in a while) settings. there you go "spatial browsing" is enabled. the folder is the window except we're not making a big deal out of it and its easily disabled. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 08:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? People seem to forget that OS/2 have a brilliant spatial desktop, that now is more than 10 years old. Every folder remembered its position, you could put individual desktop background in each folder, sort the content in different ways, each folder could list data in different ways - e.g. in a tree view or in a detailed view, you could filter the content of each folder in different ways, it was even possible to make a folder into a "Work area", which meant that all the programs opened from that folder would be minimized when the folder was minimized.

With OS/2's brilliant CORBA based desktop implementation you could even extend the behaviour of folders and the hole desktop in your own way. One of the best of these extensions is probably xworkplace (http://www.xworkplace.org/), which is still actively maintained.

To me it seems that GNOME is just reinventing the wheel, but on the other hand the current direction of the GNOME desktop really makes me want to try Linux again :-) Sun, 13 Jun 2004 08:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I hope they don't remove it ;P Sun, 13 Jun 2004 08:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? What's going on here is that there's a new feature and it has been decided that this is best for all. Some people, in particular those who use linux don't like it when other people choose for them. This is the whole reason they use linux in the first place.

So trying to force feed them the new feature by removing the feature it replaces has a very predictable effect. The fact that the gnome developers didn't see this coming is a good example of how out of touch they are with their (intended) users. The dogma of today is that users are stupid and hence must not have choice since they are so easily confused. This dogma has replaced the dogma that everything should be configurable and that configuration is an excellent replacement for proper design choices. Both dogmas are in fact wrong (i.e. not always true).

Modern GUIs usually have more than one way of accomplishing a given task (e.g. a simple way (for the easily confused), a fast way and a flexible way). These are not in any way mutually exclusive. Opening folders is one of the most basic functionalities of a UI with a long history in many UI environments (and a particularly poor record in the gnome environment). Users want choice here and removing it has the predictable effect that users will get annoyed because the GUI gets in the way of how they want to use it. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 08:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I used to be of the same opinion as the author, but lately, I'm simply not so sure.

A lot of the canonical GUI paradigms were developed 20 years ago. As common sense as they seem, computers of today are not very much like computers of that day. In 1984, a system with a 10M hard drive and 1M of RAM would have been fully loaded. A 640x480 display was high resolution. Nobody *had* web browsers or email. The chances of you having more than a few hundred files you actually wanted to deal with were pretty slim.

The thing is, spatial file browsers are essentially built on the idea that you, the user, are a better organizer than the computer. Having all those sticky-state windows is, in effect, a representation of a physical workspace. When you have *thousands* of files you want to deal with, this paradigm breaks down. You need to get at your data, but you don't need -- or want -- to be spending time arranging it.

I really didn't think I'd like OS X Panther's browser window, but the simple fact is that it's really easy to navigate in quickly, easy to bring up multiple windows and drag and drop between them. And increasingly, I'm finding myself locating files with the quick-search feature, and launching programs and even documents with QuickSilver (very similar to the better-known LaunchBar). I remember the name of what I want, but not where it is. If I was going to name a great must-have feature for file/project organization that OS X doesn't have, it'd be even less spatial: I'd like something like BeOS's saved live queries that could be used as virtual folders. (Have a "folder" on your desktop that contains all the word processing documents you've edited in the last week, or all the documents named after the current project you're working on, regardless of type or location.)

There are some innovative approaches I've read about that are still spatially-oriented, like Jef Raskin's "Zooming User Interface" concept, but if I recall correctly even the ZUI would have a quick instant-search feature ("leap") -- and in practice that would be used constantly. I'm neither knocking nor praising Nautilus's current iteration here; I'm suggesting, though, that just maybe some of the ideas in more recent GUIs that have the interface gurus screaming have more applicability to the way people actually use computers in 2004 than ideas developed for the Xerox Star do. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 09:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? So trying to force feed them the new feature by removing the feature it replaces has a very predictable effect.

It was not removed, the old feature (if you want to call it so) is still accessible in at least 3 different ways. But yeah, you can say there was some forcing in setting it as the default.

The fact that the gnome developers didn't see this coming is a good example of how out of touch they are with their (intended) users.

How are you sure they didn't see it coming? And how are you sure they don't aim for a userbase that still hasn't switched to linux, and so shouldn't take those critics coming from power users with a grain of salt?

If you look at Novell, Redhat, etc., they are selling linux workstations (not servers) to office workers in companies not necessarily computer-related.

That's why gnome, unlike projects such as fluxbox, kde, enlightenment, etc. aim to make a desktop very simple to use, not only a chokeful of features. That's why the MacOS ripoffs you sometimes find in gnome (and that go further than "let's copy the 1337 looking theme"), that's why they can't rely on the geeks' whines about the changes (in the first place their bug reports, trolls, etc. are pretty unlikely to help them reach that userbase) and that's why sometimes they seem lost of touch with current desktops. They're over the mentality "let's do better than windows mimicking it", more like "if I can make a desktop that granny can use, it can be used by everyone, no matter if I have to take some pieces of design from other desktops".

Some people think that a free desktop that aims to please enterprises is wrong. I disagree and say that if freedom in software is about choice, it only seems logical that there is such a project.

Specially if you'd like to hack on free software and get paid by an enterprise (and not only for servers). Sun, 13 Jun 2004 09:10:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Spatial viewing makes more sense conceptually than the browser view; the only thing that makes it harder to use in reality is the interface to it, ie. what keypresses and mouse buttons you use to manipulate the view. So I think all that stops people liking this system is because the developers haven't yet found the best set of keypresses to make it work. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 09:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "When you have *thousands* of files you want to deal with, this paradigm breaks down."

You hit the nail on the head. I thought I read that you can approach the computer in two ways: either (1) the user is in control and manages everything, or (2) the computer manages things by itself.

(1) is the Macintosh way of doing things. In the classic Mac OS, the amount of data to manage was rather small so that this approach works well.
With too many things to manage, this approach fails and (2) is needed. Examples of it are iTunes/JuK/rhythmbox, iPhoto, WinFS, and the Unix and Windows systems in general. Most people don't do things in WINDOWS or /usr/local by themselves, they use control panels and package managers for that.
The advantage is that you can store larger amounts of data without getting lost. The disadvantage is that the computer becomes more of an un-understandable black box that magically manages your data.

Now does the fact that Windows and Linux accumulate more and more files which the user isn't supposed to touch, mean that spatial browsing is outdated? I don't think so. I think this is another area in which modern operating systems are getting too fat.

I mean, who should be in control of a computer? With the dishwasher, it is fine if the computer is. But with a PC, I think the user should be in control. Else, (s)he can be scared away by the complexity of the underlying system. Additionally, it can be very frustrating if the computer does the wrong thing, automatically, without the user wanting it, and without the user being able to correct it.

So I think: don't remove the Spatial Nautilus, but reduce the complexity of the system. Hide /usr, /bin, /sbin, /etc, /lib, /var and /tmp from the user, and replace them with simpler things. For example, make /usr an overview of installed packages, which then behave like normal files. Make /etc an overview of YaST control panels, which again behave like normal files, so that if you copy a "setting file" to another computer, it just works.
The best solution, of course, would be moving to something like RiscOS, but that is not doable at this moment. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 09:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Everybody here who's arguing against a spatial interface seems to be using the arguments which have already been covered (and refuted) in the article. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 09:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? (I'm sorry, but I haven't tried Gnome 2.6.)
But the author says it uses a _long_ time to display just a thousand files, what's that about ?
Give me a fast filemanager before you add all those features.
I mean, TWO minutues displaying THOUSAND files,man ! Sun, 13 Jun 2004 09:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "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)."

What a lot of rubbish! A browser mode file manager *can* retain folders' state (if I remember correct KDE's Konqueror does exactly that if configured to do so). A browser mode file manager does *not* alter content if not ordered (by click) to show new content. Naturally it happens to be in the same window. But of course I get a "new set of icons" and I can tell you I also get a new set of filenames. The *only* thing that differs between spatial and browser mode is that in spatial mode a new window is opened and in browser mode not. It is ok for me if *you* like to have new windows but don't tell *others* some nonsense about it. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 09:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? i havent commented on the issue before, and some of these (if not all) have been brought up before but i feel i must add my $.02 to the debate (this is starting to feel like vi vs emacs)

this is win95 all over again. i have yet to see any arguement against this that wasnt just simply "no, it isnt" without anything substancial for support. the windows arent the folders in gnome any more than in win95 except for seemingly more options for the folder in gnome but then again being from 10 years later i would HOPE that would be the case.

the author is rather full of himself if he thinks his way of organizing folders is the "one true way" (which is how this article reads). if i put all my music into one folder it would be extremely large and much harder to find what i want. same with my documents, downloads, and pretty much anything else i have stored.

99% of the time when i navigate to a child folder from a parent folder i have no use for the parent folder again. what point is there in keeping it open? why do i have to use a hotkey to close it as the child opens? shouldnt this be the other way around (ie, use a hotkey when you want to keep the parent)? also i very RARELY do file operations (such as move/copy/etc) between parents and children, but instead do lots and lots of file activity between folders which are cousins. this requires me to navigate between

no good way to close the stream of windows in one swoop UNLIKE win95 (hold shift, hit the X in the upper right, watch as the folder closes and all of its parents close with it). unable to manipulate the entire set of open folders from the task switcher as though they were one unit even though they get grouped up rather quickly.

no way to turn it off from the logical place for this setting in the gui (in folder window -> edit menu -> preferences -> should be checkbox somewhere in here). didnt anyone think this through?

i have seen many a claim that it is more efficient, i want to see the studies linked that support this claim because IME it isnt any slower nor any faster once you get used to it, it is just different.

i honestly think that microsoft's filemanager/explorer treeview on left side folder navigation was an excellent way to go. i have seen something for osx that also looks like it would be easy to use and very powerful (although i dont know if it was native to osx or a 3rd party addon). it had vertical panes for folders and as you opened up child folders, the parents would shift one pane to the left and a tab indicating what the folder name was was at the top of each pane. both of these methods are fast and easy to use with what would seem to me to be an easy learning curve. ( i would love to see gnome/kde get a file browser similar to the one for osx i mentioned)

that being said i still havent turned the behavior off on my boxes. i do most of my file manipulation from a command line and use the file dialog boxes within applications quite a bit. also all of the gui apps i want to run are in the gnome menu. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 09:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? TROLL; heed no word of his. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 09:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? A computer screen is no desktop. Was never. I don't dare saying "Will never", but presently it is not. The harder you try to mimic a real desktop, the more it gets you into trouble. "Spatial" browsing is not new. Windows used to have this option "Open each folder in new window" since long, and I remember that the Amiga Workbench used to do "spatial" browsing in folders, too.

But read my lips: A computer screen is too small! Of course on a real desktop you browse spatially, there's not other way you could handle multiple documents. But you have the space to do it, and you don't have it on a computer screen. So while this Spatiality works out nicely in real life, and we're used to it, it miserably fails on a computer screen! How do you stack documents on a computer screen, without losing track, and still with instant access to each document? It's already difficult in real life, and nearly impossible on a view as limited as a small screen.

Just one example: You want to open a certain document and only have a vague notion where it is stored. So you open your "Documents" folder, then go through two or three indirections, maybe navigating backwards. This works just the same in a "spatial" as in a "traditional" browser, just that you use the "close" button in one case and the "back" button in the other. Eventually you find what you're looking for and open the document. However, with "spatial", you need N clicks vs 1 click to clean up the remainder of your search. This is not an advantage. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 10:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? the true thing is not spatial nautilus but the fuck*d
gconf.
this tool is too bad why don't use a simple text file to store
propreties ? Sun, 13 Jun 2004 10:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Good software design adheres to the way people act; bad software design adheres to the way developers think people ought to act.

Defending Gnome's design choices by criticizing the behavior of its users, or by asserting that users need to change their behavior, is just plain wrong. This time, perhaps, Gnome has used the wrong metaphor.

It's fine to use physical world models, such as "drawer" or "directory", but that's not the way I think of things. My exposure to computing began with Unix, so I learned a long time ago that the abstraction used to describe a collection of files on a disk is a "directory". Many others entered computing via Windows and learned that the same collection of files is called a "folder". Both words are an abstraction, a metaphor, just as the directory and file names that appear in a terminal window when I get a listing are also abstractions and metaphors.

I know these things are abstractions and metaphors, and I suspect most Gnome reviewers know that, too. The last thing we need is another well-intentioned creation of yet another metaphor that does not conform to the way we think about and use the machine.

BTW, I use browsers tabs specifically to open a bunch of unrelated pages and then go through them one by one. I don't paste together physical newspapers because that's obviously awkward and messy. But, I do open stories on the same subject or event from different news sites in tabs, and then read each of them in succession. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 10:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? So by your reasoning, MacOS X is bad software design because it works in a different way than most users (read: the Windows crowd) are used to? Sun, 13 Jun 2004 10:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Give the user an option to change the setting without jumping through hoops. I don't like it but that doesn't mean no one can like it. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 10:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? A "Close All" button might be replaced by Ctrl+click on the normal Close button. IIRC that was the way it was done in Windows.
(Just mentioning the idea so you don't need an extra button)


Anyway, I don't really appreciate a Spatial File Manager. I tend to have a hierarchical structure for a lot of things. That's the way the file system is, isn't it? I can't use a shallow organization, and I navigate with a tree. click, click, click and I open only the deeper node, not the three on the way to it. And more to it, I don't need those three on a windows each. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 10:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? My problem with gconf is that it does nothing to help people use it and that every gnome installation I've tried lacks help files about gconf (as well as a lot of other help files and related documentation.)

If users are expected to employ gconf to make Gnome conform to their wishes, they ought to find all the help they need contained within the application itself. They ought to be able to use it without any knowledge of how Gnome is actually configured. They ought not to be expected to troll Google or look around the Gnome site for assistance. If users aren't expected to use gconf, if it requires a familiarity with Gnome that users will not possess, maybe it ought not to be accessible to them. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 10:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? is a 1:1 (and I mean 1:1) clone of total-commander

then I delete all the gnome/kde stuff and run it under icewm with a tool for desktop shortcuts (which is fine too) Sun, 13 Jun 2004 10:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I own a Mac and don't see that much difference between it and Windows in terms of design metaphor. Different look and feel, yes. Some different capabilities, yes. Fundamentally different metaphor, no. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 10:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Someone was talking about tabs on browsers. Why not do it for file management. If you want to fork, then just middle click and it opens in a new tab.

I would use that. Having hundreds of windows open or having to remember which keystrokes to use is not a great useability idea for anyone other than power users.

'Spatial' sounds wonderful when you are sitting around discussing 'paradigms' etc, etc, but in reality it is just clumsy. I think people who like 'spatial' or those people with very few files to manage or those who just like the idea of something different. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 10:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The real problem is window management. The window frame today is optimized to be used infrequently and use as few screen space as possible. The close buttons have been made very small avoid accidental clicking. Window overviews (like taskbars) usually do not have any real structure and work best with a small number of windows.

All this is fine for regular document-centric work, when you don't close more than 10 windows per hour and there is no relation between the windows, as all of them represent are stand-alone applications or documents.

But when you have windows with some hierarchy and you close at least 10 windows per minute, today's window management becomes a nightmare. It just has not been designed for this scenario. A 'close all' button is a partial solution, but not enough. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 10:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? ...as an old swedish saying goes. In other words: if spatial browsing was a good idea, people wouldn't be complaining about it.

The smoke tells me there's a fire, so to say Sun, 13 Jun 2004 10:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The worst multimedia-programs, are the ones that mimic your hifi-stereo exactly. The usable programs (like itunes for example), seriously deviate from it.

It is utter bullshit to say that to make a good user interface, you need to mimic the real world exactly. You don't. The reason why one uses a computer instead of a real life object, is because a computer is better at the task than that real life object.

Most real-life metaphors fall appart pretty fast. I mean, who puts a file in drawer in a drawer in a drawer? Maybe we should go back to the 2-level-deep directory hierarchy, because that would be more life-like? Sun, 13 Jun 2004 10:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "It's really hard to use a spatial file browser if someone keeps his or her files in a ten-folder-deep structure. Browser-mode file browsers hide the lack of thought and organisation in the filesystem structure"

so you're saying that it is lack of thought and organisation if i use several subfolders for my X thousand files? Sun, 13 Jun 2004 10:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I have to agree - mimicking real-life and explaining new users how to use their computer with some half-hearted metaphors propably isn't the msot efficient thing to do about computer intefaces.
What's this all about? "Hey, look - it's a whole new world... But don't worry you don't have to learn anything new to take advantage of this 'computer thing'...".

