Why Users Blame Spatial Nautilus

An anonymous reader writes "OSNews has a commentary on spatial Gnome and why you KDE/Windows people hate them so much (hint: because almost all of you use Windows and/or a Windows 'interface clone'). Steve Jobs, however, denounced spatial interfaces because they make the users janitors. Hmmm!"

How to turn it off.

[MooKore 2004]

From the Wikipedia article... [wikipedia.org]

If you do not like Spatial Nautilus, turn it off by setting the following key to true using gconf-editor. /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_browser

Re:Spatial browsing can be good if...

[Snad]

OS X could easily be spatial

OS X is (optionally) spatial. There is a preference option to set the "open-new-window" behaviour, or not, depending on how you like it, or not.

I'm surprised there's no clear option for doing so with Nautilus given that this "spatial" approach is so often a love it or hate it thing.

Computer Vs Reality

[Anonymous Coward]

so in reality.. i open a cabinet... then a folder...
and in that folder i have 16,000 files.
Hm.
Sorting that is gonna be a job for a janitor, subdirectories (DIRECTORIES, NOT FOLDERS) makes this infinetely easier.

Im not using all this hardware to make life as hard as using paper

Re:Paradigms

[mz2]

Whoops, there's a bit of a mistake in there, that makes the logic founder a bit. I was supposed to say: "... and DO NOT change back to KDE/Windows/whatever". Whoops, sorry about that.

Understanding spatial

[DreadSpoon]

Windows does not have a spatial interface, never has, and likely never will. Spatial doesn't mean "opens files in new windows" which is the extend of the Windows behaviour people label "spatial."

Spatial works, and only works, because it's *spatial*. Which means that you can visualize locations and objects based on their relationships to other objects.

The classic spatial example is driving. There are probably tons of places you go on a daily basis on which you have no idea what the road names are. Or, if you do, you at least don't think about them while driving. Many people give directions that don't say things like "turn left on Elm" but instead things like "drive into town, turn left at the corner with the brown building, drive a couple hundred feet, etc."

Another example is a filing cabinent. (Closer to the computer folder/file metaphor.) I can tell someone where the records for my company's taxes are. The name of the drawer, the name of the folder. When I look for that folder though, I don't scan the cabinent for the drawer name, I don't filter through the folders one by one. I go straight to the third drawer, go straight to three fourths of the way back, look for the clump of red folders, and pull out the first one. I know the location of the proper draw in relation to the cabinet itself and the other drawers, and the know the location of the folder in relation to the folders around it. That's spatial.

And the great thing about the spatial Nautilus mode is that it works both spatially *and* navigationally! You can open a folder, scan through the list of folders and files in it, and make a choice based on a known path or set of directions. On the other hand, if you are already familiar with the file, you can navigate to it without so much as reading a single label/name, because all the items are in the same places, each folder opens in the same spot on your desktop, etc. You can remember where to click based on the location of the window and icons therein in relation to each other.

And just as the article states, your clutter argument is crack. Middle click or shift-click will close the parent window while opening the new, so there is absolutely no reason for your desktop to be cluttered other than you being unaware of the feature. Now that you are, that argument is invalid. ;-)

Re:Spatial browsing can be good if...

[tunabomber]

Whether a spatial interface is useful or not depends on how many levels of nested directories you have

Damn straight. And I'm a Java developer, who'll often have to be dealing with deep directory trees that represent java package structures. In my experiences, I have found that by far the fastest way to work with lots of nested directories is with the vertical-columned multi directory view. (the same one used in the file choosers in Mac OS X) It has all the advantages of spacial browsing: it's easy to drag & drop between directories, the "state" of the directories is saved, but its much less messy than an expanded-tree style file browser.
Also, I have one of those Intellimice with a side-scrolling switch that enables me to move up and down the directory tree extremely fast.

Re:What the hell?

[cos(x)]

Part of the idea behind using real world analogies is, of course, that newbie users should get a better understanding of what is happening based on their previous experiences in the real world. But from my own experience, it doesn't seem to work this way for most users. When they first start using computers, everything is new and they learn by observing and reading about how things are done. They don't think in analogies. It's all strange and new. That might mean it takes them a while longer to grasp the ideas, but it also means that they are no longer confined by the way things are done in real life.

I have never met a single person who didn't love tabbed browsing once they were told how it works. They don't give a damn about the analogies behind it or what its recommended uses may be. They check it out, see what it can do for them and once they have figured it all out, they use it in the manner that seems most efficient to them.

I absolutely don't see why it would be good to force people to think about the real world analogies behind a new technology and to tell them that whatever they can't do in real life, they shouldn't even try with this new technology.

Re:I don't see what the big deal is...

[Anonymous Coward]

heh, i work in prepress using OS 9, been two months and i still hate it. We'll be moving to OS/X or Windows Xp soon, i want to use XP because if OS/X is anything like OS 9, i'll continue to hate it so.

It really isn't.

Re:Shallow org works for small number of files

[Anonymous Coward]

> He gives as a metaphor the contents of a drawer, which is easily visible to anyone who opens it. But he fails to consider the problems for people who have large numbers of files and documents that need organizing.

Yep. He also forgot (along with the GNOME developers) that people's file cabinets contain dozens of folders per drawer, three drawers to a cabinet, with multiple cabinets along the wall as needed. Sometimes folders are inside of folders - and when you open a folder and open a sub-folder, you're interested in the sub-folder, not the parent! Even if you take the subfolder out and have both folders open, you're doing so on a VERY large work surface (from a current computer monitor point of view), your desk, or "worse", on the floor, a work surface that has no analogy in capacity in any monitor I know of.

So much for the only-use-a-desktop-metaphor viewpoint..

here's a flash demo of piles in action.

