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Okay, so it's just a Virtualbox-specific bug (on my Athlon64 3000+, with ~500 MB of virtual RAM and 64MB of virtual video ram, it takes around 20-30 seconds to fully load desktop + deskbar + tracker).


No, what I'm talking about is using tabs on the left and right side but with horizontal labels. If you wonder why this may be useful, compare how much apps the deskbar with default settings (vertical list of horizontal buttons) can show with how much it can show when it's put at the bottom of the desktop. This would allow much more tabs to be put on the side of a window. Currently, you can put 3-4 tabs side by side as a maximum, with tabs on the left or on the right, you could make ~10-tabs windows easily.


It seems to have been integrated (see previous pages in discussion), sadly someone thought that Ctl+Alt+Click was smarter in meantime...



"Everywhere"? By my count, the "Mount" menu exists in exactly one place: Tracker's right-click menu. "
Right click on desktop + Deskbar menu. I thought I had seen more, though. IMO, it should be in only one place, or, even more nice, not appear in menus unless an option is set somewhere...



Sure, if you have multiple drives/partitions, or regularly insert & unplug removable media. "
Problem is that manual drive mounting is a geek-only feature. Normal users don't manually mount/umount their partitions everyday, they just have them mounted automagically as needed and unmount them through a right-click menu. As an example, Windows automatically mounts drives/partitions, why some linux desktops do not but show an icon for the unmounted drive/partitions and mounts them automatically when you want to access them. I prefer the second option myself : it's not resource-intensive, it works without the need of going through some manual mounting (and hence learning about mounting), and it's easily discoverable too...



Ctrl-Shift-K. "
Alt+K (Ctl+Shift+K does not work, so I suppose that's what you meant) still leads to messy results, just like mac OS classic.
1/It does not reorganizes the icons on a grid, it wastes space everywhere...
2/...and hence icons finally get out of the window, leading to the need of scrolling or resizing the window.
Random example of both : http://yfrog.com/jmmesshp


Yeah, or a way to disable per-folder display settings, like in Windows XP.


This still means that spatial browsing is not the preferred way of browsing files : you have to learn some keyboard shortcuts or play with preferences in order to do otherwise.

My problem is with having this used as a default setting. But then, as you said...



Actually, that argument, while perfectly valid, is one of the things that make me less enthusiastic about Haiku than as usual : in the end, wouldn't bearing the BeOS legacy have the same effect on it as the one bearing the DOS legacy has had on Windows for a very long time ?


Maybe, though ergonomically-wise it's generally better to make people use the knowledge which comes from using other OSs, in order to reduce learning pain. However, you're right that applying this principle everywhere is bad for innovation. I dislike spatial browsing because of my love for big hierarchies in file storage, but it may be better in the long run.
That's a design choice which I, and many potential users, happen not to like. Let's see how well it'll perform in the future ^^


Only if you can make usability-aware devs use it, which requires more usability in the whole OS first That's a chicken and egg dilemma, isn't it ?

Edited 2010-05-11 16:50 UTC