But thats not the real problem. What disturbs me the most are all those editorilas about spatial Nautilus on the web that state how wrong everyone else is and that they are just to blind to see.
Just accept that there are two quite different approaches towards file management and that neither of their followers have the right to declare theirs is the "only right one".

Maybe someone should write such an editorial about browser-like interface on OSNews, to let the people know there are people that disagree here as well. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 10:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I agree. I read that and thought, "So grouping and organizing files is a bad thing." He says you want your organization as flat as possible. Well I could put everything in a single folder. Spatial works well that way, you only have to have one window. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 10:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? On the left side, you've got your tree with all your objects. The view of this tree will only be changed, if the user wishes that (by expanding or collapsing the tree). On the right is the content of the currently chosen item (or realy-life-object how you call it) - be it a pdf file, picture or merely the contents of a folder. This is the same with the spatial browsing: You've got a window full with icons. Clicking them opens a new window. The root window has the role of a tree item in the old style nautilus and the new window has the role of the contents window on the right.
Working with spatial browsing requires the user the think in recursions (explain this to a poor secretary). The "termination" of the recursion leads to total chaos on the desktop, since trying to use a folder in a deeper level of the recursion requires to either finding the corresponding window in 5 or more open windows or clicking on the bottom left button and choosing the folder's window, which leads to unreachable windows due to overlapping which again requires to move several windows around. On the other hand the old browsing behaviour provides a well sorted tree, where you can easily choose from which object you and can *decide* whether it will be shown in a new window or in the "contents view" on the right side.

I don't really know what's unspatial with the old behaviour. The new behaviour didn't change much. Instead it made usage worse, since you've often got to find your requested window manually in a set of dozens of windows. The mozilla project managed this "many opened windows"-problem with tabs.

The new spatial behaviour tries to map a hierarchical real-life object - the file tree - into an object with a flat hierarchy - the desktop full of windows each of which corresponding to an object. This leads to confusion, especially for users that have problems with the understanding computers' functionality. It isn't that hard to think in hierachies, if you can see the whole tree, as it was the case with the old behaviour. With dozens of open windows there's almost no way to see how the connection between those "objects" are (which one is the parent of the other, etc).

The idea of spatial browsing is very good, but the implementation is a very important factor, which decides about acceptance. gnome's implementation is good, if you don't open more than 3 or 4 "objects", otherwise you'll get lost in chaos - and nautilus is not the only application, the user want the have on the desktop.

I'd suggest an implemention, where you can always see the whole file tree. What about a sidebar integrated in the desktop-background, that can be opened and closed on request by clicking a small button? Choosing an object in this tree opens a new new windows with the corresponding content. The icons in the side-bar-tree must be split in two areas. Clicking one will expand the object, cklicking the other will open a new window as it happens in the new spatial behaviour. One could then implement features like showing a slim arrow from the clicked side-bar-tree-icon to the already opened window and bringing this window to the front. In this way, you've got your objects flying around on the screen, without losing the overview how they are interconnected. The sidebar may not be overlaped by the opened windows. This is just an idea.

greets Boris Sun, 13 Jun 2004 10:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Sometimes they even abuse the physical metaphor of tabbed browsing by opening multiple pages - not subpages of the same web site! - in multiple tabs of a browser window. I even know few people who never open more than one browser window, viewing all pages in tabs; I hope they do not try to glue a daily set of newspapers together before reading them...

Actually I like to use tabs because it does not clutter my taskbar. I can have many, many programs open at one time.

I don't even if the metaphor models the real world. A DE is different environment, and restricting people to following the way the real world works, is of course very limiting and creates restrictions for no reason. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 11:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Having been forced into using spatial for a while, I hated it at first. However, I soon got used to it and now I really love it. You would be amazed how much of your cognitive power is used trying to find things in explorer/nautilus/konquerer windows when they move around. After you get used to it, it is extreemly efficient.

One thing alot of people seem to miss is that spatial is crap for extablished file systems you have been browsing with another method. Howver, if you put the file there using a spatial file manager, you will find it very, very easily.

Note: The first thing I used to do in win 95 was turn off the open in new window thing Sun, 13 Jun 2004 11:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? So you do misuse the tabs-metaphor. If the taskbar is inefficient, it should be replaced, not be worked around by the applications.

I mean, Mozilla, Internet Explorer, MS Word, MS Excel, Notepad and Paint Shop Pro all have the same problem, yet their solution is different: Mozilla has tabs, PSP has MDI and the Microsoft products neither. That's not what I would call consistent and efficient. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 11:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? An interesting piece. The only section that immediately jumps out at me is the part about tabbed browsing.
Personally, I have never encountered the suggestion before that tabbed browsing is like placing bookmarks in one book and that they should be used to navigate sub-sections of the same site.
Not only have I not heard that metaphor before, I don't believe it makes very much sense. Reading a web page and reading a book are quite different exercises. Typically I will start reading a page and any links that interest me on that page get opened in a new tab. I try and avoid using multiple windows at all because it just becomes an unmanageable clutter of windows and tabs. The pages aren't arranged heirarchically anyway (beyond my interpretation of the link structure), so windows and sub-windows (tabs) don't really make a lot of sense as a metaphor. It's just easier to have one window that does all your browsing, in my opinion.
I do like spatial nautilus, it reminds me a lot of my Amiga. I'm not sure that liking spatial file management means I dislike browser-style file management. The tree view might be a pain in some respects, but if you know your heirarchy well it does seem to be a much quicker way of getting to something fast.

I guess my rambling is leading to the point that sticking too rabidly to paradigms and metaphors an HCI professor says are good is no way to make interfaces. imo it doesn't matter if you do something differently in a computer to the real world, so long as you are allowing the user to do it efficiently, consistently and wherever possible, intuitively (by that I mean it should be obvious what to do, not it should behave like it does somewhere else, be it another PC or the real world). Sun, 13 Jun 2004 11:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I have no strong feelings over the new spatial mode or the older mode. I can use both without too much problem. I think the thing that I object to is the taking away control from the user. Just because a load of usability studies say most people are more productive using this approach does not mean that a sizeable minority are more productive using another approach.

As such it should be made exceptionally easy for the user to choose the way he/she wants to work.

One of the things I like about KDE it is exceptionally configurable (easily) and allows you to setup your environment to suit you as an individual, not ignoring you if you don't fit into the results of focus groups and studies. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 11:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? No, the Taskbar is VERY, VERY EFFICIENT. Tabs are a UI enhancement, they Compliment the taskbar.

MY preferred paradigm goes something like this. I open an application. All the documents I work with are managed in that space. I typically can have about 7 applications open at one time. Individual documents within an application reside inside that application. Maybe if I worked on a very high resolution monitor I would not maximise windows, but I use a 1024x768 notebook. Now if I use Office I can't do that, but it is slows me down. I much prefer using MDI applications, than Office ones.

Anyone you can use Windows/taskbar/tabs in complementary ways depending on the need/situation. There is no one way. I use the filemanager in different ways depending on what I am trying to do.

Andrew.

P.S. I don't even think people think of files/filemanagers as physical folders and file cabinets anymore. Maybe in the 80's when computers were new.

Oh one more thing, if you can tell me a method of being more productive, not consistent with your paradigm, I would appreciate it. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 11:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I agree. They also try and choose sensible defaults. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 12:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? > it is just bad file organisation coupled with a bunch
> of old bad habits [...] attacks on the spatial browser
> try to stop the innovation

Every time I read something like this I wonder:
should it be 'technology for the people' or rather
'people for the innovation'? Sun, 13 Jun 2004 12:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Just to open a slightly different box of unknown, but possibly unpleasant content:
I suspect you, like me, would see it as a big improvement if Gimp went MDI?

And I use a command line to manage my files, TYWM. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 12:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I recently installed FC2 and I have to say I am one of those people who don't like spatial browsing.

I think the only place I find spatial nautilus useful is if I create the following shortcuts:

My Computer
My Docs
My Music
My Videos

But then I still have to browse sub folders if I have categorised my music and video collection. So this makes spatial useless to me again.

The only useful one may be the My Computer, because I plug in a USB disk or digital camera I expect them to be mounted automatically and icons placed in My Computer.

Have GNOME developers created a help file to go with this, that would also give me an indication on what it is used for.

I am really finding it difficult to figure out how I could use Spatial Nautilus in my day to day usage. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 12:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Androo (IP: ---.107.193.93.charter-stl.com) wrote:
To me, the most comfortable form of file management is the single-window filemanager and wonderful "copy/move by context menu" that Tracker in BeOS provides. I can double-click my volume on the desktop to open a new window ... navigate to the folder I desire, and do all my file management from within that one window with minimal clicking and fuss.

To each his own, I guess.

With Tracker you don't even need to open a new window and then navigate to the desired folder by multiple double-clicks. Just right click the volume on the desktop and use the spring-loaded menu to open the right folder directly.

My opinion is that Tracker - or even better; OpenTracker - is the most usable of the file managers out there. Duplicate that interface and you will have the ultimate tool to manage your files. But hey, that's just me. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 12:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? hm, seems like i forgot to put my name on my post, sorry about that Sun, 13 Jun 2004 12:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I am with you, Bogo. I think, actually, if Naut. implemented the drill-down folders (and actions) in a context menu, it would nearly perfect!

But I also think that they should not abandon the single-window mode of file browsing, afterall, OpenTracker offers that as well. (Not saying that YOU said that, btw).

Mike Sun, 13 Jun 2004 12:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Yes, I would. I would like to hear what the benefits of the existing design are, or if it is just easier to code.

But I think that if you are going to be working in more than one application or with multiple documents the current setup is note very productive. Unless of course you have a very large screen(maybe dual) and only work in one application. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 12:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The most anoying aspect of the Spatial Nautilus for me is that you have to close all that windows one by one after you have reached the desired folder. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 12:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? This is, yet again, an engineer speaking and trumpeting theory over usefulness. I have no problem with the spatial browser, but I do have a problem with forcing it on everyone because it's theoretically 'correct'.

I'm no fan of M$, in fact, my main machine is a Mac. So I think it's safe to say that I've had my share of high horse ui eliteism (in Apple's case tho, it's usually correct). I think it's fine to say this is Nautilus and its default display mode is spatial. But at least provide us with a way to turn it off - for now or maybe forever.

Some will definitely see spatial as their way to go, others, esp. Windoze users, probably not. But by forcing someone into something because of ideological ideas is just as bad as any similar behavior by M$. Gnome should not be just an exercise in freedom, but also in usefulness as well as CHOICE. Fortunately there are little projects out there that see the relevance in choice and provide it - I'm thinking of gTweakUI in particular.

So fellow developers and engineers, continue your great job in providing better and better tools, but for god's sake, give the end users a choice as well. Otherwise, your dry theory is going to turn away more than it brings in. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 12:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I believe you can close all parent windows with a button and/or combination of keystrokeand and mouse.

But if you are closing them anyway, what was the point of spatial again? Sun, 13 Jun 2004 12:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? First off, as far as I can tell, this is not an innovation. The pre-osx mac finder behaved like this, as did (to some extent) the windows 95 explorer. However, both file managers gave up this paradigm (at least as the default) some time ago. While I do not know their reasoning, I'd guess it has something to do with the increasing complexity of the average computer's filesystem--having a separate window for each folder became impracticable, as one often had to dig four or five levels into the heirarchy to find what one was looking for. Do this two or three times, and you have fifteen separate, identical looking windows open on your desktop--which is annoying, troublesome, and confusing. The approach has thus broken down at this point, as it is causing the reactions it was designed to prevent.

This is even *more* of a problem on Linux than it is on a mac or a windows box, because Linux makes such extensive use of the filesystem hierarchy. c:program files becomes /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /usr/share, /bin, /lib, /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/lib, even /etc... By the time you're done searching for something, you have so many windows open that it's just about impossible to proceed without closing *all* of them.

In my opinion, the desktop metaphor hasn't really worked perfectly since the days of the mac plus, simply because we demand much more of these machines than we used to. While "exploring" a filesystem does feel a bit kludgy and is certainly more difficult to explain to new users, it is, at least currently, the best we've got. I think, however, that perhaps a good compromise would be using a spatial file manager for the desktop, home dir and removeable media only. Since what I'm doing when I use the filesystem outside of home directory is quite different from what I'm doing inside my home dir (I'm generally doing some sort of configuration--installing/removing programs, futzing with /etc...) and one has to be root to do futz with the root filesystem *anyway*, it might make sense to have this separate browser baserather thanyou generally have to be root to do this *anyway*, it might make sense to have a separate tool for this--a browser based file manager, perhaps called something like "system editor", stored in the gnome control panel (or whatever it's called).

Just my $0.02 Sun, 13 Jun 2004 12:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Okay, maybe the taskbar has its uses (I use the window-switch menu as it takes less space and doesn't get cluttered when more windows are open). But still I think there should be one way of handling windows within a single application. What is the advantage of having some applications using tabs, some using MDI and some using neither?

I think MDI is crap. It is very confusing for newbies, and as a Power User you are locked into the MDI parent window.
Tabs are also crap, as the taskbar doesn't know about them. Suppose you have two tabbed Mozilla windows:
- One has the OpenBSD-Sparc64 review of osnews active. Other tabs are some ebay auctions for them, and a Just the Facts PDF
- One has the mainpage of OSNews active, other tabs being slashdot, kuro5hin and CNN.
Suppose both windows are minimized. Now when you look at the task bar, both buttons are called "OSNews.com - Exploring the Future of Computing", thus providing no clue which window is which. If you want to look at one of the eBay auctions, you only have a 50% chance of opening the right window.
And this is why I think the current taskbar approach isn't really that efficient.

Now how about a completely different approach? Now that OS'es get more and more task-based, why not make the window handling task-based too? In that way, you can put those eBay auctions, the OSNews review, the Just-the-Facts PDF and the price-comparison spreadsheet right into one single task. Now make 1) a bar for switching between tasks, 2) a bar for switching windows (or tabs or whatever) within a task and 3) automatically save these groups to disk, and you have 1) a solution to the window clutter problem and 2) a replacement for favourites/bookmarks that is not tied to webpages.

Btw. another serious disadvantage of tabs is that you can't use drag-and-drop between them. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 12:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Amazingly, the Gnome endeaver (and especially this author) manage to do just enough theorizing and abstracting to result in strange and unintuitive interfaces, but not enough to see the folly of their ways.

For example, if you want to be spacial for context, then trees or tabs are far better than windows, for the simple reason that they are designed to be viewed and comprehended even when a lot of them have been opened! Windows are not designed for this at all, which is why they suck at it and result mostly in clutter and frustration.

It's pretty sad to read a lesson on abstraction from a guy who apparently never considered that a tab in a browser in a taskbar on a screen is highly spacially organized (principle of containment - very intuitive and usable). This guy can't imagine that I may not have a problem distinguishing my websites amongst my tabs. He hasn't considered that I may view the web in pages, not sites, and that I hardly care about site divisions at all. He hasn't considered that I may just need less graphical junk than he to keep track of what I'm doing and what happens next.

I like the MS Intellipoint software as a metaphore for user interface design: Your mouse has 8 buttons. Tell them each what to do in each application. Learn your own system and then interface with your computer at the speed of light. Amazing that MS is less arogrant in this sense than the Gnome project. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 12:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Scratching my ass is also a bad habit, but I'm not going to stop doing it just because some yahoo says it's a bad habit. Choice is good, and if I can't choose whether my directories open in a new window then I'll choose a different file manager. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 13:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Could work. Just need to see how the theory / idea pans out when it gets implemented, hopefully well implemented.

I don't have a problem wondering what is open in the browser, because I can generally remember what I have open, and if I can't I at least know it is a web page, so I open the web page app.

I don't have the same MDI problems. All apps become virtual platforms, but ones in which objects can be shared. Generally just by dragging and dropping or copying and pasting. In Windows I don't like the task based approach, because I normally know what I am doing and which apps do it. I like deciding for myself which app will get the job done. I don't want the computer to think too much for me. Others may benefit from a task based approach though. I mean I am sure it has a place. Establishing a network connection is an example, there are others. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 13:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Okay, I'm going to completely disagree with this inflamatory piece and the troll who wrote it.

My computer is not a filing cabinet, there's nothing to suggest that it should operate like a filing cabinet or a book or a typewriter. Maybe it's time to start throwing out these "real-world" metaphors before they start holding back interface design (maybe they are already).

The spatial metaphor actually tries to hide the real structure of the filesystem from the user by never presenting the true filesystem hierarchy to them. If users think of their hard drive as a collection of discrete 'filing cabinets' it can be much harder for them to understand the true structure of their filesystem when it comes time to perform lower level tasks like backups and data recovery.