[tentimestwenty]

First off, in my using piles as an example of the melding of spatial interface and meta organization, i didn't want to suggest that piles are a particularly great innovation, just that they were an example of a way to do it. I think if Apple put some finesse into it like they did with their excellent Exposé technology, it could be a very welcome addition to an already great Mac OS X. In any case, here's a flash demo of the concept: http://homepage.mac.com/rdas7/piles.html

The old mode is still there

[JCCyC]

Right-click on a folder and select "browse folder" (it's the second option in the context menu).

Me, I like the new mode a lot. It has a Windows 98 feel, very lean, no-frills.

For those who don't know what the fuss is about:

[WoTG]

I'm a little behind in my GNOME versions... so I had to dig up this short article with pictures of this spatial mumbo-jumbo [bytebot.net]. Here I was imagining the weird virtual reality type file navigation in Jurassic Park, but no, it's just another file browser - albeit one that is somewhat more like Explorer in recent versions of Windows.

I really don't see the fuss, it's not like anyone's forcing GNOME 2.6 on anyone. No button to turn off the feature? If it is that big of a deal, then someone will create said button... it ain't rocket science.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Spatial browsing can be good if...

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

What exactly makes it spatial, then? Just opening folders in new windows the way Win95 and Win98 did by default (and most of us probably disabled?) Or is it remembering your preferences for each seperate folder, the way WinXP does?

Windows has never been truly spatial, not even XP I think.

If you want a good example, you'll have to go back to Mac OS 9 etc. When you open a folder, it opens up in exactly the same position, size as when it was last closed, all the icons are in the same sorting order or position as when they were last time.
Mac OS X finder is a load of crap in terms of being spatial. It's unpredicable half the time, and that defeats the entire purpose of using spatial orientation in a folder system.

Re:How to turn it off.

[Skjellifetti]

The Gnome group seems to think they're smarter than me, and that if their system doesn't work with me, then I should look elsewhere, and so I have.

Agreed. Apple seems to have had this same attitude, too, at least in its early days. I said "in its early days," because when I see that attitude, I usually ignore the company from then on and have no idea if they have changed or not. There are always alternatives which have learned to listen to their customers.

Re:My beef with nautilus and why it doesn't matter

[geek]

Uh, right click or control click on the file and select "Get Info" you can there change what app to open with, you can even change it for all apps of that file type. You don't need resedit, just some OS literacy.

Okay, here's all you need to do

[Phillip Birmingham]

Put a launcher somewhere that launches

nautilus --no-desktop --browser

If you've installed Fedora Core 2, you'll find that the installer has already done it for you, under the helpful title of "Browse Filesystem."

Re:Spatial for shallow, Browser for deep.

[orcrist]

Why do I like it? because if I want to copy a folder in a browser-type file manager, I have to select the files/folders, press Ctrl-C, try to remember exactly how many times I need to press the 'Back' button to get back to the folder I want to copy the files into, and press Ctrl-V to past the files.

Not in Konqueror. There I just hit Shift-Ctrl-L (not sure if this was the default keyboard shortcut since I've been using it so long and have customized quite a few of them) to split the window into two vertical panes and navigate one of the windows to the destination or source depending on where I am. Then I hit Shift-Ctrl-R to close the extra pain again when I'm done. If two panes aren't enough I can hit Shift-Ctrl-L or Shift-Ctrl-H to split any of those into as many sub-panes as I want. Heck I can even open a terminal emulator with F7 which can be linked to any of those panes (i.e. follows the cwd of that pane) and which accepts dragged files or folders as parameters for clt's.

And don't tell me that that's "just like in Windows".

Cheers,
Chris

Re:Huh?

[Moraelin]

Well, regardless of who wrote that, it's an example of the rampant "if you don't do thing _my_ particular way, you're a n00b/retard/luser/fossil/whatever. I couldn't care less about what _you_ need. Just learn to use whatever I felt like coding" mentality.

If for the authors of that article shallow directories are ok, more power to them. But here's a real life example (with the corporation and project name changed to protect the innocent;) of a directory I need to get to. It's from a java project:

~/workspace/some_project/src/de/some_company/som e_ framework/some_project/util/xml/handlers/content

What am I supposed to do? Dump the files of all projects together in my home directory, so I can save the "/workspace/some_project" part?

Yeah, that'll make it so much easier to check in only the some_project files in CVS, when they're mixed with other projects and with every single config file and directory from other apps. E.g., I'm sure everyone will understand if the config file for the game Pingus suddenly appears among the sources I checked in. (Hey, it was something to do between projects, ok?:) For that matter, I'm sure they'll understand that my whole browser cache and history needs to be in CVS in every project too.

Or maybe unilaterally also dump the "src" (and other directories in each project too), regardless of what the rest of the team decided?

Or maybe I should tell them that they should stop using packages too, for that matter. Yeah, those projects will be so much easier to use with all the files dumped together in a big mess. EJBs, facade classes, xml content handlers, whole hierarchies of data objects, wrappers, singletons, factories, properties files, deployment descriptors, etc. Yeah, when you need to find the sax event cache classes, and only those, it's soo much easier if they're not in their own package. Not.

Re:Huh?

[lorien420]

/home/me/Documents/Articles/2003/spatial-nautilus. If my tool can't help me get there, I'm not going to use it.

What's you've just described is pretty easy to deal with. Put a shortcut for Documents on the desktop. I bet Documents has a few core sub-directories and maybe a bunch of files. Articles will be at the top, double click it. Now you have a bunch of directories naming years. Click the one you want. Now you have the directory with your file. Hit File -> Close Parent Windows and the "clutter" is gone.

Re:Huh?

[mystran]

except the whole point was that almost any filebrowser allows "open in new window" while "open in new tab" would be about 10 times more easy to get things done =)