All spatial file managers that I have seen have a problem whereby if you are trying to manage files nested a couple of directories deep the screen gets strewn with windows and managing the windows becomes more of a problem than managing the files at hand, also it becomes difficult to determine the parent folder once it has disappeared into the clutter of windows behind the one you just opened. It's not an acceptable work-around to say "just don't make deeply nested directories" on a UNIX system when your home directory is usually already nested at least two levels deep.

Users don't generally need to know about full paths, but you can be damn sure they won't thank you when they need to copy their files off a defunct computer and can't find them because the system never really told them where they were. Think about the "My Documents" folder in Windows NT/XP/2K for an example of why hiding the true path is bad.

My preferred method of navigation is the column view from NeXTStep/OpenStep/OS X because it is very easy and intuitive to navigate with keys, preserves child-parent relationships and is compact, structured and honest in the way it presents information about the filesystem to the user.

Why on earth should this be replaced with something which lies to the user about how deeply nested in the directory structure of the hard drive it already is, are most users really that babyish that they can't handle that much information? I don't think so, maybe you do. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 13:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? In my opinion, Spatial Nautilus is a symbol of degeneration -- it was long since window managers removed their spatial style of managing files.

Why? The human just doesn't work the way files and folders work in their lifes. The file and folder desktop management theory does not stand as humans view things by focusing -- if we wanted a file we would look for it, and we wouldn't want to make the desktop messy.

If we were to use a drawer, we would open the drawer and look at a pile of folders. when we found the specific folder, the brain automatically shuns out the other folders -- they merely take up the blank spaces that we don't want.

This tells me that people look that things by the usage of attention, and not spatial. The specific folder would take up all our attention span. In this way, its easy to note that we would rather the unimportant folders disappear...

Moreover, if one stumble across something interesting, he could just open it as a new window -- there is no use for spatial windowing except that! Its been included in windows for so long that I have forgotten about its existance!

In all, you could just get a hint from users -- if users don't want it and could give so many reasons, that isn't the time to implement anything you want to. BTW, spatial windowing isn't ANY INNOVATION -- IT WAS HELL! Sun, 13 Jun 2004 13:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? That was well put. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 13:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Tabs are also crap, as the taskbar doesn't know about them. Suppose you have two tabbed Mozilla windows:
- One has the OpenBSD-Sparc64 review of osnews active. Other tabs are some ebay auctions for them, and a Just the Facts PDF
- One has the mainpage of OSNews active, other tabs being slashdot, kuro5hin and CNN.
Suppose both windows are minimized. Now when you look at the task bar, both buttons are called "OSNews.com - Exploring the Future of Computing", thus providing no clue which window is which. If you want to look at one of the eBay auctions, you only have a 50% chance of opening the right window.
And this is why I think the current taskbar approach isn't really that efficient."

Think of it as a tree. The taskbar is a node. Creating two nodes beneath it that are both named "Mozilla" and that each have half of what you want would be stupid. You either need to (a) open each web page in a separate window or (b) all in the same window. You can obviously already do (a) just by opening more instances of the browser. Tabs allow you to opt for (b). If you care what site a couple of related links are from, that is another level on this abstract tree. The browser could, assuming enough people cared, graphically group pages by site. It could use meta-tabs, or graphical divisions between sets of tabs, or any of a jillion graphical methods to make that visual distinction.

Whether the browser or the OS should do is not an interface question at all, of course. It's just a programming question. And Gnome/KDE by default even add another level to the tree by having multiple desktops. So in this case you could have your two different Mozilla "tasks" on different desktops. One for work and one for your lunch break, or whatever. Abstract though it may be, the tree would be like:

Desktop 1
-> ICQ
-> Mozilla
-> OSNews
-> Slashdot
-> Article 1
-> Article 2
-> Ebay
-> Quicken
Desktop 2
-> Mozilla
-> Company intranet home page
-> Work-related research site
-> Company application

I think most people can keep track and "see" these relationships in their head without a lot of visual fanfare. And if not, then I don't see why I should have to use their handicapped interface that wastes space on things I don't personally need. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 13:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Oops. How about this:

Desktop 1
   -> ICQ
   -> Mozilla
      -> OSNews
      -> Slashdot
          -> Article 1
          -> Article 2
      -> Ebay
   -> Quicken
Desktop 2
   -> Mozilla
      -> Company intranet home page
      -> Work-related research site
   -> Company application Sun, 13 Jun 2004 13:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? gah. okay, i'll stop trying now. most of you get the point... Sun, 13 Jun 2004 13:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? spatial nautilus is not supossed to be for managing files outside of /home it is not an administors tool. It is very efficient when browsing folders filled with user saved documents or media.

Now for example, the organisation of files taken with a digital camera.

With spatial: Pictures are downloaded in to a directory, unorganised. The user in question then makes two directories Bob's birthday and Wendy's wedding. Now all three aforementioned directories are open apon the users desktop. Each photo can be examined in turn and placed in the required directory. This manner of doing things is very natural compared to the individual highlighting, cutting, navigating and pasting which is necessary in the browser paradigm.

on an unrelated note, to an unseasoned computer user the taskbar is unfathomable, the items on the taskbar bear no resemblance to the programs when maximised. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 13:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? What is the real cause of all these attacks on the spatial Nautilius? In my opinion, it is just bad file organisation coupled with a bunch of old bad habits.

Translated: users are morons.

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.

Translation: morons should not complain.

What's worst, attacks on the spatial browser try to stop the innovation.

Translation: developers know better what users want. Get over it.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++

Speaking about innovation: Mr. Bob was an innovation. Yes, it was- but not the one users liked. In fact, users hated it.
So, where is Mr. Bob how? Hello? What? He is spending all his time in undisclosed location at MS campus, where he belongs!

That's it, folks: does not matter how innovative is your innovation, if users don't like it: shut up and take your innovation back. End users are always right, even when they are wrong!

What, can't swallow your pride and surprised that for your free hard work people can't even thank you properly, but prefer to complain instead?

Well, as Russian proverb says "cheap but crappy, pricey but lovely." Don't become proof of it.:) Sun, 13 Jun 2004 13:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Funny article. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 13:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I think conceptually spatial is the way to go with a file browser, but practically it's not. In the real world and in every day use situations the browser-like file manager is more practical and efficient for the majority of people. I think this has been the cause of so much of the outcry against spatial Nautilus. The debate seems to be split into two camps. Those that believe they know which is the right way to design a user interface and those who know how they feel when they use an interface. I think a truly great UI designer trusts her intuition more than what is popular opinion about what is the so-called technically right thing to do. It seems the decision to make spatial Nautilus the default was made by people who are more intellectual than intuitive. While there's nothing wrong with being intellectual, I think a larger dose of inuition in this situation would never have yielded the decision to make the spatial mode default. I think eventually they will admit they were wrong and change it back. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 13:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I hope they do not try to glue a daily set of newspapers together before reading them...


I hope the spatial guys don't rip off the pages of the newspaper and spread it all over the table...

Seriously now, the problem with spatial navigation (which I tried to like but at the end turned off) was the way it was implemented: if the Gnome guys implemented it but left it turned off by default (with a big button "open directories in new windows" or whatever available), no one would be complaining. Choice is great. Push it down the throat of people is not. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 13:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Sometimes they even abuse the physical metaphor of tabbed browsing by opening multiple pages - not subpages of the same web site! - in multiple tabs of a browser window. I even know few people who never open more than one browser window, viewing all pages in tabs; I hope they do not try to glue a daily set of newspapers together before reading them..."

I do -- but I simulate on screen what I do in meatspace -- I stack my reading, and flip rapidly back and forth using some rather tab-like bookmarks. It's efficient when dealing with, say, my 700-page telecom contract. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 13:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Gnome have made the mistake of forcing their spatial browser on their users, there may be good arguments in favor of spatial but then there are also arguments in favor of browsing. I don't believe one is greatly superiour to the other, it very much seems to depend on the person.

Spatial isn't the oldest method, browsing was in use for a long time - even before GUIs were invented. Does your terminal open a new window everytime you change to a new directory?

It's unfortunate but GUI developers in the opensource world do not seem very open to critisim. GIMP and Gnome have both recently been subject to critisim but all the response I've seen is the user has not done their research or is dumb, noone seems to recognise that the user might actually have a valid point. This article is a case in point, there is nothing wrong with a robust defence but this says spatial is the one true way and if you don't like it you are in the wrong.

People should get it by now, there is no one true way, especially where useability is concerned. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 14:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The author seems to be overly obsessed with the idea of finding the correct metaphor.

I think the best answer to this article would be a link to Alan Cooper's article, written in 1995:

http://www.cooper.com/articles/art_myth_of_metaphor.htm

Excerpt from the article:

"But by searching for that magic metaphor you will be making one of the biggest mistakes in user interface design. Searching for that guiding metaphor is like searching for the correct steam engine to power your airplane, or searching for a good dinosaur on which to ride to work." Sun, 13 Jun 2004 14:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Most people writing here seem to think that "spatial" simply means "open a new window for each folder opened". As a result, most people seem annoyed by it. This is unfortunate, as that is NOT what spatial means. Please read the article at Ars for a better explanation:
http://arstechnica.com/paedia/f/finder/finder-2.html

If i had to do a short summary, a spatial file browser:

Has a single root (desktop, computer, whatever).

Always shows the same item in the same way it was the last time you saw it - windows remember their position and how the user displayed and organized their contents.

Will only show one instance of an item at a time, so the user never wonders about whether two of their windows are open to the same folder.


None of these are in themselves bad (and many would argue that they're good), but they can be implemented poorly. Please try to separate the arguments over implementation from the arguments about spatial representations.

JT Sun, 13 Jun 2004 14:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I agree completely with all who say spatial isn't at all that good. but I also agree in that the old way wasn't really good either.


So how do we make things more efficient?
I've seen two project who might take care of this, one who went one step further and assigned actions, items and times in different rows and then let you chose one object, autmatically filtering away all invalid options.

(you could therefor either chose a image, and get a list of what to do with the image, or you could say what you want to do, and it would list all that you could do it with.)

The other solution (which I'd love to see) is reiserfs as it states in their white papers.
with reiserfs in the state it's supposed to be, you would not be in need of a file browser/manager, and most additional structure to your data would be meaningless.

all you would need was to think in associations.
think: christmas chimney reindeer man.
and at your disposal, all documents or whatever containing this should be shown (just as google, but with a good, sub-searchable design Sun, 13 Jun 2004 14:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I've seen all the articles about why using the spatial interface is better. They all bend over backwards trying to convince us why the majority of people who prefer using a browser-like interface are wrong, that the spatial way is superior. Did you ever stop to think that if you have to put that much effort explaining why something is better, maybe it's not? This is just another insulting example of the tunnel vision some really talented developers get that prevent them from making some really cool software. Come down off your high horse. If people like it and are comfortable with it, why change it? Quit patronizing us with your holier than thou attitudes! Sun, 13 Jun 2004 14:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Your idea might also work, indeed, but at one point it is significally different from mine.
I like to group things into tasks. In each browser window, I want to see those websites that are about the same subject. Site doesn't matter. And my idea is to extend this approach to other applications as well, thus being able to group the following things into one tabbed window:
- A review on OSNews of OpenBSD on the Ultra 5
- Some eBay auctions for Sun Ultra workstations
- An OpenOffice spreadsheet for calculating the price/performance ratio of the eBay auctions
- Acrobat Reader showing the Just the Facts of some Sun Ultra workstation.
As these things include three applications, it can not be implemented at the application level, but only at the OS (or DE) level.

Your approach doesn't focus on a certain task, but on applications. In that sense, your idea is only a slight reorganisations of the menus that my Macintosh SE/30 (System/MultiFinder 6.0.3) already has: an application menu for switching applications, and a View menu for switching between documents within an application.

My system has one little disadvantage: the OS should provide a way for saving tasks to disk and restoring them (just like bookmarking the entire tabset in Mozilla), as they aren't generated dynamically.

To make this post at least a little bit on-topic: such a system would most likely imply a browser-like file manager, or could a spatial one also be fitted in?

Btw. I would welcome a hierarchical view of comments ;-) Sun, 13 Jun 2004 14:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Could be implemented as Konqueror + read-write KParts + save tabs. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 15:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The single best, as in b-e-s-t, file management tool I have ever used is Lotus Magellan. Magellan, a DOS product disappeared around 1991, took what became the familiar Norton Commander interface a few steps better: It would index all or part of your drive (file content, not just filenames) and allow you to query that index using a simple but useful syntax; it was able to display most of the word processing/spreadsheet/graphic formats of that time; the usual batch of archiving ability; a builtin text editor so you could edit files in place; a thick manual and a nifty macro capability. And it was fast.

An updated equivalent for Linux, with the capability to handle the web and today's media formats, would be fantastic.

(No, Konqueror is nothing like it. Not even close.) Sun, 13 Jun 2004 15:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Windows used to have this option "Open each folder in new window" since long, and I remember that the Amiga Workbench used to do "spatial" browsing in folders, too."

That is still the default if you use the Workbench program for file management. Many users prefer a 2-column file manager such as DOpus 4 (similar to Total Commander for Windows). IMO this is much more efficient, although it has the disadvantage of taking a bit longer to learn.

It is a bit puzzling to see this old method touted as a "new thing". Sun, 13 Jun 2004 15:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I did install gnome 2.6 and sat in it for a month. I tried to use gconf a little, but all I got out from it (it's help files and other things telling me what gconf is and why I should use it) said the same: do not use gconf to change settings, use the applicaitons themself to do that!

now, I still don't get it.
why don't gnome just take the wonderful idea of windows/kde or whatever witha control panel for settings, and an application section there-in which i _designed_ to be used, and to hold all necessary documentation to be userfriendly?

I went straight back to kde after this month of frustration. Nothing disturbs me more in the computer world than tools implying their will upon me, when it was I who had a will to do something.

(let machines work for the people, not against them) Sun, 13 Jun 2004 15:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? ``I even know few people who never open more than one browser window, viewing all pages in tabs; I hope they do not try to glue a daily set of newspapers together before reading them...''

If you knew me, you would be adding my name to your list of `few people'. And your analogy regarding `desk of drawers' and `newspapers' is pathetic.

I guess the reason it's called `spatial' is because it uses all the space on ones desktop. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 15:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Hmm, being a long time KDE user I have tried Gnome 2.6 since it has entered Debian Unstable, and I have been using it ever since as my DE. Konqueror convinced me very much as a browser, but as a file manager, it just feels cluttered and overloaded. So finally I did all my file management using the command line.

I have never been a friend of tree widgets for file browsing anyway. They require very accurate mouse movements and the nodes in the tree constantly change their positions on the screen or move out of the viewable area when expanding and collapsing. In addition, browser-based file managers use more screen space due to the toolbar (back and forth buttons etc), address list and the file system tree, things that are completely unnecessary when you just work on a single folder, something which bothers me at 1024x768. And drag-and-drop is therefore just a PITA.

I agree that for deeply nested file systems such as a typical Unix filesystem, spatial file managers are not the preferable way to go; but neither are browser-based file managers - for poweruser system administration, I am using the command line anyway.

But in order to manage my personal documents, projects etc, I do like very much the spatial mode! In fact, spatial nautilus was the very reason for me to switch to gnome, in addition to the environment's general simplicity and clarity of design. KDE just does not have ANY theme which is aesthetically pleasing, and there are just too much little buttons and icons you never use in your life. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 15:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I think this article brings up a lot of good points. It makes sence too that new users would find a spatial interface a little easier to learn regarless if its less efficient or not. So offering an option that is on by default is probably a good idea.

In my oppnion however I don't like having these parent windows open. To me the whole folder/file analogy is annoying. I just want to get the file(s) that I'm looking for. The only concern I have with the path or the method of reaching these files is that I want it to be as efficient as possible and well organized. This is one reason why WinFS sounds so attractive to many people. As for spacial interfaces, I can definitely see how information about the view and icons and stuff should be saved for each folder however size of the window and keeping windows open isn't that important to me. The reason is that me and many users work with their windows maximized almost all of the time in order to get the largest possible view of their file system. It does make sense to me to have a window that is small and just barely fits the files into it withough scrolling and everytime you add or remove files from that folder you have to resize that window. To me I'd rather just maximize it and never have to worry about resizing. Thats where tabs, and trees come in handy. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 15:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? *sigh*
93 posts complaining about spatial *again!*.

Sometimes I wonder if it was even worth doing those usability studies? What happens when they do another change? If anyone wonders why the UI metaphor hasn't advanced much beyound the Early Macs? Now you know.

Anyway, I think that spatial will come into it's own, when married to an underlying database. Which if memory serves is being worked on. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 15:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I do like spatial Nautilus (although I do think this article makes a bad case for it). However, I do understand what one comment writer said--that this feature has been "force fed" to people. It's true that the Gnome developers should have included a dialog to switch off spatial mode entirely before Gnome 2.6 was released, but now it's done so who cares?

Spatial nautilus is extremely useful if you know how to organize your files and folders and want to have control over how your desktop represents them. As a result, it's _great_ for managing my home directory. But what if I want to browse /usr/share/? That becomes a kludge with spatial mode. That's why it'd be great if I could hit a hotkey and the spatial window would transform to browser mode (like the functionality top-right button in OS X finder). Is this already there? Sun, 13 Jun 2004 15:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Look at all this time wasted on one issue that was solved 10 years ago by Windows and Mac. Spatial doesn't work with deep hierarchies - which is what most users have today - at the office, every network drive is 5-6 folders deep, at least. A tree makes it easy to navigate and drag and drop files between folders.

This is ridiculous. We worry about trivia and don't fix the real problems of Linux: 2 incompatible desktop environments, so developers don't have one API to shoot at (like Windows, like Mac). Incredibly difficult installation issues - Petrely was complaining about this back in '99! and still no answer for the COMMON user. And this ties in to the differences between distros - a total mess.

I remember The Kompany explaining how they had to build their apps to run on different distros, and what a mess! I think they finally got fed up.

You can talk all you want about choice, but developers don't want choice of API's on something as basic as a desktop environment, and neither do the users. The fragmenting of the Linux desktop, it's API's, and the incompaitible distros are not a benefit, but a noose around Linux, and any other talk about things like Spatial before fixing these more important things is just mental masturbation.

The only hope for the Open Source desktop looks like Syllable, or OpenBeos. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 15:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "That's why it'd be great if I could hit a hotkey and the spatial window would transform to browser mode (like the functionality top-right button in OS X finder). Is this already there?"

Try doing a right-click--> browse folder.

"However, I do understand what one comment writer said--that this feature has been "force fed" to people."

Well one can view any decision that "others" make as "force-fed" (especially if one has a liberal definition of force).

I'm reminded of when RH had a desktop distro, and all the "advance" decisions it would make (GCC, Bluecurve, etc), and all the complaints it got because of it. And eventually the worth, much after the fact would be proven. Someone has to take point, and get the arrows, so number two and three doesn't have to. GNOME apparently is the arrow-taker, and maybe, just maybe we'll get a desktop out of this, and the charges of "tail-light following" will be behind us. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 16:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? All spatial file managers that I have seen have a problem whereby if you are trying to manage files nested a couple of directories deep the screen gets strewn with windows and managing the windows becomes more of a problem than managing the files at hand, also it becomes difficult to determine the parent folder once it has disappeared into the clutter of windows behind the one you just opened. It's not an acceptable work-around to say "just don't make deeply nested directories" on a UNIX system when your home directory is usually already nested at least two levels deep.

There are at least two ways to fix the problem with too many windows.

As I grew up with System 6 and 7, the spatial file manager I have the most experience with is Apple's Finder. From System 7 on (released 1991) it had good keyboard navigation. You could hit Cmd-Down to descend in the hierarchy, and hit Cmd-Up to open the parent folder. If you held down Ctrl when you opened a file or directory (by keyboard or double-click) the original window would be closed. This way you could hold Ctrl and double-click your way down the hierarchy with each window disapperaing as soon as you were done with it.

The second way I know for not opening lots of windows when navigating deeply in the folder structure is to have a right-click menu which lets you navigate the file system. There was at least one extension for Finder that did just that (part of Norton Utilities was it?) This way you only need to open a window for the folder you actually want to do something with, regardless of how deep you must go to find it.

All the features mentioned here are also implemented in BeOS' Tracker. Actually, with its default settings I find Tracker to be very similar to Finder as of System 7. It's obvious that Finder inspired the BeOS team alot. They refined it by adding a single window mode, a menu for opening a folder x levels up and the nifty copy/link/move context menu mentioned in an early post. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 16:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I agree that clicking on a link is similar to turning the pages of a book. Both get you to a different page to view. What's missing here is how the spatial part also applies to this. Given the same scenario imagine having a new book appear every time you turn a page. After say 20-30 pages there are 20-30 books one needs to close...And the drawer thing, c'mon. It's more like I open a drawer only to find several more drawers to open. Then after opening one of those drawers there are several more to open, etc.
How anyone can say this is faster is certainly beyond me. If I go 5-6 directory levels deep I then have to close 5-6 windows when I'm done. How on earth does this make file brwosing faster when without spatial I only need to close one window when I'm finished? Keep in mind the deeper you go in the directory the more windows you need to close. Sorry, I think spatial sucks. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 16:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? A really good File Browser should be like Google :-). Or like Gmail. You should only search at the content of the document, instead of where it is located on your filesystem.
Looking for it in the filesystem should be only an option.

I mean that seriously : I'm already doing it for the web. Instead of typing a homepage in the browser, I type for example : midelware + NMM to get on the homepage of the mutlimedia midleware "NMM" . It's much easier as to write the full internet http adresse - that I also never can remeber. So, if I'm looking for a textfile "Paris.txt" on my filesystem which handles from my hollydays in paris, I should write "Holidas Paris", and then wroooom, I got a list from the 10 best matches in 0.05 seconds . Like google works . Sun, 13 Jun 2004 16:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Look at all this time wasted on one issue that was solved 10 years ago by Windows and Mac. "

Actually I think that Windows is part of the problem. How many of the above complaints are based on MS's "implimentation" of a spatial browser?

"Spatial doesn't work with deep hierarchies - which is what most users have today - at the office, every network drive is 5-6 folders deep, at least. A tree makes it easy to navigate and drag and drop files between folders. "

Not if it's a very deep tree. And it's no fun when you have a gret breadth either.

"This is ridiculous. We worry about trivia and don't fix the real problems of Linux: 2 incompatible desktop environments, so developers don't have one API to shoot at (like Windows, like Mac)."

That's two API's.

"I remember The Kompany explaining how they had to build their apps to run on different distros, and what a mess! I think they finally got fed up. "

And how long ago was this?

"You can talk all you want about choice, but developers don't want choice of API's on something as basic as a desktop environment, and neither do the users. "

I think it's only fair to point out that on those "other" platforms, MOST users haven't ever been presented with the choice of different desktops. How can we say they don't prefer something, they never had?

"The only hope for the Open Source desktop looks like Syllable, or OpenBeos. "

Those two are choices. If choice is the noose that people think it is? Then lets have only ONE DE. No more Macs, or any other alternatives. One API to rule them all.

Confidentually I think a lot of people are simply afraid of choice, but choice isn't something to be feared. In fact there would be no progress without choice (the old and the new, pick). Sun, 13 Jun 2004 16:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? If you land at a page for middleware using the search term midelware, I think that is quite an accomplishment.

Besides that, you don't need the 10 best matches, you need the match "Paris.txt". And if you know the filename, (it seems you do) the Find File utility of Windows 3.11 is all you need! Sun, 13 Jun 2004 16:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? BeOS did that, so the answer is obviously OpenBeOS Sun, 13 Jun 2004 16:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? ok, now i try to imagine me saying to a customer on phone: "no, it is sooo inovative, you are just to stoopid to realize my genius!" ... i bet that costumer simply will accept that i develope software the way i want. it is not like he could just turn away and use some other software or stop paying me ...errr... or could he?
so to put it short: i don't like it, i won't use it, and YES, i use spatial filemanagers a lot when i have to... at work i often have to use solaris with cde and i was a big amiga fan back in the good olde days, so i won't accept the explanation that i only have to get used to it. nautilus just started to get usable and less pain in the ass... it is okay as long as i can put it easyly back into "usefull mode", but i fear now it will take twice as long for nautilus to get rid of it's countles bugs. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 16:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Nice idea, but there's some file types that just don't play nice with searches unless you force the user to manually input some meta-data.

Eg.
I want to find the digital pictures from my Paris trip.

There's no real way for the computer to know which pictures are from Paris and which are from the barbecue I had last week. Unless I differentiate between the two by manually adding information (Filename/meta-data) the search is not going to give me my pictures back.

Do we really need a set of information tags for each file, filled in by the user. IMO it would be a pain in the neck. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 16:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Gnome is not pro choice. They hid the option that turns the stpatial brosing off somewhere in the freaking gconf. Gconf is bad, and evil is completely corrupted my GNOME installation. Whenewer I start gnome i get this weird message that gconfd is messed up, and then the system stops responding. I cleared my HOME directory but it doesn't help.

I'm back with KDE right now because GNOME doesn't work anymore for no reason. Although they made a great improvement in terms of speed, KDE is still a lot faster, only if it wasnt so visually bloated (vide konqueror). Sun, 13 Jun 2004 16:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? On Konqueror's menu, click Settings, Configure toolbars and you can get rid of buttons you don't want. KDE gives you that choice. This works for most KDE Applications. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 16:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I see what you mean, and it is kind of fascinating. The items in the task:

- A review on OSNews of OpenBSD on the Ultra 5
- Some eBay auctions for Sun Ultra workstations
- An OpenOffice spreadsheet for calculating the price/performance ratio of the eBay auctions
- Acrobat Reader showing the Just the Facts of some Sun Ultra workstation.

would under most modern OS's have to be saved as documents or shortcuts to documents in a task folder. You could browse to the folder (file system acting as task manager) and "open all" or something similar. Then you would (sort of) have your task back.

A more elegant solution along the lines of what I was talking about could define a task as basically a single desktop, and when you saved the task the OS saved as much info as it needed to restore that desktop to its current state. It would save URL's for webpages, your locations in web pages and PDF's, the size of all windows, which had focus, pretty much everything. When you chose to restore the "Shopping for Sun hardware" task, a new desktop would pop up in your desktop-changer tool (whatever/wherever that was) and you could drop back into that task at any time.

A solution that uses an app as the task's "container" rather than a desktop is pretty similar, the programming requirements just get transferred around a bit.

Practically speaking, this sounds really hard to do full-on. Mozilla and Excel and Acrobat would be easy - but what about an app like Photoshop that has internal window positions to keep track of? Apps would maybe have to be "task compatible" or something... able to save their state themselves so that an external app, like a task manager, could call on them to restore to "save point 293948" or some such. Sounds like kind of a mess, but the result would be great! I hadn't really thought about it in the task terms before - I do have a lot of junk open when I go shopping for tech or am reasearching something in Google. And bookmarking a bunch of stuff hardly equals the ability to "restore task" at a later date. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 16:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "I'm back with KDE right now because GNOME doesn't work anymore for no reason. Although they made a great improvement in terms of speed, KDE is still a lot faster, only if it wasnt so visually bloated (vide konqueror)."

This is just a troll, no more.

If you likde gnome, use gnome.

if you prefer kde, use kde.

They're both very good DEs imho.

I prefer kde because of the layout used, QT and KDE dev libs are so great, and I have to learn more C++

I like the OO paradigm in kde.

eg : a file is a file, no matter of it is local, ssh (fish://) ftp and so on...

my 2 cents... Sun, 13 Jun 2004 16:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Eg.
I want to find the digital pictures from my Paris trip.

There's no real way for the computer to know which pictures are from Paris and which are from the barbecue I had last week. Unless I differentiate between the two by manually adding information (Filename/meta-data) the search is not going to give me my pictures back. "

I'm not certain why this is the pain people think it is? Remember back in the "good old days" of film photography? People when they got their prints back, would write on the back what that picture was about (e.g. sister's high school picture), or they would write on the envelope the subject e.g. Family picnic. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 17:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Personally I hope that Nautilus developers are reading those comments and what even more important - take some bits out of it for Gnome 2.8.
I didn't read all of them, but even after reading a third part of it one could find there enough problems pointed out and enough suggestions for improvement offered... Sun, 13 Jun 2004 17:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? when you put a name on your file adn cathegorize it in your picture folder, preferable under paris/holidays or whatever so you can find it by browsing later, why not instead add it to a real meta-data tag, and make a "folder" in your DE act like a result of the querie that brings up pics form paris?

meta-data on objects are good and I can't see why not everyone is striving for such goal.

ever forgot where you put a file? remember it's content?
well, if you had meta-data on it you could easily have found it. (spatial is good, makes us work as we act, but why nt go one step further. meta-data would help us use our in-built association system to find our data.

human mind has been (more or less) proved to work with associations rather than indexing... Sun, 13 Jun 2004 17:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I think that spatial nautilus is totally incoherent with the new gnome fileselector! In spatial nautilus you can't set bookmarks on dirs, so i don'use it...

If you try Microsoft Longhorn you'll see that there are a lot of stuff very similar to GNOME and OS X, I don't care of it, but trying explorer file manager you see a very interesting way to access to the directories, it is simply the best for me: it's similar to gnome fileselector (and CDE fm), but more powerfull because has combobox insted simply buttons.

You can see a screenshot here --> http://assente.altervista.org/?q=node/view/23

I REALLY HOPE THAT NAUTILUS WILL ADOPT A SIMILAR WAY!!! Sun, 13 Jun 2004 17:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? You are right about the virtual desktops. KDE's session manager, albeit technically "broken", almost exactly matches your description.

I've drawed some very simple mockups of my idea. In the last window, imagine the last tab is a notepad window editing OSNews.txt ;-)
http://dmac.webcindario.com/page.html

But now let's take a look at KDE. Its applications are already session aware, so they can be ordered to create save points and restore from them.
Normally, the session manager saves all applications at logout, and restores them when you login again. Now the following changes would be necessary:
- Implement tabs in KWin, so that multiple windows can be grouped together as tabs within a single task window
- New "windows" are automatically created as tabs within the current task window.
- When you close a task window, KWin asks to save it somewhere. Also, KWin can load saved tasks. The functionality is about the same as that of the session manager.

So, that should not too difficult. Maybe someone can convince me to abandon Pascal and learn C(++) instead? Sun, 13 Jun 2004 17:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The problem with Metadata is:
1. Putting .jpg files in a folder with a name == putting text on the envelope of real photos;
2. Automatic folders based on metadata stored for each .jpg file == writing the subject on the back on each photo, put all photos you ever made on one big pile and have a machine sort it all out

The problem with 2. is clear: it is very, VERY time-consuming to label ALL photos ONE BY ONE. And if you apply the metadata changes to all of them at once, you could use folders just as well, couldn't you? Sun, 13 Jun 2004 17:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I don't agree with the article, but I like GNOME's spatial mode. But please, give it a chance before dismissing it. Try it for a while. You'll need to unlearn some Windows habits, but in the end, you might just like it. In my experience Spatial works very well for managing user documents, but horribly for system files and code (thats why a browser mode is still available). I use both. If AFTER trying it, you still don't like it, use the GConf key to turn it off. From what I've read, the Nautilus developers have listened and are going to add an option to turn it off (like they should have done in the first place).

Still, I have a couple of gripes. The browser mode needs to be MORE separate from the spatial mode. The whole spatial metaphor doesn't work well with browser mode, so I'd prefer if no options were saved "per folder" while in browser mode (and browser mode option changes should absolutely NOT affect spatial mode views). Also, along these lines, I think "show hidden and backup files" should be a folder option (and more easily accessible than the preferences page) in spatial mode, while there should be a single, separate option for browser mode. Finally, an option to open a spatial window from browser mode would be nice. With these changes, it would be damn near perfect for me. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 17:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Why do not unity the power of tabed browsing to the idea of spatial Nautilus? Sun, 13 Jun 2004 17:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I disagree with the views expressed in the article. Users do not care about any desktop metaphors, they just want to work efficiently and quickly with their computers, and it is not necessary that emulating reality achieves that. Quite the contrary: Computers give us the ability to overcome the limits of reality. Please reconsider your opinions. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 17:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Tabbed browsing and spatial mode are inherently incompatible. Remembering folder locations won't work if multiple folders are within a single window. Maybe it could be applied to browser mode, but that sounds like overkill to me. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 17:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? well, of course you could use directories as well.
and you don't have to put a description on every photo.

I'm just saying that those who put a lot of effort into actually giving senseful names and storing in "proper" folders could just as well use meta-data and get the same job done, but with easier (and more flexible) access.

to add, grouping types of object (read, folders/directories) is a good thing, as it's makes it easier for someone who seek out something, but don't know what, just what it is relative too. (think this is very well possible with meta-data too, but may be more clumsy then to have things organized) Sun, 13 Jun 2004 18:10:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The problem is that we don't all follow pseudo-scientific rules of behaviour. Our preferences are not always metaphorically correct.

Why have I disliked KDE from the moment I first saw it? Because it offends my idea of what a GUI should be like? Nope. I just don't like it's look and feel and will not use it even though many KDE apps are, IMO, superior to their Gnome equivalent. However, if Gnome started to exhibit some really irritating behaviour..... Sun, 13 Jun 2004 18:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "What is the real cause of all these attacks on the spatial Nautilius? In my opinion, it is just bad file organisation coupled with a bunch of old bad habits. It's really hard to use a spatial file browser if someone keeps his or her files in a ten-folder-deep structure"

This must be the pinnacle of arrogance and it reflects perfectly what spatial nautilus was developed and why it is being pushed so hard for its developers. You see, they know better than you how you need to organize your folders, even though many of us are professional researchers who have given considerable thought to information retrieval and organization.

Thanks, but no thanks, you can keep your spatial nautilus.
You want real usability. Forget about trying to imitate the real world with a computer. It didn't work for Microsoft's Bob and it ain't going to work for you.

People realize that they need to learn a new skill, so they do. You want real usability. Look at Konqueror's split and tab windows and it's profile management that allows you to save the state of a bunch of windows and, most importantly, their respective connections.

But you will brush this as the comments of a KDE user, only to learn that it was Gnome's nautilus that eventually pushed me over to KDE and I am glad I did. I hadn't used KDE since 2.2 and this is a very different beast. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 18:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Unless you're watching zeros and ones, every interface element in every OS is a metaphor. Users are so accustomed to some of them that they forget that.

Icons floating on the screen are metaphors for objects on a desktop. They don't look or behave anything like real objects on a real desktop, but people are accustomed to using icons.

Ditto for working without X or in a terminal window. (There's another metaphor: window.) The words we humans use as labels triggering commands are textual metaphors.

But, adapting a metaphor some real-life object won't work if the real-life object itself doesn't work well, or if the metaphor is expressed poorly. (In my book, "poorly" is defined as "the user doesn't know what he is supposed to do with it just by looking at it. He has to look it up someplace else.") In the case of spatial navigation, a lot of folks thinks Gnome has missed the boat. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 18:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "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."

Are you kidding me? Are you saying new users shouldn't be able to have the system the way they like it unless they can understand how to do it? And people are suprised so many people steer well clear of linux with attitudes like that! This, to me is the definitive issue with linux, because of its openness and the way it is developed it means things are developed by developers for developers, because they aren't looking to make money from consumers etc... noone is listening to them! People may argue that Microsoft don't listen to their customers but they listen a heck of a lot more than many linux developers at present. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 18:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Is garbage. End of story. Garbage. It sucked on MacOS Sun, 13 Jun 2004 18:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? ":"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."
:

buddy this is sarcasm. those who use it hammer down the old classic " linux is only for developers" need a humour hammer Sun, 13 Jun 2004 19:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Do you use tabs in fluxbox? that's what it means... Sun, 13 Jun 2004 19:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The problem with the KDE file manager it seems to me is that the developers took no decision at all. They loaded up the file manager with functions and setting without giving any thought to how it's supposed to be used together. So the result is a application bloated, with little or no usability at all. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 19:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? This article sucks ass and so does spatial Nautilus. I refuse to use an inferior Win95-esque method of opening folders. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 19:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I posted a few observations about why I like spatial nautilus here. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 19:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Is garbage. End of story. Garbage. It sucked on MacOS Sun, 13 Jun 2004 20:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The problem with the spacial mode nautilus is that file management very quickly becomes a window management problem.

The spacial benifits only exist when you leave the windows open (or create a desktop link to each folder), otherwise you are browsing to them each time anyway.

The platform where the spatial view has been the most popular is MacOs Classic. I believe that this was the direct result of a feature which classic provided briliantly, and which I really haven't seen anywhere else. That great and powerfull show/hide application menu on the top right of the screen (the finder menu?).

That menu allowed you to leave your finder windows open without them getting in the way of what you were working on. You could manage your files and then when you were done, just hide the finder windows. Everything was accessible and you could stay focused on what you were working on instead of managing the 40 windows you had opened. This also allowed applications to avoid problems having multiple documents openned.

Most current window managers will allow window grouping with which you can achieve a similar effect, but I haven't really seen that used without the user setting everything up themselves. I know of at least one window manager which provides an option to group windows from the same application automatically, but I recall problems with it's implementation.

So perhaps if the gnome folks included something like this in metacity, if would make people less frustrated with the spatial interface. I get around the problem by having a virtual desktop which I use just for file browsing. Not a perfect solution, but it does keep the window clutter from annoying me. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 20:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Unless you're watching zeros and ones, every interface element in every OS is a metaphor. Users are so accustomed to some of them that they forget that.

I think you are confusing metaphor with representation. Not all representations are metaphors, and a metaphor is more than its representation.

Even 0s and 1s are simply a representation of the movement of electrons in copper. Explaining this to children as like the flow of water is using a metaphor.

(I think) Sun, 13 Jun 2004 20:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Hear, hear!

If Linux remains the plaything of developers, it will remain just that: a plaything.

Software made by developers for developers will be used only by developers. It is the height of unmerited snobbery for these developers to slam non-developers who can't figure out the godawful messes they've foisted on people.

Pay attention to what people want and give it to them. Pay attention to what people do and make it easier to do. Stop pretending the problem with bad software is the people using it. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 21:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The comment about gconf "if you don't know how to use gconf, what are you doing chaning the behaviour of Nautilus" is the usual GNOME Usability arrogance and disgrace (there just isn't another word for it).

It comes from worshiping the Simplified UI, which the GNOME community caught.
Newsflash - a SIMPLE UI makes your life easy by showing the minimum of options, but allowing you to customize the behaviour. Example of a good implementation - Firefox. The UI is much simpler than Mozilla Browser, yet you can change almost all the options you could change in Mozilla. Evolution is also good - for example, LDAP settings are split into two tabs, one basic, and one contains all options. Most users will never see the second tab. The ones who do, will be grateful they don't have to hunt through gconf keys.

GNOME is moving torwards the simplified UI - translation: We'll hide 90% of the options in undocumented, unexplained gconf options (which in the lack of documentation are chillingly similar to Windows registry). Example - Galeon.
You don't believe me? Go change the color of visited links in Galeon. What do you mean you can't figure out which undocumented key to change? What do you mean you don't know the Hex Value (!!) of the color you want?
Well, if you don't know these two things, what are you doing changing the color of the visited link?

Just for giggles, change the color of the visited link in FireFox, Mozilla Browser (and probably Konqueror). See the difference between a simple UI and a simplified UI?

Hiding the ability to neutralize Spatial mode is a stupid move.

I hope GNOME moves away from the simplified UI to a simple UI. If not, at least make it part of the HIG to document ALL gconf keys in an easily accesible format (such as an appendix in the help). Sun, 13 Jun 2004 21:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? When I heard about the spatial browser, I got myself mistaken. I didn't know what it was at the time, but I was told it was like the navigation in anything below OSX in MacOS. It's much more like Windows 95. Personally I like the old OS9 browser, using a similar idea, but instead of throwing windows everywhere it just went ahead and made I guess you could call a mask over the previous window. Once you closed that, the previous one would appear, and I really enjoyed this. Spatial isn't really all that bad either, if you make good use of the local-bookmarks you can create, it actually makes it probably a bit nicer to operate with. And if it's a real problem, there are commands and files which can be changed to restore the navigator back to browser-styles.

Interesting Point about the simple-UI, I never really thought about it that way. Especially if they really want to start to enforce a stronger desktop market in the world, it's going to need to be easy and comfortable to use. As of now though, it's primarly the users who are willing to learn and take time out to figure these things out who use Linux, so things like that shouldn't come as a large surprise Sun, 13 Jun 2004 21:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Go change the color of visited links in Galeon...

Just for giggles, change the color of the visited link in FireFox, Mozilla Browser (and probably Konqueror). See the difference between a simple UI and a simplified UI?

You could go one further and remove these superfluous options altogether. I've really never had the urge to change the default visited link colour since most websites will choose thier own anyway. My point is, remove these silly options and you remove the extra code required to load and validate this option, therefore simplifying, speeding up and increasing robustness the software. I'm not saying hard-wire everything, I'm saying don't invent options for the sake of inventing options. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 21:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I have always been a fan of the browser-style view, and at first was even disgusted by the announcement of the new, "spatial" way Nautilus should work. But I gave it a try.
And, guess what, I liked it. I still need some time to get fully used to it, but I really like it.

It's not perfect yet: The only shortcut for "close all parents" shouldn't be a combination of three keys - the current bingings for this and "open closing parents" (key functions in spatial-style) make both mouse-only and keyboard-only navigation impossible (I believe both should work, since depending on your current task it can make you much faster). So there are things, the GNOME team should try to optimize.
But even now it already feels like spatial Nautilus makes me MORE PRODUCTIVE. And that was just the beginning. The new way, my filebrowser (filespatializer? ) worked, made me reconsider my habits.

To all people now screaming "the software should adapt to the user, not vice versa" - well, that is half-right. Innovative software should not just let me solve a task in a way I'm used to, but it should also show me the possibility of solving the task in a new, possibly better way. I know people, who had their first experiences with Win95 (like myself btw) and since then strictly deny to change anything. They buy new hardware, install a new system (may it be WinXP, Debian or Gentoo) and tweak it down, so it looks and behaves exactly like that ugly and weak system many of us sat before 8 years ago.
Well, it's everyone's right to do so. But I don't want new software to just mimic the same functionality again ang again, to be just a new-iconset-equipped bugfix of a bugfix of a bugfix of a bugfix of the same old stuff. I want software to softly push me in a new direction, to show me new ways. Like Nautilus-2.6 did.

Now I'm more productive not only when working with Nautilus. My whole desktop-interaction now follows another pattern. It makes much more use of the possibilities, my desktop environment (and even Linux itself) offers to me (I won't go into detail, since it's very subjective) and which I left mostly unused for a long time.

So, even if I'm not always happy with GNOME's decisions and politics (I really doubt that "user friendly" means "no configuration options"), I'm really glad, that they had the courage to bring an innovation to us, their users. Thanks @ GNOME & keep up the good job. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 21:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Sometimes they even abuse the physical metaphor of tabbed browsing by opening multiple pages - not subpages of the same web site! - in multiple tabs of a browser window. I even know few people who never open more than one browser window, viewing all pages in tabs; I hope they do not try to glue a daily set of newspapers together before reading them...

What the...? It seems a lot simpler to me that I have _one_ web browser application open in my window manager and in that I have tabs for each web page I'm viewing.. the taskbar for me is for each seperate application- then they handle which documents they have open.

As for the gluing newspapers metaphor, it's pretty weak. I'll use my computer the way I want to thankyou. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 22:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? To me, the most comfortable form of file management is the single-window filemanager and wonderful "copy/move by context menu" that Tracker in BeOS provides. I can double-click my volume on the desktop to open a new window ... navigate to the folder I desire, and do all my file management from within that one window with minimal clicking and fuss.

I like that as well, it's available as a plugin from the official KDE base. It should be installed by default imho! (some distros do, not all). Sun, 13 Jun 2004 22:10:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I wish they'd do that, I hate it when pages fall out. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 22:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Don't know how to use gconf? Then you shouldn't change the way Nautilitus works"

Thanks, I find sentences like this to be a great help to know when to stop reading. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 23:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I've been using Gnome for a "long" time now (in OSS development cycles, that is - since 2.0), and I read an article about benefits and not-so-benefits of the spatial nautilus BEFORE I installed 2.6. The article stated that "it takes a short time to get used to it, but after that it's great".

And I made exactly that experience; at first, it was strange, but after a few minutes (30) it began to feel "right". I'm using a three-head system here (17"19"17") and it's really great that folders open where they did the last time. Like this, nautilus and xmms never overlap while selecting music, and nautilus and Eclipse never overlap when looking for old source files and stuff.

Just give it a chance, you WILL like it. I can't work with the Windows Explorer anymore, because it's so annoying now. And I don't think this is only because I'm used to spatial nautilus now - doesn't make sense, I should be able to get used the the "old" technique in less than 30 minutes. I am
not.

Anyway, everyone can turn the feature off. I would not advise it, though

Have a nice time with /software! Sun, 13 Jun 2004 23:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Now I can hear all that "what about the web browser" croud again.
s/croud/crowd Sun, 13 Jun 2004 23:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Most of the reasons people give for liking spatial browsing is that it makes things "more real" or in this articles case "more life-alike".

Well, the point of computers isn't to make things more like real life, it's to make things better than real life. Why do I need an interface that becomes easily cluttered like my real life desk? Here's a hint... I don't. My hatred for spatial browsing is because I'm lazy. I don't want to be the janitor for my data. I don't want to have to put folders where they should go. I especially don't want clutter popping up over the screen. Also it is faster for me to simply type in the location of the folder I want in an address bar than to click my way through multiple levels of folders each popping a new folder up at a different part of the screen.

In other words spatial browsing is a usability nightmare, just like having real folders all over your desk would be. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 23:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "spatial" interface annoyed me really quickly. I don't like to waste my time doing gconf hacks just to make it work like before.

i'm back to my old setup. Windows XP with vmware. what could be better? Sun, 13 Jun 2004 23:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? You're not going to get past the spatial argument on the notion that the browser interface breaks the notion of having everything the way the user organized it. This is backed up by the metaphor of opening a desk drawer and having everything left where it was.

This is a specious argument. For one thing, my desk does not have hundreds or thousands of drawers. If I had hundreds of drawers to wade through, I'd go nuts. The only thing that would make my life easier at that point is if I could push a button and have the drawer come to me. For another thing, a spatial mode does not require a new window to maintain organizational state. You could open the new folder and lay things out as the user had them the last time they accessed the folder. Finally, if I misfile something out of order in the folder, it is harder for me to find it than if the drawer auto-sorts itself. (But if you say spatial mode can do this, then you're caught in a contradiction, because that would break the concept of leaving things the way the user left them...how could you provide this functionality and not allow easy selection of browse mode?).

Quit trying to use busted metaphors to justify a bad design decision. I have been an absolute fan of Gnome since the beginning, but I cannot forgive sanctimony. It is pretty Microsoft-like to assume that you know better than the user how to make the user productive. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 23:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? then maybe the spatial thing would be overlooked or simply accepted.

But nautilus is slow (yes its fast-er than previous versions, but windows don't exactly pop open immediately for me, even on a 2.6GHz Athlon), has numerous visual oddities (e.g. image collection view obscures image details), is not integrated with the rest of the desktop - why is there a GTK file selector for gnome apps, not a nautilus window?

Basically, the GNOME devs are spending their days adding pointless features like 'integrated blogging' instead of trying to deliver a world-class desktop UI.

And because of that theyre going to get flamed constantly by the people who choose to use their product.

Of course it's their choice to do what they like with their time, but they shouldnt expect adulation from the users when theyre basically just f**king around shipping broken garbage instead of trying to provide a really good user experience - and if they are trying, theyre failing rather spectacularly at this point.

I really think that GNOME has made progress, and I use it on most of my machines myself, but i have stopped recommending GNOME to others who want a desktop, because I really think the Linux desktop is going backwards at the moment, with the amount of bloat added.

I don't want (and nobody else I know wants) a desktop thats unusable on a P3-600, unusable on less than 1600x1200, unusable without scanning the mailing lists for the hidden key combos and gconf registry keys and thats what GNOME is becoming. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 23:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? most of the people are happier with the previous browser mode, why not set the default tp that mode and left the spatial one for those who want to use it? Sun, 13 Jun 2004 23:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? This is really very simple. We don't like spatial mode for the same reason we don't like popups. Why do you think that I should subscribe to your "drawer" metaphor, just because I happen to like the "page" metaphor for a browser? The two are not related. The GNOME people really stepped in it on this one as can be easily seen by reading the many reviews that slam the spatial mode. If there weren't a lot of criticism of it I doubt that you would need to post this opinion piece. Sun, 13 Jun 2004 23:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "most of the people are happier with the previous browser mode, why not set the default tp that mode and left the spatial one for those who want to use it?"

you rather speak for yourself or atleast dont assume things Sun, 13 Jun 2004 23:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I don't have any folders that display all their contents even on a full screen icon view. My home folder uses up a couple with listings of sub folders.

So to pop open a few small windows to work with is useless since I have to scroll excessively to find what I want.

I hate scrolling. It means finding a slider, or finding an arrow button, rather than finding what I'm looking for.

What I want is some way to easily represent the large hierarchy of files that I have.

OS/2 had this spatial view and it didn't work then.

My Images contains a few hundred image files under various folders. Thumbnails or popup thumbnails are much more useful than a bunch of small windows with two or three thumbnails visible in them. My daughters music folder is around 15 gigs.

I see this idea for very shallow and sparse file storage only.

Another problem with it is lack of context. Where in context of your file system is /home/user/Images/Paris/bridges if only bridges are visible? For the purposes of perusing, the bridges folder is only useful in context of the hierarchy. A spatial view takes it out of context.

Derek Sun, 13 Jun 2004 23:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I haven't read all comments, but I'm sure someone else will have said this before: Since when is a design superior when a user doesn't want it? I'm a HCI pro myself and I've never seen the sense it this approach. You can yell all you want that something or the other is better because it's more thought-through, but if the user doesn't catch on, it's just the same rubbish.

Building a suitable user interface is not designing something that's clever, it's designing something that helps the user best. Taking an approach saying you know better than Joe User is plain wrong, since it's Joe User who will use your app. Experimenting with something is great, but forcing your o so clever ideas upon a userbase is simply wrong. It means you don't respect the crowd your working for.

The desktop methaphore is too old, these days, people are used to the level of complexity a pc gives them, why go back to "those great ideas from the past"? Try to use the *new* methaphores to create a whole new different approach, one which your users will like. For me, it's a reason to use KDE instead of Gnome (although I use both quite frequently), since at least KDE isn't forcing an interface on me that's "better" in the eyes of the developers. I'd like to decide that myself, thank you very much. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 00:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? When I saw spatial Nautilus the first time I was delighted. I truly hate this everything-o-matic giant window which is too big to let you operate on two folders at a time and is too small and feature limited to really do everything without running external applications.
Then, fetched some experimental Debian stuff, installed it and cried. The spatial file browsing I got in GNOME 2.6 was only a small step towards truly spatial browsing. IT IS NOT ENOUGH to make folders open in seperate windows! The right-click folder browser is missing, which makes new Nautilus mode nearly useless.
Those who remember the BeOS (yes, it's you, Eugenia) know why right-click file browser is so great. It makes possible to open ANY foler without opening EVEN SINGLE mid-way window. This is essential to spatial browsing and is important to those, who hate having tens of windows opened.
I recently mailed jdub (a GNOME developer) and asked about this feature to be included in next release but he didn't answered.
Have you tried BeOS anyways? Get live cd from bebits.org, it's free (zero price). Mon, 14 Jun 2004 00:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Give me a tree and I have a functional filesystem. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 00:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? so, it's not spatial nautilus at fault anymore, its the users fault for being disoraganized???????

are you out of your fucking mind?

who the fuck are you to tell me how to organize my files? who the fuck says that either a) i cannot or should not and b) deeply nested hierarchies are bad file management?

since when have gnome developers turned into mother fucking assholes? you know, i switched from microsoft products because of their stupendeous levels of arrogance, but i have NEVER, EVER heard microsoft tell ME how to organize my files?

your arrogance is stagerring - having surpassed microsoft at their own game (stupidity) i will most definately be looking at kde leaving you to wallow in your own stupidity. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 00:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? It's nice that Gnome is catching up with OS/2 Warp, but as someone who went from using OS/2 for years to using Linux, the spatial interface is one of the few things I'm glad I left behind. And actually, my process was the opposite of what some people are describing - I liked the spatial interface and thought the browser interface was stupid. Luckily, I eventually learned better.

So, you folks who are new to the idea can be as arrogant about the idea as you want. Take it from someone with experience in the matter - it's nice to have a spatial interface as an option for those few who like it... for everyone else, it's a step backwards. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 00:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Wake up, a Web Browser *IS* a real life object!

This is absurd, the power of Linux is the choices it offers a user. Gnome should offer people choices for what they want.. or well.. people just wont use Gnome. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 00:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I agree with EIC's view... The article suggests that the problem is the way we organize our files, but the real problem is the file/directory way of accessing them. If they were more namespace based, we might organize them completely different.

I also think that an option as simple as "open in new window" should always be available when easy to implement. If so many users complain about the missing functionality, then that is the type of option NEEDED to make your application as usable by the public as possible. Besides, I believe the original concept Windows went with was that the visual folder was really a window into your filesystem -- which is why the contents can change.

Personally, I find it difficult to organize my filecabinet IRL because the real file cabinet does not allow any kind of cross-linking. When something belongs in more than one file (say "Mortgage" and "Taxes" and "Bills") a real file cabinet requires that we choose ONE of them, instead of making it easy to find from any of them (like with the query approach).

Besides, how many file cabinets would be required to hold all of the data currently on my computer? Mon, 14 Jun 2004 00:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Indeed. I think one thing that's underestimated is that for a lot of experienced users, a browser is indeed more of a real-life object than a filing cabinet, and the general structure of the filesystem something they're used to dealing with, probably from several angles.

For these people, any metaphor that comes between them and the filesystem is useful if it happens to provides more effective tools. Since "a good metaphor" and "an effective tool" are not always related, it's not a given that it will.


(Disclaimer: Formally, I have no idea what I'm talking about.) Mon, 14 Jun 2004 01:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Ok, so I browse with 1 (yes one) opera windows open, and all tabs... Thats 25 (yes, twentyfive) tabs open at this moment.
25 is not THAT many for me, I sometimes get up to 50 at work, browsing for info etc. And you are saying this is bad practice ? That I should open MULTIPLE browser windows? Why? Because it's more "real life" like? I don't WANT it real life like. I want it clutter free. I have 6 (yes, thats six) desktops, and one of them is for browsing. I do NOT want to go searching for the right window.

Now on spacial file browsing... I don't know. I don't use file managers, I use a shell. And on windows (yeah, I game...) I open max 2 file browsers at a time, and I close them as SOON as I can... Darn clutter...

So, yes I COULD use ctrl-alt-shift-windowkey-w to close one of them windows... but WHY would I WANT to make that extra effort? I have a pretty DEEP dirtree... Ofcourse I do! domping everything in 1 or 2 folders is the strategy of a digitally impared person!

Sorry man, but you arguements do not hold here... Quite the opposite, you are preaching ineficianty... Mon, 14 Jun 2004 01:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "The problem with 2. is clear: it is very, VERY time-consuming to label ALL photos ONE BY ONE. And if you apply the metadata changes to all of them at once, you could use folders just as well, couldn't you?"

No, not really. Imagine that you have some pictures your dog on your trip holliday trip to the beach. Should you put that picture in the folder "My dog", the folder "My holidays" or the folder "On the beach" In a metadata oriented file system you mark your images with the three keywords dog, holiday and beach and put them in your pile of images. Then you create three folders, one that shows pictures labeled dog, one that shows pictures labeled holliday, and one showing beach pictures. That way your image will turn up in different contexts. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 01:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I don't like to whinge, but I think in the case of project names it's important to get the spelling right. It's nautilus, not nautilius. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 01:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? 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.

Configuring your fm to open new folders in the same window then clicking on a new folder is "ordering it" to behave that way, just that you don't have to *keep* telling it (as if it is a 5 yr old child).

While reading a book, you can see only two pages at once, and every time you turn the page, the new set of two pages replaces the two seen before.
...
So, people in fact love when the machine works in a way resembling behaviour of real-life objects

But the two read pages GO AWAY when you turn the page. You turned the page when you were done with them, just as I am done with the "My Music" folder once I get to the album subfolder.

Sometimes they even abuse the physical metaphor of tabbed browsing by opening multiple pages - not subpages of the same web site! - in multiple tabs of a browser window.

I also do this.. I keep all of the web pages that I am using neatly tucked away in one browser window that I can easily minimize/maximize/close as I please. I Wish my physical desktop was like this and I could just as quickly manipulate all associated bits of paper or office supplies.

What is the real cause of all these attacks on the spatial Nautilius? In my opinion, it is just bad file organisation coupled with a bunch of old bad habits.

Or it could be the same brand of cranky that people get when you force them to loosen Torx screws with a Phillips screwdriver.

I am not saying I'm right, and I'm not saying you're wrong. But I am saying that the Nautilus developers are building a tool that is used by a HUGE number of people and there will be many usage patterns (i.e. there is no One Right Way), so you will need to get over yourselves or spend more Zen time learning to become flame retardant Mon, 14 Jun 2004 01:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? If the tabbed interface works so well for web browsers, why not use the same thing for the file manager? Mon, 14 Jun 2004 01:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? This is the most moronic thing I've read in ages.

Since how does the way YOU read a book mean it's the way everyone else reads them? I WOULD glue 20 newspapers together, if I could. What stupid arguements.

I gave up 1/2 way through this load of tripe. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 01:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? If tab browsing was to be implimented then drag and drop would need to be functionable on the tabs. Also opening a new file browsing window could be as simple as that of dragging a tab of the window you want from your current browser window (with tabs) onto the desktop. This would then add some functionability to the tabbed browsing experience and stil allow for decent drag and drop experience.

As tab browsing currently stands in Web Browsers, no thanks, not for file management. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 01:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "No, not really. Imagine that you have some pictures your dog on your trip holliday trip to the beach. Should you put that picture in the folder "My dog", the folder "My holidays" or the folder "On the beach" In a metadata oriented file system you mark your images with the three keywords dog, holiday and beach and put them in your pile of images. Then you create three folders, one that shows pictures labeled dog, one that shows pictures labeled holliday, and one showing beach pictures. That way your image will turn up in different contexts."

Sounds to me like the "virtual folder", like Evolution does. Combine that with a good search capability, backed by a light-weight DB, and we're much further along (someone will complain I bet). Mon, 14 Jun 2004 01:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? No, not really. Imagine that you have some pictures your dog on your trip holliday trip to the beach. Should you put that picture in the folder "My dog", the folder "My holidays" or the folder "On the beach" In a metadata oriented file system you mark your images with the three keywords dog, holiday and beach and put them in your pile of images. Then you create three folders, one that shows pictures labeled dog, one that shows pictures labeled holliday, and one showing beach pictures. That way your image will turn up in different contexts.

So what if I actually want to find all the photos where I was on the beach, with Mary?

Automatic meta-data generation can work reasonably well when you're dealing with text, but for most other things it just breaks down completely. For music we can mostly get around it with things like CDDB. However if your track doesn't have an entry, or the entry is wrong then you're stuck with entering ID tags manually.

Imagine having to input meta-data for every track on your hard drive. I only have 500 or so music files, but I know for a fact I wouldn't have bothered labelling them individually, just sorted them into folders with autogenerated, track1.ogg, track2.ogg etc, names.

Now imagine having to do that for every file you make on your computer that isn't text. That and trying to second guess what information you might need when searching in the future.

Computers are meant to reduce the amount of this tedius work, not increase it.

IMO a complete meta-data based system is a dead end unless people are expected to become data entry clerks in their free time.

***

Kinda left the spatial topic :> Mon, 14 Jun 2004 02:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I like it.

I like the small simple windows without anything but files.

I like the speed. I don't know who said it was slow, but it feels to me that the Gnome 2.6 Nautilus opens the window before I even finish double-clicking.

I especialy like that each window remembers its location and size. That lets me position and size each window just the way I like it and it will stay there just as I left it.

I don't like the window clutter, but I've become used to holding Shift while I double-click and I've created shortcuts to my favorite directories on my desktop. If I was going to change anything, I would add an option to always close the parent folder. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 02:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? It could be that you are comparing apples and oranges.

Digital/virtual interfaces have affordances that physical ones do not -- such as the ability to magically replace one folder/drawer with another one. That this can not physically be done with a real drawer is the reason we do not do it.

Here's an interesting tidbit: I've never owned a real desk that had drawers. Nor have I owned a filing cabinet. I've grown up with the "Desktop Metaphor" being the only desktop I've ever known. It's not a metaphor for me -- it's the real thing. The only thing. Having to open my drawers in separate windows would annoy the living hell out of me!

It would annoy me as much as "opening My Music from the panel, opening the appriopriate album folder and double-clicking a file icon" just to play a song. They're called ID3 tags, and they organize your files for you so that you never have to clickety-click through all your nested folders.

Also, maybe it's easy to keep your files organized if you have 1 work computer and 1 home computer, and you keep your data completely separated. I, on the other hand, work from home. I have a laptop, 2 desktops, and a server. I use them all for both work and fun. I am a part-time college teacher, a freelance web developer, sometimes a writer, a blogger, and I have a lot of research interests, not to mention 300 GB of media files. It's difficult to organize all of this into "shallow structures" without having a GABILLION files in each folder.

Just my $0.50 Mon, 14 Jun 2004 02:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I supposed the spatial concept would work if all you're doing is file manipulation, but I usually have more than just the file manager window open. I can have a web browser, word processor, email program, spreadsheet program, and music program all open at the same time. Having one file manager window open with tabs keeps all my file manager windows organized in one place so they don't get mixed up with all the other programs that are running. To me, it's less confusing. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 02:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? According to the article, "attacks on the spatial browser try to stop the innovation".

I wonder what innovation the article talks about. Physical properties of real desktops and drawers? Mon, 14 Jun 2004 02:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Even if he is right, which only time will tell, it's no excuse for being a condescending asshole. I suggest that the author be kept from writing any more articles until he shows he can write in a proper and courteous manner. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 02:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Excuse me Spatial head, I *like* my TABBED browser and my Windows desktop not opening multiple windows for each folder. If you don't like it, TOUGH FUCKING SHIT! Mon, 14 Jun 2004 02:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Taking away choice and then telling people who object that their preferences are wrong is bad taste. And however well intentioned and well thought you it's possible that the spatial approach isn't best. And maybe there is no best. Except to allow people to choose (i.e. without have to go to a newsgroup for instructions). Mon, 14 Jun 2004 02:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I want a spreadsheet-like matrix of buttons.

Let's say I open 100 windows. In the old days, they'd all have different entries on the taskbar -- 100 buttons, all stripped of titles in order to cram them onto the bar, leaving nothing but a nigh-meaningless application icon. Actually the buttons lose their informational content -- the window title -- long before you open the 100th window, especially if you don't use a vertically oriented taskbar.

The responses have been: tabs, window list menus and grouped-by-application taskbar buttons.

Tabs, of course, lose their titles all too quickly, and as yet we apparently can't have vertical tabs (so much for that workaround). Some programmers have added scroll buttons, which is better than nothing; others have favored multiple rows of tabs that dance around en masse whenever you click on a different row, which is perhaps worse than nothing.

Window list menus and grouped buttons are better at keeping useful information available, but do unfortunately hide it away so you can't see it immediately.

With a simple spreadsheed matrix of buttons -- preferably resizable and with a choice of placement (left/right/top/bottom, docked/undocked) -- this wouldn't happen. More room for buttons, more room for information, clicking on one button would not cause any of the others to leap around. (Oh, and let's have an option such that closing a window would cause its button become an empty space rather than necessarily moving all the other buttons to close up the gap.)

(Dare I mention Notebox Disorganizer? If real programmers wrote word processors to work like ND, I wouldn't have to...) Mon, 14 Jun 2004 03:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I had been using a Spatial File system on my mac for years, ie Mac OS 6-9, but as soon as i upgraded to OSX i wondered why the hell didnt i do it sooner, browser type file systems are so much esier to use and a hell of a lot faster. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 03:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Even if he is right, which only time will tell, it's no excuse for being a condescending asshole. I suggest that the author be kept from writing any more articles until he shows he can write in a proper and courteous manner."

You mean like people do here? :> Mon, 14 Jun 2004 03:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Personally, I don't like web-like operating system browsing windows except on a BeOS-loaded computer. Oh well. My loss I guess. I like spacial browsing in Fedora in Gnome. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 03:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The point here is not that you should always or never be opening new windows, it is that *sometimes* you want to do it one way and *sometimes* the other (and maybe sometimes something else). As for the suggestion that I should flatten out by directory structure, just _get lost_. It's *my* disk, not yours. And even if I did, there are all those java source packages that must be deeply nested.

I use Windows 2000, and I use Windows Explorer. One of the first things I do with a new Windows installation is to make sure to set Explorer up up to -

1) open new directories in the same window, and
2) use a 2-paned view.
3) Use the "classic" appearance.

I don't want to open a new window each time I go to a new folder, because - just think a moment - I am usually *navigating* to some target, and I don't care about the intermediate steps. In fact, I don't want them around once I get where I'm going. Why should I have to close a lot of windows I didn't need in the first place?

But sometimes I do want to see two folders at the same time, sometimes even in the same tree. Windows makes it easy - Right-click on the directory icon of interest and select "Explore". This opens up a new Explorer window.

Yes, I do use many tabs in my browser (Firefox, BTW). When possible, I just use one browser window. Typically, I use another tab when I want to keep the original page available. For example, on a page of search results, I will probably want to explore several links, so I leave the results page open, and open each link in another tab - usually the same one, why get cluttered with lots of tabs if I don't need to?

So here we have the author trying to

1) Tell me I should restructure my disk(s) to suit his ideas, although he knows nothing about how I work or think.

2) Tell me how to use my browser and its tabs.

3) Tell me how to use by file manager, without regard to my ways of working.

4) Ignore the real need, which is to have it work several ways depending on what I am doing.

5) Defend the use of obscurity to prevent a piece of software from being flexible and easy to adjust in the heat of action by a non-technical user (or even a technical one who is not familiar with configuration details of the system).

6) Trying to force me to use a metaphor that he likes nd in the way that he thinks is good.

This is the kind of thinking we have trying to get away from for decades. Spare me. And yes, I use a command line (AKA shell) too, and I have written my share of, e.g., AWK code. I'm not just some dumb stereotyped Windows user who doesn't know any better. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 03:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The unix (linux) filesystem is hietarchal by nature. If used as intended (in the unix style) it is very neat and orderly. If a user understands the unix concepts then their home directories will be just as organized as the rest of the system, which could mean several layers of directories. Like one reader said, spatial browser makes sense with a DB type filesystem... not with the current unix fs layout. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 04:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? when you're done finding the file you want with a folder in a drawer it just takes two more actions to finish up (putting the file back in the folder and closing the drawer) but with gnome you have to hand close every single open window, which is incredibly annoying.

saying that deep hierarchies of folders is innefficient is just ignorance. lumping all of your *.filetype files into one folder is just dumb, and that seems like what you're suggesting. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 04:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I don't really understand. I guess I'd have to use it to understand the comments that a spatial interface would be better for a database. When the contents of windows are search based, then I would expect the contents to vary, and spatiality would not make as much sense. At least that's how I think of a spatial interface, one with fixed locations for things. Windows which open in the same size and position, with contents arranged in a known manner. I don't get how search results fit into that. I would expect to browse results I can't be sure of.

Regardless, I'm quite satisfied with the OS X browser. I think everything can stand to see improvements, but I'm not upset with the move from spatial to browser like some are/were. I think what the Gnome developers were probably reacting to, was the huge outcry from the Mac community over the loss of thier spatial system, and a lot of public comments from former Mac interface designers complaining about what a step backwards the browser is.

Truth is, some never adapted and won't move to OS X because of it. But over half of Mac users did change, and I for one feel the OS as a whole is markedly better. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 04:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? There are other file managers.

There's of course Gnome Commander.

And there's Endeavour Mark II.

http://wolfpack.twu.net/Endeavour2/

Can do DnC from it to Nautilus. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 04:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? One last comment. I do get the advantages that a database type filesystem is going to bring. I think the best example of what that future is going to look like is the iApps from Apple.

In both iTunes and iPhoto, the filesystem is basically hidden from the user. The primary reason other applications are confusing to non-computing types is they just can't visualize the hierarchical file system. They lose files in there.

My Mom can't really deal with Photoshop Elements, or some other third party application because it means exporting files, and finding them again from a new app. But she has no problem working with iTunes and iPhoto, because the computer knows where her music and pictures are; and she just works with them.

In both cases though, the applications are browsers. Their interfaces allow you to sort on data like name, date, artist, etc.

I'm not suggesting Mac has a database filesystem. Perhaps it will someday, and then this type of functionality could be extended across the system, and available to all applications. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 04:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I don't use gnome, and the main reason why is the elitist
attitude presented by the main supporters. I do not believe
there is "one true way" to use your desktop, nor do I think
most Linux users do either. Choice is the most powerful
feature of Linux. As Perl puts it - there is more than one
way to do it.

I'm not expecting that gnome has to be all things to all
people, and for all I know the spatial metaphor is going
to be the most used metaphor for file browsing in the
future, but those of us who may *prefer* the browser
model to the spatial metaphor are not idiots, just
different.

Gnome developers/supporters/fans, please refer to the
spatial mode as "another way to do it that users might
enjoy", not "the only way any non-schmuck would use
their desktop if they would just re-arrange their
file system accordingly, and if you can't turn it
off in gconf, you're too stupid to even consider".

I'm sorry, but the latter is the message I'm getting
from the gnome people regarding the changes in 2.6, and
this article's author is a case in point. This is not the
right foot to get onto if you want widespread acceptance
of gnome.

BTW, I use XFCE4, which uses gtk2, but without treating
me like an idiot. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 04:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I ALWAYS use the tabbed browsing feature to surf several webpages that are NOT subpages of one and the same site.

Why I do that? Because it's just handy to have several reference pages open at once, or several newssites which I can go trough quickly, etc. I know tons of people who do just the same, but I guess we're all wrong.

As goes for filebrowsing, you bet, I never use the spatial mode, because I don't like screen clutter, AND I do quite nested file structures. But then, I use cd/ls most of the time as filebrowsers, so I guess I am wrongt too! I should clutter my screen with dozens of windows where I don't see the information despite all the windows, and give up my nice and clean ls in favor of some good'ol chaos.

You bet! Mon, 14 Jun 2004 06:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? You refuse to use it because it's users are "elitist"? Well, I'm guessing that you're never going to use a Mac either.

Have you ever thought that perhaps there is a reson that users act elitist? Maybe you should try something instead of denouncing the people who are trying to show you how good something is.

You can turn spatial off easily, and how many people that actually use Linux today are too stupid to figure out how to change a small setting in gconf? Last I recall, Google would still give you search results if you typed something in and hit enter.

This is Linux, if you're admining an Linux box, you have to THINK before you do something. If you are logged in as the superuser and delete everything on your computer, it's your fault for being an idiot, not the developers that allow you to do that.

Everything has to have defaults. What better way to showcase a new feature than to set it as the default? Mon, 14 Jun 2004 06:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The guy is as clueless as he is arrogant. I mean, besides all the cheap shots at people who disagree with his way of using computers, he equals "old ideas" with "innovation" and goes on to compare Nautillus' performance with that of Windows NT 4, a product that is outdated by anybody's standard and to suggest that Gnome's RegEdit clone GConf is an acceptable way to manage one's UI settings.

OSnews shouldn't have accepted this "article", really.

Slightly more lengthy "rebuttal":

http://nils.jeppe.de/Geek/559/ Mon, 14 Jun 2004 06:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Let me get this straight, you're talking about one windows behavior beeing better then another? That means you in fact started a window-manager? Well then you're not to be helped anyway.

Hm yes, how do you like that I am right and you're wrong? Mon, 14 Jun 2004 06:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Where did the other folder go?" That's what I think whenever I try to use a Windows machine in it's default configuration. When I use a file manager, it's because I need to manage files, not just look at them. And managing files includes moving and copying them, which needs two folders. So, I'll open the parent of both folders, doubleclick on one to open it, doubleclick on the other (hey, where did the parent folder go?), and then drag the file. So, as soon as this happens, I'll change the settings to open folders in a separate window. I haven't yet seen a useful filemanager that didn't open folders in a separate window. There's the Windows 3.1 file manager, with it's horrible treeview (the filesystem may be a tree structure, but the vertical-only treeview is definitely not a usefull representation), and there's the Windows 98 "We got slapped for bundling the browser, so now we need to integrate it" file manager wannabe webbrowser.

Always opening a new folder is not perfect either, because it tends to leave a lot of intermediate windows on the screen, windows which are only used for navigating to the target folder. Windows supports ctrl-click for "open folder in this window", but this is too cumbersome to use, and also it keeps the parent folder, instead of opening the new folder, and closing the parent. So, if I go from a folder with two subfolders to a folder with 1000 files, I still have the small window with room for two files. Maybe the BeOS right-click menu that other people mentioned is the solution, but I haven't tried that one. I guess I will soon, because the Gnome people tend to be trying a lot of good ideas, and not trying to work around court orders. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 07:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Go change the color of visited links in Galeon...

Just for giggles, change the color of the visited link in FireFox, Mozilla Browser (and probably Konqueror). See the difference between a simple UI and a simplified UI?
---------
You could go one further and remove these superfluous options altogether. I've really never had the urge to change the default visited link colour since most websites will choose thier own anyway. My point is, remove these silly options and you remove the extra code required to load and validate this option, therefore simplifying, speeding up and increasing robustness the software. I'm not saying hard-wire everything, I'm saying don't invent options for the sake of inventing options.

Hey, great idea! Screw all those color blind people who set the link colors so they can SEE them! Mon, 14 Jun 2004 07:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? It's all about choice; I don't really care if the default behaviour is to switch on spatial FS browsing, but not to include a quick way to switch it off in one of the menus is just crappy and extremely arrogant design. It's also utterly stupid.

I am one of those people who opens *shock horror* multiple pages from one website in a bunch of tabs, and I rarely if ever actually open a new Firefox window. This is the type of browsing I *prefer* because I read *lots* of pages at once, quickly switching between them. If I was able to do something similar with books then I would - unfortunately they are too primitive to manage this effectively and as such aren't as good as webpages for this method of browsing. This only applies to technical books really; not fiction, but the analogy applies perfectly because I tend to read tech stuff online 99% of the time.

I use one window for one specific task and close it afterwards, this includes filesystem browsing. If I wanted to use pointless 'features' like remembering what order I put a load of icons in (instead of just putting them in order of type and alphabetically sub-ordered) then I'd switch it back on in windows, which incidentally is very easy. I DON'T, and I don't give a crap what kind of stupid ideas the Gnome team has about the way in which I should browse.

I will continue to use Gnome, after switching off this 'feature', but I have to say that arrogant crap like this pushes the Gnome team closer to the whole reason I don't use Windows. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 08:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Having multiple tabs might be like glueing newspapers together. To me it comes more down to having a binder with tabs in it. Multiple information in one binder seperated by tabs (I wonder if that is why they call it tabbed and not glued browsing).

If you look at the way filesystems are organized you can not really compare them to cabinets. If you do compare them, then you have to acknowledge the fact that on a FS we store folders inside of folders, a practice not often done in cabinets due to physical limitations of the folders. If you would store folders inside of folders you would actual leave the cabinet opened all the time and browse the folders with your fingers until you've found the right one (left pane directory structure browsing). Once you've found the right one you will take it out and open it. Now this might be a place to open a new window, but any normal organized person would want to avoid getting out all the folders and spreading them out on his desk.

And your argument about bad folder structure design: who are you to judge how I should organize my folders. If your tool doesn't help me with my way of logic, your tool s***s for me. Although screws are better than nail, I still will not use a screwdriver for my nails. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 08:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? woah, almost 200 posts..

anyways, I like the old way of nautilius and how it opened folders. But you can turn the spacial feature off just by getting gedit and editing the .conf file. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 08:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? . Mon, 14 Jun 2004 08:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I don't understand the aproach of browbeating people for not organizing their stuff better to fit with a more elegant UI. If browser-style file management makes organizing a smaller task, why be doctrinaire about spatial viewing of directories? More elegant is not better than more functional. Just because something is theoretically more consistent with a philosophy of UI doesn't mean that it's easier to use. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 08:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? All that talk that the "spatial" zillion windows approach is Windows influenced simply baffles me. For me the "spatial" file manager is simply a reviving of the Win3.1 abomination. I used a tree approach to file managing before I've ever seen Windows. The DOS utility I used was called XTree. I later used XTree for Windows and would probably still do (in both Linux and Win32) if a native version existed (the Win16 one does not know about long file names).

And for Web browsing I prefer tabbed browsing 500% to any alternative. Having twenty open browser files (the IE way) is simply not the way I like it. In fact, even two open Web browser windows are one too much. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 09:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Might be ok for a small number of files - how about 200 business projects? Multiple clients? How should I organise that?

What if u have 100s or 1000s of files to organise - a deep consistent hierarchy is really the only way to go.

I tried it and switched it off after 2 weeks. It just doesn't fit anything other than small time usage. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 10:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I think there is a problem, in understanding what
"users" want, and it seem so what they are being forced to want/use.

there has been melting an unwritten law within the UI-Designers,

"don't force the users to use a behavior they don't want to use", when you have an idea on a "Killer(G)UI (c)" concept,
test it first with an average common user (this means not a
- geek
- nerd
- win32-without-mouse-keyboardfreak
- GUI-designer

and the best "NOT YOURSELF TRYING TO THINK LIKE THE AVERAGE USER"

),

who also got no hints how he/she should use it, then you will see how intuitive your GUI is, you will also see the pros & cons of your design

but I think spatial localfile browsing is a good solution and usable, except under Gnome, look at (IBM) OS/2 Warp 3
there it has been used, there it worked damn good,


Why KDE is now being seen on so many Desktops ?
- it favors many flavours off GUI-grafic-styles
- it favors many flavours off GUI-usage-styles
- it favors many widgets & not clumsegets
- it favors many flavours off GUI-behavior-styles

so it can simply be set to a mixture or purification
the user want's & they don't try to educate
the user, even when they think some long used ideas
are "not clean on an other context or more specfic on the devellopers personal taste"

(quote)
..
But as things are today, the spatial Nautilus is going live before its time*. Explorer-like file managers are a better bet for the kind of filesystems we utilize today. Yes, spatiality is the future. Not just yet though because the filesystem part needs a grassroot "upgrade" too.
..
(/quote)

*just add "& to die before it should" Mon, 14 Jun 2004 10:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Because, to put it simply, drawers suck. Sorry, the the physical world analogy you chose is one that DOESN'T work, and thank God we have computers. Specially ones without gnome.

Now, before this bs about having become used to a bad interface design, let me state that OS/2, which I used for many years, worked precisely as stated, unless you configured it to close the windows as it opened new ones. Thankfully, as it really cleared up screen clutter.

Now, as for screen clutter, the problem is that you don't want anything else from the parent folder most of the time, so it's there USELESSLY, and you have to DIVERT from whatever you are doing just to close the damned thing. THAT'S bad interface design.

On the matter of adding special folders to the bar, that's fine if you really don't have much to do. Sorry, but some of us do have to deal with thousands of files.

Finally, on the matter of gconf, I hope to God someone who thinks users should bow to software and not the other way around isn't being allowed important decisions in gnome. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 11:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? they accept the book metaphor with web pages, but reject the drawer metaphor with folders and files
Maybe because your metaphor sucks!

Sometimes they even abuse the physical metaphor of tabbed browsing by opening multiple pages - not subpages of the same web site! - in multiple tabs of a browser window.

Really?!? I dont know that rule! Thanks for tell me how to use my computer. After all, you know what is better for me, right, Mr. Gates?

I hope they do not try to glue a daily set of newspapers together before reading them...

And i bet you read only the front page of you newspaper. You try to click on the headlines, it does not work, you blame the webmaster and throw it away


Spatial interface can be great or not, but you are a moron. Period.
And yes, a dont speak/write english. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 11:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I later used XTree for Windows and would probably still do (in both Linux and Win32) if a native version existed (the Win16 one does not know about long file names).

Have you tried ZTree? It's supposed to be the same as XTree, but for Win32. I haven't tried it myself, but then I've always preferred the browser-style management over either tree or "spatial" management. I did use XTree, though, when Windows was still opening new windows for every directory.

And for Web browsing I prefer tabbed browsing 500% to any alternative. Having twenty open browser files (the IE way) is simply not the way I like it. In fact, even two open Web browser windows are one too much.

Exactly. When I want to check 3 different websites, I open 3 tabs and read the first while the other 2 load. I don't need 3 windows just to read 3 websites.

As for file management being related to your method of browsing, I don't really buy that. Most of us seem to use deeper directory structures to filter our files more carefully. I don't want 5000+ mp3 files in my base mp3 directory, because I'd have to spend more time finding that particular song. So, I have individual directories for each letter of the alphabet, then directories for the individual artists, and finally directories for the individual albums. If it were possible to file the physical media this way without taking up significantly more space, I would. Any other organization of the songs (by genre, year, etc) can be handled when the files are loaded into a playlist, as most music software can manage that.

The way different files are managed depends on how you use them. Most of my interaction with my music files is not through the file system, but when I do go into the mp3 directory, I have a specific purpose, and the directories are organized accordingly. While having 3 or more directories nested from whatever base folder I start with is common, there's always a reason for it (and I periodically go back through the more neglected areas of my directory structure, like download folders, to prune these back). Whatever time is saved by opening a new window for each directory is wasted in excess by closing windows that were only used once. The idea of "just double-middle-click" or whatever is rediculous if opening multiple windows is the behavior you are least likely to be using. In Windows the option to change this behavior is usually in the first panel of the Folder Options menu item of any explorer window, and there's really no reason to make it any harder than that to change this behavior. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 12:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I've got the Finder set up like Nautilus -- I prefer it to work that way. Frankly, it makes far more sense/works better.

When a file browser doesn't open new windows for every folder it's very disconcerting. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 12:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? what a fucking dipshit. your analogies are bullshit. worst article ever. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 12:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? dead horse Mon, 14 Jun 2004 12:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? What I want to know is... Why oh why do you have 3000 files in one folder... Or even worse.. 10000 files in one folder? I have one word -- ORGANIZE

Thanks! Mon, 14 Jun 2004 12:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? listen up all meta-data dislikers:

either put your file in a folder.
if you, you could have, just as well, put the folders name as the meta-data, and the work for you would be exactly the same, no loss.

you don't have to enter dog, beach, and wahatever on your pictures, just as you dont have to create /my pictures/holiday/beach and put your ppics of beaches in there.

but for those who do want to, they should be free to.
and keep the tree based orginazition too, that way automatic meta-data indexing of folder-structure could be added to the objects and further enhance the usability. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 12:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I think the following statement from the article pretty much summarises the current problems with mainstream adoption of Linux:

"Don't know how to use gconf? Then you shouldn't change the way Nautilitus works, I presume."

A better comment would have been:

"Don't know how to use gconf? Then it is poorly written"

There is no excuse in this day and age for forcing users to jump through hoops in order to change basic functions of the GUI interface. A "normal" user should never have to look at config files or drop to a command line to change the behaviour of their GUI - it should all be achieveable from within that GUI. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 12:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I tell: why not?

these 10 000 files may not be my personal files, they maybe are the logs of asome program who do an by hour dump ?

what if I don't feel like sorting my music in artist/album/track but rather take every single song, put them in "music" and then let my music player sort and work with it ? (pretty much the layout I have right now, lost of OGG Vorbis with good meta-data on them and rhytmbox to give me just the songs IU want.) Mon, 14 Jun 2004 12:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? See, that's what happens if you let somebody with no clue whatsoever write articles. He does not know any bettern then to anounce 'the right way', and all others be silent.

What's next by this author?

software:
reasoning:
random_needless_remark:
article: 'This', , 'owns because', ,
work: + Mon, 14 Jun 2004 13:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? and by "real" i mean how it is organized in the machine. in
software. how the computer sees it. that the spatial
browsing methaphor isn't an apt one because the "real"
structure is a tree. i think if new users truly understand
this, it's much more empowering for them (probably their
first lesson in computer science without realizing it

thus when they see a url, they can envision the parent-child
relationship and they can just intuit "ahah! i can delete
this folder and insert this filename to get to were i was a
while ago!" rather than having to browse back multiple
pages and re-click through new links, which would be
equivalent to closing a bunch of windows and opening others
in spatial file management.

furthermore, continuing on with how empowering it is, that
heirarchical understanding prepares them for the command
line if they ever need to use it. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 13:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Thanks Eugenia for the additional comments.
They put the editorial into a much better context - of course everyone knows that such Opinions are not those of OSNews.com one might get the impression. it's a good thing to clear this up. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 13:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? There's only one problem with the whole 'book' metaphor: it's wrong. The author's implication is that opening a new window is like turning the pages in a book. The only problem is, according to the author's metaphor, I would have to open to those pages in an entirely separate book, meaning I would have to have page count/2 books inorder to read the entire novel. I'd much rather read the book within one book, or browser window. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 13:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Although I still prefer the browser mode, I think the whole 'spatial' idea is not a bad thing. But the spatial mode in Nautilus looks like it is in its infancy and a lot of things could be improved to make it actually usable. There are two things I can see at the moment:

1. Bring in a tree view. What I mean is: make it like in MacOS Classic Finder. Yes, just rip it off. It was extremely useful for browsing deeper nested directories and you could always double-click a directory to open it in a separate 'spatial' window. This should be really trivial to implement as the tree view code is actually there: it is used in the sidebar in the browser mode. Just make it a separate view (like 'icon view' and 'list view') and add 'spatiality' to it and here we go!

2. This is more a Metacity issue or window management in general but still... What I mean is when Nautilus is not the top-most application and you want to browse files and click on a Nautilus window/taskbar/whatever to bring it to front, all Nautilus windows should pop up together. Just like in MacOS Classic Finder again, and not like the current situation when you have to separately click on the taskbar to bring each window to front.

Not to mention the 'docking folder windows to screen edge' feature MacOS Classic also had. All the refinements like these made it a really pleasant experience. Well, it turns out I am a great fan of MacOS Classic interface although I have not used it a lot But one thing I must admit: it was the spatial interface done right and I would not mind if Gnome developers tried to recreate its best features in their 'Spatialus'. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 14:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? and milk it. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 15:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Yes, I call them ("them" being authors such as the author of this article) elitist. No, I will never buy a Mac.
Too expensive, and I prefer to have complete control over my
system a la Linux (My preferred flavor is Gentoo - tweaker's paradise). OSX my have the most "intuitive" interface
according to some, but I simply don't care. I'll work
using whichever window manager suits me in whatever manner
suits me, thank you very much.

My point is that the stance of "The way this works makes sense to me and is the *only* way it should make sense to anyone" is inherently flawed and arrogant in the extreme.
It is entirely noble and good to attempt to improve the user
experience through innovation and thinking outside the
box. It is arrogant to dismiss users as idiots for
*choosing* to stick to what they know or rejecting a
feature because it requires too much change for them
in the short term. They may in fact not think like you,
yet are just as productive doing it their own way.

Regardless of how wonderful gnome may be in theory,
users will drop like flies if they are treated like idiots.
I say this as an ardent GNU/Linux supporter.

Case in point, this article is up to 200+ comments, most of
which denounce the author as being full of himself (in
addition to something brown and fragrant).
The spirit of Linux is freedom to choose, not
indoctrination into Mac wannabe elitism. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 15:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? True the article needs work. However as one person pointed out this article isn't so much for the Gnome users as it is the Gnome bashers (of which we've had plenty). Today it's spatial, but it's been other relatively trivial things in the past.

The thing people need to ask themselves is "How are we going to have an award winning desktop, if we fight every decision with the same amount of viterol?" Like I said before it was things like color, today it's spatial. What will tomorrows complaint be? At least closed-source has someone to cut these gordian-knots that the community seems to tie themselves into. Maybe it isn't the decision you want, but then the software process isn't frozen into "pleasing every, offending none" impotence either. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 16:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? This article is basically "the way I do things is the only way to do... if you do it another way, you simply have bad habits. Shame on you."

Ok. Shame on me. I hate multiple windows. Hate. It. I am not more efficient that way. It's cluttered and mostly unorganized... for me, that is. One window for an application is how I do things. I am more organized and get more work done that way.

Tabbed browsing is a blessing for me. I click to links browser-style if I don't care to keep what was on the original page, then use tabs when I want to line up the pages I'm using.

I produce a radio show. When I am researching a guest, I find articles, contact information, and related materials online. I keep them all on separate tabs in the same window. If I move on to a second guest or topic, I open a second browser window and do the same. But having new windows open for everything becomes a complete mess on my desktop. Same goes for file management, in my case. I want one window per subject/topic. If I'm working on more than one thing at one time, then I'll add additional windows. But this forced-spatiality in Nautilus leads me to pull my hair out. When I'm done with one file and move onto a subfolder, I typically am done with that parent. I don't want to have to close it after I've found what I'm looking for in the subfolder. That's taking more steps than needed.

Anyway, that's how I'm stifling innovation.
Sorry.
CP Mon, 14 Jun 2004 16:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? As a long time KDE user, I commonly compare the features of KDE and gnome. (KDE is still winning)

But when I hear of spatial nautilus, I am jealous of a feature that is not in KDE. Because I expect Linux distributions to have unessicary, impractical, obsolete, and generally bastard programs/settings/configuration. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 17:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? First of all, it is not always a good goal to emulate physical environments on a desktop. So it is a non-sequitur to say that because people know how to use this or that (file cabinet, etc.) that it makes one desktop GUI more intuitive than another.

Despite that, this comment really had me laughing...

[quote]I even know few people who never open more than one browser window, viewing all pages in tabs; I hope they do not try to glue a daily set of newspapers together before reading them...[/quote]

I also know a lot of people who read newspapers and magazines by flipping pages -- pages that are physically bound or folded to make browsing through the content easy. They don't rip apart groups of ads and articles and arrange them on their floor or desktop so that they can find them exactly where they left them the last time they looked.

The problem with Nautilus is not that it's spacial, but that the i----s who designed it decided that users shouldn't have a choice. Using Gconf is not a choice, it's an arrogant nerd-centric statement that anyone who doesn't find Gconf "easy" shouldn't be allowed to decide how Nautilus should work. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 17:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I simply use what I like.
Don't make politics but give posibilities.
Bye. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 18:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I really don't understand the idea of opening a new window for every click. I can't have a link on my desktop for every file on my computer. If I want to get to something, I'll have to use some sort of heirarchy. So, when I open a folder (or whatever spatial topic, whatever), I don't care about it except to get to the item I want. I VERY VERY RARELY want to keep a parent folder open when searching for a file. Until a file search is a database query, there will be heirarchies in filesystems, whether they are actual folders or spatial concepts. It's simply how humans categorize things. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 19:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I have to agree with Eugenia here. The spatial Nautilus is broken. I could totally see what she said about spatial being a good way to go on a DB-structure FS, too.

Frankly, I wouldn't mind if they flipped the defaults for how you browsed such that shift-double-click used spatial mode rather than one-window mode.

Frankly, they should also have a tree view just like Windows Explorer. I find that I work in one of two modes. Either I'm drilling down to a directory so that I can see everything in it and open documents, etc., or I'm about to start moving things around the file system.

In the first mode, spatial metaphors (and I really hate the word "spatial" here, because it really misses the mark) are just useless. I want to get down to a particular directory and act on the files that it contains. Once I'm down there, the other windows are just crud floating around.

In the second mode, I'm typically want to move a directory or file somewhere else in the hierarchy. For this operation, having a folder tree visible makes way more sense to me. The problem with a spatial metaphor here is that I'm typically not moving the file or folder to a parent folder. Thus, all the windows that opened to get to that point are useless clutter and just make for d-n-d mistakes. Further, I have to drill down to another point in the hierarchy, so now I have multiple paths-worth of folder windows out and about.

Anyway, spatial browsing really doesn't work well. I didn't like it in 1984 with the first Mac and now I hate it. The only saving grace was that the original Mac used 400 KB floppy drives and you couldn't put enough stuff on them to really develop deep hierarchies. Now, with 200 GB HDDs becoming the norm, the problem is acute. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 19:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? As a long time Mac user I have to say the old "many window" approach was a real drag ( you spent all of your time dragging them out of the way!). What the Mac had was the ability to close the parent folder while opening a new one with option-click. This had the advantage of preserving the "spatial" settings for the folder you were opening, while eliminating the clutter of many open windows. Can Nautilus do this?
Paul Mon, 14 Jun 2004 20:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Well, Win31 did it and everybody hate the File Manager and the Program Manager which did this...

You are talking about Organization as a Justification to use Spacial Model, but then you say 10000 Files in a single Directory? What a mess is this? Why do you Need 10000 files? if those are Pictures than you need an Album Application or an Image Database or Something like that then is no need for putting 10000 Files in a single Directory...

About the structure of the File System Hierarchy, It is a Tree and the Common Browser uses the Tree Metaphor, exactly as the DownLayer of the File System is Designed...
Bye, thankz and think about it...
Sorry for My English!! Mon, 14 Jun 2004 20:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I really do not understand the hussle around this spatial thing. Please, rightclick and select Browse. I can't stand this "spaciality" and I don't use it. But for the sake of a debate...
Two-panel orthodox file managers were, are and will be the fastest, easiest and most usable progs for managing your stuff. Instead of trying to help users feel at home, teach him to camp out in the open and fosus on more important issues that fill forums and are mostly asked by people that are used to work with linux. Do you think that managing files is users first concern? And while we debate real linux krusader(s) sink. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 21:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "What the Mac had was the ability to close the parent folder while opening a new one with option-click. This had the advantage of preserving the "spatial" settings for the folder you were opening, while eliminating the clutter of many open windows. Can Nautilus do this?
Paul"

yes. use middle click Mon, 14 Jun 2004 21:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The guy is as clueless as he is arrogant. I mean, besides all the cheap shots at people who disagree with his way of using computers, he equals "old ideas" with "innovation" and goes on to compare Nautillus' performance with that of Windows NT 4, a product that is outdated by anybody's standard and to suggest that Gnome's RegEdit clone GConf is an acceptable way to manage one's UI settings.

I had the joy of installing NT4 on a laptop a few weeks ago. You can say lots of ugly things about it, but it's fast, and the explorer interface is really minimal, like I want it. It's a very valid comparisation, and one few file managers come out of winning, if you're only looking at speed.

GConf, OTOH, is one of many reasons I prefer KDE. If you want to let people configure things, why not make it easy? Mon, 14 Jun 2004 23:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Anyway, spatial browsing really doesn't work well. I didn't like it in 1984 with the first Mac and now I hate it. The only saving grace was that the original Mac used 400 KB floppy drives and you couldn't put enough stuff on them to really develop deep hierarchies. Now, with 200 GB HDDs becoming the norm, the problem is acute."

The problem is ACUTE, period. Regardless of how one browses their filesystem. Information overload is an ongoing problem which is partially why you are seeing DB-filesystems, and good search engines being toted. There's already a story over on "/." about Seagates 400GB HD. Several could easily give you a Terabyte to look through. Mon, 14 Jun 2004 23:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Why not just make a tabbed file manager... I would like that more than anything spatial... After all.. Don't real life folders have tabs??? :-) Tue, 15 Jun 2004 00:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? this bug:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48085

and the attitudes expressed by nautilus developers with regards to this spacial browsing issue and the summary of these issues with regards to the very bug in question:

"I think severity of this bug should be critical, because this causes a loss of data...Btw, I noticed, that nautilus developers doesn't care about compability with older versions, for example like in this bug with people, that used gnome1x with gmc, another example is going to spatial mode without user-friendly way to change to previous browser behaviour."

are all indications that it is time for me to find a new file manager... Tue, 15 Jun 2004 07:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? cd, ls, cp, rm and mv

those are good tools and bash -o vi is very useful too. Why bother with a retarded file manager?

Before someone begins to scream that THESE are NOT good tools...

consider that part of my everyday job is to keep a deep and complex file system up to date and nicely ordered, something for what I would NEVER use a graphical user interface, because it's slow, unprecise and error-prone.

On a sidenote, is it just me or seem mac-centered developers do not care much about portability/compatibility/usability ( for other kin ) ? Tue, 15 Jun 2004 12:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I don't really know WHO THE FUCK are you to tell us how we have to make the structure of our file folders, desktops, and browsing habits.

Go fuck yourself. Wed, 16 Jun 2004 10:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Now, as the battle over my article is heading towards its end, I'd like to sum up it a little.

First, what many of the readers haven't realized, the article is a little exaggerated. The things have been put in 'black and white' just to emphasize some of the points about the spatial interface. Of course, I really do like spatial Nautilus (not Nautilius -- my fault), but I see the need to complement it with a classic file browser (and that's why there's a 'Browse this folder' option in Nuautilus' context menu; seems that hardly ever noticed it). I really think that an average user is unable to organize his or her files and I can prove it just by walking down from my office to the other room, where some secretary girls sit in front of their computers and save every one file on the desktop naming it the way that they are unable to find it one week later. And finally, I am sure that many people will contest everything they are not used to, even if all they did to test it and see it only was to turn it on for a couple of minutes (and in fact they are no experts in the matter).

Second, I'd like to thank VERY MUCH all the people who did not agree with me and presented some opposite points. The aim of my article was to begin a discussion, and the form of it (a little arrogant) was chosen to filter out the people who do not agree and can say it, and the ones who have nothing to say and only comment "Go fuck yourself" or "You are such a moron" if they do not agree. I appreciate very much the discussion itself and all those who do not agree with me, but all I can say to the ones who just use dirty words is "think about yourself and do not touch the 'Submit comment' button for a month".

Thanks again for all sensible voices, even if they were full of critics. Wed, 16 Jun 2004 10:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Maybe the nautilus crew can help Havoc Pennington with making metacity 'spatial'. I hate that metacity always opens windows in the top left corner of the display (I know... I know... some gnome apps do have hooks to retain their window placement, but this is not universal among gnome apps, much less non-gnome ones). Wed, 16 Jun 2004 20:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? What's next? Gnome will ship with abacus instead of calculator?
Why not, moving balls around is more natural than clicking on some abstract buttons with numbers.
The whole HIG is a bunch of bullshit and it's fundamentaly wrong.
Computers have nothing to do with real world. The whole analogy to real world objects is totaly wrong.
Computers were invented to manage massive volumes of data.
In real world a human will get overwhelmed by too many objects just like when working with computer files.
Just like one doesn't try to count a sworm of flies or other insects outside the windows but simply uses a spray to kill as many as possible, so do we need good file managers to deal with thousands of files on a computer.
Nautilus is like that poor sob that's still trying to kill the flies one by one with a flapper.
Get over it Gnome zealots, Nautilus is a poor excuse for software and even poorer for a file manager.
Gmc was a file manager, Nautilus is just another useless window taking up space on the desktop and the sooner it's dead the better.
Microsoft gave us "Nautilus" over 10 years ago, why reinvent it again in 2004? Bill Gates must be loughing all the way to the bank when he sees what the Gnome developers are coming up with these days.
Gnome 2 and later versions will surely go into history, but not as remarkable software but as the worst ideas and sad jokes in software's history. Thu, 17 Jun 2004 21:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments