Why Users Blame Spatial Nautilus 925
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!"
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't know how to use gconf? Then you shouldn't change the way Nautilitus works, I presume.
Am I missing something?
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Remove the Kiddie Gloves! [osdir.com]
Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Spatial browsing can be good if... (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone explain? (Score:5, Insightful)
this whole thing is silly (Score:2, Insightful)
Bleh (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people aren't interested in the Gnome developers personal interperation of the desktop metaphor. Some people think that making poor decisions based on pushing on a metaphor to the breaking point is stupid.
Some people think that using a tool to apply struture to files is an excellent use of a computer, rather than yelling at users that they're too messy and they need to conform to thier tools rather than the other way around.
Jesus. What egocentric crap! There's nothing wrong with a "spatial metaphor" if thats what works for you, but your underwear twisted in a knot when other people don't willingly submit to your attempt to push it on them is just egocentric and irritating.
what nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
There is not a single case of anything there but first-hand anecdotal nonsense. Not only that, but it ignores the fact that spatial browsing (as they call it) was tried with Windows - and dumped, because it largely sucked.
Some people might like GNOME, but most do not. I do not like it because it is not configureable. Even Windows is more configurable than GNOME is in some respects.
The author tried to say that hard disks should be browsed like a file cabinet's folder. That's fine - but I like to browse by task (if I'm browsing at all). It would drive me nuts if i had a seperate bash instance or state for every directory I navigated to - as I've evidently moved from those directories, and no longer need them.
That said, this guy's writeup is borderline incomprehendable. How'd this make it to the front page, again? My left testicle could make a more sound argument for castration than this guy's half-assed attempts at arguing for spatial file browsing.
mod me flamebait but... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not trying to flame anyone here, but it is a valid opinion shared by me and lots of other users.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
retarded interface design (Score:4, Insightful)
If you ask me (Score:2, Insightful)
I hate spatiality in file browsers, regardless of my directory structure. I'm pretty much always only using one file manager window. I never manage five windows at once, so I have no need to open five different windows -- I'm only using the one. All the rest are clutter, whether it's five extra windows, or just one extra window.
I guess, if we keep taking their metaphors too far, then a non-spatial file-manager would be like a drawer that magically changes its contents to be whatever you want. Sounds useful to me. Also, butchered the hell out of the metaphor.
not a very thoughtful article. (Score:5, Insightful)
Thats just insane.
Users have their way of using their desktop, and software should adapt to that. Yes - software should push new ideas. However, when users flat out reject them it is not the place of the developers to say "quit your bitching, we know what is best for you."
As for the guy that wrote the article, attacking users that complain and don't know how to use gconf? What, only power users are allowed to choose how their desktop feels?.. [ as a side not, perhaps if gconf wasn't so crap... ]
Why Spatial Nautilus Sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
I've thought about this, and seen the way a lot of different people use their computers, and i've come to this conclusion why spatial mode is a really dumb thing to do. Spatial mode only helps you move or copy documents from one directory to another.
Users are basically divided into two groups: people who can find their files, and people who can't.
People who can find their files hate spatial nautilus because it just clutters up the screen without providing any real functionality. Sure it makes it easier to drag and drop files the few times you need to do it, but it makes navigation of the file system a complete bitch. These people don't want the hassel of working with twelve different windows.
People who can't find their files typically put every single one of their files regaurdless of content or file type into a single directory, "My Documents" or its equivilant. Since these people pretty much always save their files in this same place, they never benefiit from spatial nautlilus because they never have multiple places for their files. The only benefit of spatial mode is easier copying or moving of files from one directory to another, and since these people only use one directory, spatial mode means nothing to them.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Translation: We know best about how to organize your files. We don't understand why you need a deep directory hierarchy, so we'll make it hard for you to use it.
Translation: You are a pinheaded luddite if you oppose this "innovation."
Ivory Tower (Score:4, Insightful)
I *hated* the folder diarrhea that began with Mac OS. Some people love it. The option to turn it off and on should be an easily configured checkbox in the app, not something "hidden" in the gconf setup.
I'm gonna start a flame war here... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not perfect -- it's stuck on alphabetical order and always takes me to the top of a folder's contents instead of scrolling to wherever I last was -- but it gives me a lot of information in one window, which is just the sort of thing an info-geek like me loves.
Imaginary Real-life metaphors? (Score:5, Insightful)
Advice for shallow folders seems stuck in ages of DOS when you had 100s of files on a drive max. In age with 100's of thousands of files, shallow hierarchy is a murder both in terms of organization and performance.
Similarly, author's disgust at some people using tabs to display separate pages seems ridiculous - we're not supposed to use interface in the most convenient way possible, just to avoid crossing some imagines real-life metaphor none of us knew existed?
I guess I just cannot get myself into the mind of the reviers, or the way that he apparently uses his computer... all I can say is, he better realize that other people don't all use the computer in the same way, before he presumes to write UI articles with any authority...
Re:Someone explain? (Score:3, Insightful)
Kinda like why some people don't like front wheel drive automobiles and some don't like rear wheel drive.
They're not saying rear wheel drive is what you should like and this is why. More like these are some common misconceptions of rear wheel drive and common mistakes when using it.
What the hell? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, I am one of these people, I like to have one browser window open with all of the pages I need in tabs along the top. Why? Because I find it much more efficent functionality wise, if I had multiple windows on the bottom menu bar, it would get far too cluttered.
I am getting the feeling the author is attacking people like myself who use their browsers like this based on his view that people like their software interfaces to act like objects we encounter in real life. But why should I be limited to how objects work by the laws of physics, when there are better options available to me that aren't confined by these laws?
I don't understand the attack here, if I find it more functional to use my browser this way, who the hell is he to suggest otherwise? No I don't glue pages of a newspaper side by side, because that would be plain stupidity, but this is not the same. It would take ages to glue newspaper pages together in a different arrangement, whereas on a browser interface such as mozilla, it takes a simple: Right click > Open link in new tab.
Worst analogy ever.
Re:Windows (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a reason the UI has moved to the modern "same window" default, because that's what people prefer.
This "edit your gconf file" business is bulls... inapropriate. There is no good reason to force that down someone's throat and feels more like a lousy excuse for forgetting to put a button in the UI.
Re:what nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people might like GNOME, but most do not. I do not like it because it is not configureable. Even Windows is more configurable than GNOME is in some respects.
I'd say that about sums up my problems with GNOME in a nutshell. With KDE, I can configure everything, but its still not overwhelming because the defaults are chosen sensibly and the options are well-presented.
Re:Someone explain? (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, I do almost all of my filesystem navigation in shell windows. Its much easier and quicker. And one reason I don't like file browsers is precisely because I don't like having the new directory replace the current one in the window. That makes it real fun to move a file from a subdirectory into the parent, for example. So other things being equal, a spatial file manager would probably be preferable to me.
I agree with parent up to a point. Much of the time there's no point telling people they should prefer something else. But it is also true that people can be very resistant to new things out of bad habits or because they don't understand the benefits of the new approach. In this case, it seems to me that its a good idea to introduce spatial behavior but it should be easy to turn it off. And easy doesn't mean using gconf. It should be possible to do this from within Nautilus, and not several levels down in preferences. In fact, I can imagine that I would want to switch back and forth frequently, so a button right on the toolbar would be handy.
I like gnome 2.6 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Disclosure? (Score:5, Insightful)
As in it's not like the metric system? The metric system is mathematically elegant, but the spatial nautilius is just oversimplified. An oversimplified approach to a rather complex task. It's an abstraction level below the browser nautilius, and one step to low. Clutter.
we don't want it now because we're not used to it, but everyone knows it's better than the English system.
As in clearly not everybody knows it's better than the browser nautilius?
Troll? Yes, probably.
And here is why engineers make bad UI designers (Score:5, Insightful)
However, reading this article is like a HOWTO on the philosophy of poor user-interface design. Software engineers in general make bad user-interface designers because of the philosophy of those like Radoslaw. That philosophy is that you can engineer a perfect design and ram it down the throats of users who don't like it, because it is based on "sound" engineering. A desktop "metaphor" is only as good as it does its job- which is to aid the user in doing what he or she wants to do (in whichever context you're in).
"Spatial" nautilus (and to be honest, I'm not entirely sure how it differs from the Windows 95 file manager, but as I said, I don't use Nautilus very much) may be great, but it won't be because it rests soundly on some abstract file drawer metaphor. Hell, if I want to something that matches the usability of a file drawer 100%, I'll buy a file drawer, thank you very much. Nautilus, and any other piece of desktop software will be great if and only if it helps its users get their jobs done. If users are clamoring for an option to turn it off, then that's probably an indication that they are not buying the new UI, or at least not ready for it. Provide them the option (apparently there is one, buried somewhere in gconf no doubt) and move on. Stop trying to deliver a "revolution" to the unwilling, and stop developing user interfaces in a vacuum.
What an arrogant jerk (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't use Nautilus but I decided to read this article just cause it's a slow day. I was amazed at what an absolute buffoon the writer is. Check out some of these choice quotes. Speaking of tabbed browsing:
Sometimes they even abuse the physical metaphor of tabbed browsing by opening multiple pages - not subpages of the same web site! ... I hope they do not try to glue a daily set of newspapers together before reading them..."
What an opinionated moron. I browse the web all in one window, using nothing but tabs. But *apparently* I'm abusing my user interface! Here I thought I just preferred it that way, who knew I was offending a purist! And further for people who don't find spatial Nautilus conducive to browsing:
Folder structure should be simple and as shallow as possible, and the "master" folders (something like My Images or My Music folders known from Windows) should have their own shortcuts on a GNOME panel
Ahhh, now it's how we're all storing our files the wrong way. Silly us! I appreciate the basic gyst of his argument. "If you change your way of working to conform to your user interface, then you'll find it's completely intuitive. Sorry, no offense to the folks who use and love Nautilus, but you need to keep this buffoon from engaging in any more advocacy.
Constraints in the real world vs virtual world (Score:4, Insightful)
I hate it when people applies real world constraints to the computer. Yes, each folder is a seperate entity, but that doesn't mean that you have to treat it as such whenever you handle it. Instead of thinking that each folder has its own window, you can treat the window as a view inside your file system. Opening a new folder is just like switching channels on the tv. As someone else mentioned, each window does not have to represent the folder itself, but rather the current task.
I'm also one of those "few" people browsing the web using just one window (opera). Web browsing is usually one task, thus one window. It's also quite practical if I want to move the browser to the other monitor. Instead of moving 10 windows I can now move one. If I want to use both monitors, I just detach one of the document windows (or create a new window) and move that window.
spatial nautilus is bad... (Score:2, Insightful)
a UI should allow the user to do things the way the user wants, and not force them to adapt to the developer's whims.
good software accomodates the whims of the end user, bad software doesn't.
gnome seems to be making some really astonishingly bad ui decisions lately. how much abuse gnome end users will tolerate before jumping ship remains to be seen. 'choice is bad', says gnome devs. um, ok.
(yes, i know it can be disabled, but making users have to use gconf-editor to change it is bad. it should be an easily accessible option up front, not hidden away.)
EXACTLY. (Score:5, Insightful)
if such a fundamental ui thing as spatial browsing can be disabled, present it to the user in an easily accessible manner. don't hide it away.
i mean, what's next, hiding away the logoff button in some hidden menu because users might accidentally use it?
Re:Someone explain? (Score:5, Insightful)
Spatial for shallow, Browser for deep. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is such a bad argument (Score:4, Insightful)
They explicitly argue that the spacial metaphor is somehow intuitively more appropriate:
Think of your hard drive contents as of a desk full of drawers. Every time you put something into a drawer, you may be sure that the next time you open the same drawer it will be in the same place (and the drawer itself will remain in the same place). So, when you open a folder and try to locate a particular icon, it should be where you put it before. Simple?
But so what!? There are other viewing metaphors (such as the browser) that are just as coherent to the user, but don't have such negative usability impacts (such as hundreds of open windows, new windows opening in seemingly random locations, and seemingly random changes in view).
Arguments for usability need to be based on usability testing or proven heuristics - not on "this metaphor is the most conceptually pure, but who cares about its usability impact". The only real advantage of a strong UI metaphor is to increase peoples speed at learning the interface due to their familiarity with the metaphorical concept, but the choice of metaphor needs to be carefully weighed up against how usable that product will be once it is learnt.
I find it a confusing and jarring experience when OS X finder switches view mode based on the previous way I was viewing some folder, because I don't remember how I last viewed a folder, I'm thinking in a browser/viewer type framework (but I realise my experience may not be typical of the average user). How usable is this for the average person?
Shallow org works for small number of files (Score:5, Insightful)
The solution isn't to impose a particular form of organization for storing and browsing files, but rather to provide superior tools for indexing and cataloging all entries so that they are easy to recall. What we need are browsers that allow us to browse by content attributes, rather than simply by file name or directory path.
Re:Spatial browsing can be good if... (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether it changes the window contents or not, if it doesn't have a file tree in the left pane, I'm all for it. I just don't like it opening new windows everytime I click on something. When I pull a file out of a cabinent--which, in my 20 years of life I've done so many times that I can count it on 1 hand--I don't dump the whole drawer on the table. I browse through and find the file or paper I want and remove only that folder, just like I only keep open the folder on the desktop I want to use, not the whole cabinent...
Whatever there is to a spatial desktop that isn't opening a new window, I'll accept. Guess I'll just have to learn to dbl-middle click!
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Remove the Kiddie Gloves! [osdir.com]
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it doesn't. It opens it same as normal, then closes the parent window. The difference is that unless you're very careful the windows will be in different locations and different sizes. Both are really annoying when you're trying to get to a directory that is pretty deep quickly.
Also, most people's middle "button" is my mouse wheel, and double clicking that makes little sense and can actually be somewhat difficult.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Directory Depths (Score:2, Insightful)
People have various and legitimate reasons for saving files 10 directory levels deep. I myself have various clients. Those clients have various projects. Some projects have various aspects and phases. Etc, etc. Perhaps it is my old-school thinking that prevents me from just throwing all of this information and documents into a "My Projects" directory?
~ Corporate Memo From Sys Admin ~
Dear Employees,
We have decided to simplify our file managment procedures. From now on, all users please save your files on the server in the "My Files" directory, without creating sub-directories. That way we will not have to waste time navigating through unecessary directory structures. I realize this may be a bit unconventional for an organization of 35,000 users. However, we feel that the benefit will outweight any inconveniences. Please use google if you need to locate a project file.
Sincerely,
IT Dept.
Re:Someone explain? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm amazed by this statement. In my experience the problem is usually just the opposite. Unix novices or MS Windows users tend to put everything in their home directory, or at any rate have a very shallow directory structure. A well articulated directory structure can make it much easier to find things and to keep related work together. Want to bring the project you're working on with you? If its all in one directory, tar it up you're ready. It's a real pain if it consists of N files in a larger directory. And large numbers of files in the same directory are hard to grok, whether in a shell or in a file browser window, unless they're all of the same type.
If other people find a shallow directory structure better for their work, fine with me, but the idea that deep directory hierarchies are intrinsically bad is ridiculous.
Re:Spatial for shallow, Browser for deep. (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone still has to inform the database just what is considered "smart" behavior.
This "smart" behavior may well end up being pretty stupid behavior for any particular user. The construction of business rules cannot be fully automated, as they are abstract constructions from particular real world situations.
You have to decide for yourself which drawer is appropriate to store your socks in, or even whether storing them in a drawer is appropriate at all.
KFG
MacOS Reference (Score:2, Insightful)
But Myself and nearly all of my users, preferred the "list view" of the MacOS.
I mean, we're still viewing things spatially, but without the pop-ups of 1000 windows as we're digging into the filesystem.
Perhaps if nautilus were to provide some alternative to the current form of spatial filesystem browsing, or at least an option to turn said feature off, there wouldn't have been such an uproar.
I have been a MacOS user, and a Linux user since way back when. I don't need to be told how to use my computer.
-Henry
Re:Why Spatial Nautilus Sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
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. Browser-mode file browsers hide the lack of thought and organisation in the filesystem structure; spatial ones do not. Folder structure should be simple and as shallow as possible, and the "master" folders (something like My Images or My Music folders known from Windows) should have their own shortcuts on a GNOME panel, so that playing your favourite song would only require opening My Music from the panel, opening the appriopriate album folder and double-clicking a file icon, instead of browsing straight from the home directory (or, worse, the root one) through several levels of subfolders
He seems to equate good organization skills with having all your files in one or two folders and having a directory structure 10 folders deep with bad organization. He also uses a lot of "should be's", as if he wants to press his preferences onto the rest of us.
I don't know about Music Folder idea either. His My Music folder sounds horribly disorganized, or maybe his collection is really small/limited to one genre. His directory structure should be Media/Music/Rock/80s/Singles/B-52s_Rock_Lobster.mp 3. Whats that 5 folders deep? So if he wants to play that song he has to open 5 windows. Or he could go with his shortcut idea and eventually have 30 icons on his desktop. How tidy.
Still like GNOME (Score:1, Insightful)
I am *NOT* joe sixpack, though I don't program either. It seems clear to me that GNOME's efforts are geared heavily toward making DE that will be comfortable for someone who has little or no experience dealing with computers - I can see why this irritated most existing GNU/Linux users, and might drive a few toward KDE/Fluxbox/Whatever.
Nevertheless, Gnu/Linux *needs* (assuming we see new users as a good thing) a major DE taking just this approach and taking it well - in the long term, there will be a lot more potential in simply being the first and best impression for someone who doesn't know what "OS" means than in trying to steal Windows/Mac users who are going to have to learn new ways of working no matter how much of a clone their GNU/Linux DE tries to be.
Re:retarded interface design (Score:3, Insightful)
"Good interface design becomes obvious upon using it."
As soon as I read this, I thought "yes!!" because that is exactly right. I don't think both MS and Apple ditched the spatial view for no reason, and I for one am intensely annoyed by it every time I try to use it. I end up saying, screw it, I'll use a terminal. And that's not how it should be-- It should be obvious and useful without any need for explanation, or what they're really giving us -- excuses. How am I supposed to believe "it's better, just trust us and use it for two weeks" when I have been using it for two weeks and , though I have become somewhat "used to it" in that time, it still feels like it's lowering my productivity. Here are my main pet peeves, most of which have been addressed already in reviews and such but I feel like saying them anyway:
I always say it's all in the details, and that has never been more true than with spatial nautilus. It was a bad idea at first, but then they get all the little details wrong too and it just becomes a mess, and it does make the user into a garbage (wo)man, spending more time dealing with the interface than actually doing what they want to be doing. Ideally, the interface should be transparent to the process, it should be obvious, just as the parent said.
Most hilarious paragraph: (Score:2, Insightful)
So, people in fact love when the machine works in a way resembling behaviour of real-life objects, but it seems that only when the "spatial" application is a web browser: they accept the book metaphor with web pages, but reject the drawer metaphor with folders and files. 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...
"""
This guy is actually trying to castigate people for using tabbed browsers to open more than one website!
LOL
Re:Spatial browsing can be good if... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
OK, fine. I'll just take all of my thousands of digital photos collected over the years, which are now organized in nested directories so that I can easily find photos of my kids that I took last November, or of fireworks at Sagami-ko, in the mountains of Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan in 2001, and dump all those pictures into one big folder so that Spatial Nautilus can deal with them better? Riiiiight...
I typically have four levels deep below my PHOTOS directory, and in some places it's six. Drilling down to the bottom of that would leave me with a lot of desktop clutter, to say the least. His answer to that? Well, he's got a couple, and one we've already seen: just get rid of your nice, well-organized directory structure (and we're going to call being organized an old bad habit now, too; I wonder if he uses drawer dividers in his desk, or just throws everything into the drawers in one big pile? I think I can guess).
His other answer is to cause the parent window to automatically close by either double-clicking the middle button to open something, or using shift + double-click. This puts extra burden on the user; automatically closing the parent should be the default, and if you want to keep it, you should have to double middle-click.
He also praises the old Apple Finder for being spatial. As a person who used a Mac in those days, I have to tell you that Finder's spatial behavior (I just called it "pain in the ass") was horrible. It drove me crazy, and I found Windows Explorer to be an incredible breath of fresh air in comparison. It's so much easier to drag a bunch of files from one folder to another in a tree view than it is in a spatial view (and of course, now as a convert to Linux, I find it easiest to move a bunch of files from point A to point B by using cp in a shell; beats graphical file managers easily). He might want to consider the reason that nobody uses spatial file managers anymore is that they were just a failure in practice, no matter how good they sound on paper. I fully agree with the OSNews EIC's opinion: spatial browsers and hierarchical filesystems don't mix. I am not, however, convinced that the future of a MIME-based (ugh!) or db-based (maybe) file system is the answer.
Overall, the reviewer's defense of Spatial Nautilus seems to be based on two things:
I even know few people who never open more than one browser window, viewing all pages in tabs
Uh, hello! That's the whole point of tabbed browsing; so that you don't have to have a bunch of browser windows open at once. I only open a second one if I have too many tabs in the first one and they're too small to see.
In the end, the reviewer is just grasping at straws to try and defend the horrible idea that is Spatial Gnome, and he accuses those who dislike it of only disliking it because it doesn't work like Windows Explorer. It would seem that he is bound to the idea that because it comes from Microsoft, Windows Explorer cannot be good. Could it be, just maybe, that the reason people like Windows Explorer is because it works so well? I dislike Microsoft the company, and I don't much care for most of their products either, but Windows Explorer is quite simply the best thing they've ever done.
My file manager of choice is a bash shell, so it doesn't matter a great deal to me what's on the desktop as a file manager. When I was a Gnome user I never use
I don't see what the big deal is... (Score:5, Insightful)
The spatial nautilus took me all of 30 seconds to get used to and I still use it today...though I use aterm more in day to day stuff.
But hey folks, it's not rocket science here. It's very easy to use, and it's very easy to get used to. But some people just "I don't want to get used to it! I hate it! HATE IT! I'll never use it!".
I seem to remember that OSX had a new interface also that people had to spend a little time getting used to it. And I recall in the pre-press shop I worked at people saying "I don't want to get used to it! I hate it! HATE IT!" with that too. But after a few days they couldn't live without it.
People hate change. But hey, if you don't want to use it, don't use it. Use kde or fluxbox or _______(insert window manager here).
Ahh...the sweet smell of choice!
Illegal use of tabbed browsing?? (Score:2, Insightful)
You're kidding, right? I didn't know I wasn't "allowed" to open unrelated web pages in their own tabs. What is he talking about? If he is afraid that the metaphor of bookmarks in a book is broken by doing this then maybe he should think of the Internet as one giant book. Then no "laws" get broken.
Re:what nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm going to try to go easy on the GNOME developers here for the simple fact that I can't do a better job, largely because I don't code. I hate to run some one's name in the mud if I can't do any better, but it seems to me the GNOME developers have lost sight of what made people like GNOME.
Does anyone remember the reasons GNOME can to be? One of course was to provide a truly free linux desktop as an alternative to KDE. The other was to make a very powerful and configurable desktop. In the GNOME 1.x days you could configure anything you wanted (which sometimes got you into trouble of course). Replacing the window manager was as simple as clicking an option in the preferences dialog.
In those days a lot of people really liked GNOME. We liked it because it was fast, and it was leaner than KDE. You could run GNOME on pretty much any modern (P5 or better) machine and have a full DE that was usable. In those days, KDE was simply too slow to run on a lot of commodity hardware. These days hardware is cheaper, but GNOME runs like ass. In most cases I find that KDE is noticeably faster (can't offer empirical evidence other than to say that is my perception).
Somewhere around GNOME 2 the development philosophy changed. The developers seem to care more about making this really dumbed down you-can-only-do-it-this-way GUI in the mistaken idea that this will both attract newbies, and make things easier on them. In reality GNOME now loads in more time than it takes me to wait out the dog days of summer. If it isn't fast, nobody is going to use it, certainly not newbies, who don't have a personal attatchment to your program.
These days it seems to me like the only people running GNOME are doing so from plain inertia and/or dislike of KDE.
Myself? I run XFCE, which is GTK+ based. I like many of the GNOME apps (Galeon is the best browser and Abiword is just a straight up fast WYSIWYG word processor, Eye of Gnome is a decent picture viewer), but running them on GNOME is an excersize in patience. There's really only one thing I liked about GNOME 2.6, the improved GTK+ save/open dialogue. This has long been needed in GTK+; it's a shame that the sluggishness of the desktop it was designed for and the idiocy of spatial nautilus overshadowed this important addition.
Re:How to turn it off. (Score:5, Insightful)
If there's an option you're likely to want to change, or modify, put it in the damn application, not in the registry style gconf-editor.
The article was considsending. 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.
poor UI design... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would one artificially limit their use of tabs to only pages served from the same website? The author likens tabs in a browser to marks in a book. However, he almost suggests that use of such a tool should be limited in use to one specific style of usage. To me, it might make sense to use tabs within the same window to group pages related by task (recipies for tonight's dinner, for instance) rather than source.
And this is intuitive how? The author seems to think that UI elements should map directly to real-world objects. I am left wondering which real-world object would lead the user to stumble across the idea of holding the shift button while double-clicking.
Why double-clicking? Why must a modifier key be used? My remote control never requires a double-click. Nor do the climate controls on my car. The author seems to like the book analogy -- I've definitely never had to turn a page twice while holding a random button to get the desired response from a novel.
The author also suggests that if one cannot figure out how to change the application's default behavior then they should constrain themselves to the developer's idea of what the proper settings should be. In other words, if a user finds a UI to be confusing and unfriendly, it's their own fault and they aren't qualified to determine what environment they prefer.
Is this really the type of thing one should be saying of an application with a well-designed UI?
Re:Someone explain? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dead on, the writer of this article is a serious pedantic asshole. The only argument this person has is some bizarre adherance to the rule of a metaphor. I truly am baffled by this person's mind.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How to turn it off. (Score:5, Insightful)
Er, that article is way off base (Score:4, Insightful)
They then decide that it sucks because they never bothed to give it an honest look in the first place and were either resistant to any sort of change or were simply confirming the pre-existing bias they already had.
Here's who *likes* spatial nautilus: people that use it to manage files instead of browse their filesystem. People that use Gnome as a tool and not a toy, people who and organize their personal files logically. If you actually *use* it, you'll probably end up loving spatial nautilus, despite the areas that still need improvement in it. But those are not the people that tend to review new distributions or new versions of desktop environments which is why there are so few positive spatial Nautilus reviews out there.
Re:Someone explain? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why Spatial Nautilus Sucks (Score:3, Insightful)
Well that depends of course. You may have a very large collection of many different types of music and thus need a directory structure to handle lots of things like that. Personally I'm going to give the guy a break here and assume that he thinks the file browser should understand that in the "My Music" folder it should assume all the files are music files and consult their ID3 tags. This would allow you to organize them by gennre, artist, etc without having a lot of deep directories.
That is pretty short sighted however. Checking the ID3 tags for 3000 songs is not going to be a quickly accomplished task no matter your system. The disk access time is just going to be too great.
Personally I have a /home/music directory (shared to a small group that don't all have access to my $HOME) that has two sub-directories in it, mp3/ and ogg/. I think it's obvious what's in those. Each of my files is named something like doc_watson-tom_dooley.ogg. I've got a list of the singer, and the song, and for me that's enough (I've only got three genres: country, western, and bluegrass).
"likely to want to change" being the key phrase (Score:3, Insightful)
And if there's an option that only those familiar with computing is likely to want to change or modify, gconf is a fine place.
You already can browse your files the old way either by choosing "browse the filesystem" (not sure of exact name, using an non-english locale) from the file menu, or right clicking a directory icon and choose the corresponding option.
The only reason to go into gconf is to completely disable the spatial nautilus features. Only people likely to want that, are the non-newbies longing for the "good old days" of "exploring" the filesystem.
Nautilus, as it is, already has five tabs of options in a rather cluttered options dialogue. I'm glad that this rather annoying option isn't in that.
A lot of old Gnome and Windows users hate the new spatial Nautilus. Understandable. It's very different.
On the other hand, I always hated the old Nautilus - with the spatial one it's the first time I've begun using an actual file manager (as opposed to just the gnu file utils from the shell) in bloody ages. Many of my friends feel the same way. (And some, like you, hate it.)
Well, doesn't that make everyone happy?
According to this guy ... (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
Yeah, that would be me, but I don't deal in printed works, so no I don't go gluing stuff together.
This more that anything inspires me to never use Gnome ever,
Not only do I find his entire diatribe insulting, but rather narrow minded and overall devoid of substance.
Why do I use only one browser window and load everything into tabs? Maybe I will always have at least 10 different apps open and don't like navigating through a sea of windows to find the 'one' I need at that instance. It's bad enough that BBedit on the mac doesn't support tabbing, so I often have 20 BBedit windows open because I am scripting, modeling, writing DB schemas, writing html and CSS all in different documents, so when I need to access a commandline, I don't want to figure out which terminal it's in, I just use "Screen" and tab to the most appropriate prompt -- and when testing/prototyping/debugging, I don't want to hunt down the one browser window out of a swarm, I want to just select Mozilla and have the one and only window pop up and grab my tab.
What is so wrong with this? The author did nothing to illuminate me on why my methodology is wrong nor convince me I'd be better off mucking about in a swarm of windows which he provclaims is "the one true way".
And who is this "author" anyway?
Some network admin from poland -- where I can only assume the network admins you.
Re:Bleh (Score:3, Insightful)
If you don't like it, it's only because you're messy! SUBMIT!
I think that was the best part.
Of course, I have filepaths that look like:
That's because I'm unorganized.
Programmers need to remember who the users are (Score:5, Insightful)
5 years down the line I probably spend half my development time thinking about how each change impacts the users (yes, even the really annoying ones). I have a rule.. if more than 10 people complain about something I have a design issue that needs fixing (since there's probably another 1000 who didn't get as far as the mailing list to complain).
Too many programmers treat their projects as an excercise in masturbation and forget that there are real, flesh and blood people out there who are relying on you to get it right - some of them have invested money because they believe you can do it.
People don't read documentation, or FAQs, or even google. They want their software to do what *they* want it to do and it is our job as programmers to at least attempt to give them that. Bleating that all the users *must* be wrong because this wizzy new feature is so revolutionary it'll change the world is just wrong on so many levels I can't even begin to express it.
Innovation is good, but you do it slowly - first offer the option, make it a bit more obvious over time (once the teething troubles are out), and see how people pick it up and use it. If they all hate it, then dump it. Forget the ego... you'll just piss everyone off and kill the project.
Justifying an interface using metaphors... (Score:1, Insightful)
The author of that FA (F doesn't mean fine, in this case) also attacks user for using an interface in a way that doesn't match a metaphor (the tabbed browsing of different sites). He just comes off as idiot. He tries to promote the idea of innovation, but attacks users that don't conform and are therefore being innovative.
That being said, I sometimes like a spatial inteface-but not always. I would prefer if the OS (or window manager or whatever) just gave me the choice dynamically. Perhaps left click non-spatial mode and middle-click spatial mode?
Re:Imaginary Real-life metaphors? (Score:4, Insightful)
In this case, the "drawers / cabinet" metaphor doesn't even match particularly well - it doesn't explain links at all, it doesn't map well to the deep hierarchies that are common in filesystems (what's that supposed to be - a drawer inside a drawer inside a cabinet?), and it doesn't explain removable media well. I've used computers long enough to want to think of my harddrive's contents as what they are - files, directories, and links. I want a window to be a view (that I can change) into the filesystem, not a representation of a specific directory. Any interface that gets in the way of that is a bad one.
The problem with this spatial mode Nautilus has is that it doesn't account for what people want to do. In probably 90% of cases a user opens a new directory they are finished with the old one and leaving it lying around is not the correct thing to do. As Jobs said, it makes the user into a janitor, constantly having to clean up unwanted windows. The author responds to this point by saying "you can use double middle click instead", but why have such an obscure operation for the common case, and why open a new window and close the existing window when replacing the contents of the current window makes more sense?
Re:How to turn it off. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bleh (Score:5, Insightful)
Eh? With an attitude like that, we would all still be using the same desktop as Mac OS 1.0 (or something else that predates that) Sure for the most part the desktop has been refined to be a useful replacement for the command line, but I still think there are lots of improvements to be made. 10 years from now the desktop will be radically different (if it even still exists) and you will wonder how you got any work done on the current generation of desktops.
"Let's innovate some apps that can actually threaten the standing of MSFT and friends"
Why should open source exist just to topple the Microsoft empire? Why can't it just stand on its own merits? I think open source would be better of not worrying about Microsoft or anyone else for that matter and just concentrate on making good programs.
"of retooling themes and icons on a daily basis"
There are some people who want to contribute to open source that are not programmers. If people who are graphic designers that want to contribute, more power to them, I think it strengthens the open source community if more diverse groups of people can have a say in development.
"Anything else deserves to be stopped out of existence"
Oh boy...
Real world metaphors are not always good (Score:2, Insightful)
Good examples of bad metaphors are:
- Quicktime [libero.it] (see also the links to the RealPhone and RealCD on that page)
- the desktop
- and the recycle bin
To explain the latter two: the idea of the desktop was to have a central point for a document-centric environment. How many people do you know who use it that way? Most people I know use it as a pane for starting programs or just a way to have a nice background picture. I rarely see it myself since windows hide it.The recycle bin is rather dangerous. I gave adult education classes in Windows once, and I had to learn that quite a few people empty it regularly: the full bin looks messy and they are not messy people. But that defeats the purpose of the recycle bin. (I won't go to discuss MS failure to provide this important facility where it really matters.)
The article links tries to tell me spatial Nautilus is good, because it is close to the real world. I haven't tried the new Nautilus yet, but while I actually work myself in the area of creating browsing spaces for data analysis, this particular description does not entice me at all. They can blame me for being someone who uses Windows and KDE (both true, though often Blackbox) and someone who "misuses" the browser tabbing feature (I use two windows if I have two completely different task sets -- reading Slashdot and linked sites counts as one). But that is their problem, for me the description is yet another reason not to use Gnome (the other one is that the Gnome project seems to lack pragmatism).
If they come up with a properly designed browsing space for documents (using metadata instead of tree-based hierarchies) I might be more interested.
Peter
Re:what nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
Some people might like GNOME, but most do not. I do not like it because it is not configureable.
I wonder how many different people are going to have to say this in how many different ways before the oh-so-smart GNOME developers wake the f--- up and realize how much public favor they are losing, and how many current and potential users they are losing. GNOME seems to be fast becoming a joke for a lot of people. I've thought about trying it for like the 12th time after hearing about some of the new features in 2.6, but this is something like the 6th story in the last few months where I'm seeing a large portion of the comments coming from former GNOME users telling me how GNOME is both difficult to use and non-configurable. Non-configurable is the main theme I've been hearing about GNOME since the 2.0 development releases started coming out.
I think a certain parallel could be drawn here between the GNOME developers and the recent XFree86 blowup, in the sense that there seems to be a very similar sort of stupidity going on in both camps. "We're right and you're wrong, so if you want to do something in a way we haven't officially approved you can stuff it." Anyway, that's just my general impression at this point, and that's why I won't be switching to GNOME in the foreseeable future. Honestly, what are they thinking? It's really getting ridiculous.
Re:"likely to want to change" being the key phrase (Score:4, Insightful)
My father is a good example of such a user. I see him using Windows Explorer with the tabbed view constantly. He organizes his files very carefully, and he thinks about them in a tree-like structure. But he is not going to want to climb through some kind of registry editor to make this change, since in Windows it has always been as easy as Tools | Folder Options. That's right, it's a preferences dialog right off of the window itself.
Keep the dangerous and esoteric preferences in gconf. But put the common, safe ones in a preferences dialog. Remember: the customer is always right.
"User friendly - riiight (Score:5, Insightful)
-
By the way, I cannot imagine how spatial browsing must lead to screen clutter: opening folders with double-middle-click or Shift-double-click closes the parent folder window at once. 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.
Or, "I am so l33t that I know how to use double-middle-click and the "gconf configuration editor". And people wonder why Linux has trouble getting traction on the desktop.Keyboard "shortcuts" are shortcuts. You should never have to use them, and all of them should be visible in menus. Go read "Tog on Interface", or "The Inmates are Running the Asylum". The user should never need to know a secret code to do something.
Metaphors Considered Harmful (Score:4, Insightful)
The following things are stupid:
- disabling the backspace key because you couldn't easily erase things with typewriters
- eliminating Undo, Redo, and Repeat because time travel is physically impossible
- having www.airplanetickets.biz take two hours to load because it takes two hours to go to the physical ticket booth
- making directory trees behave like physical drawers
Metaphors do not make things easier to use. If Jane-Six-Pack tosses an empty vodka can out of her armoured utility vehicle, she expects it to disappear. She does not expect it to stay where it landed until it decays in twenty million years.
If computer interfaces were just as tedious as real life, no one would bother with them.
Re:"likely to want to change" being the key phrase (Score:3, Insightful)
IMHO, gconf-editor is easier than regedit, but you could think of other ways to access the gconf database [sourceforge.net].
Thanks, but please, re-read my post or read my answer to your sibling post.
It's only those religious/nostalgic enough to completely want to banish the spatial nautilus that needs to dig through gconf (and yeah, migraters most of them, sure), which I think is fine. The "explorer-like" interface is readily available, without gconf, for all who needs it.
(In fact, when I first tried Gnome 2.6, I thought that the old interface was a little too readily available, and I thought people would enter it by mistake. This discussion, and the fire people have been pouring on my beloved spatial, has changed my mind. It's fine as it is now - spatial as default, "exploring" easily available.)
GNOME developers and the adundance of arrogance (Score:3, Insightful)
What has happened is that those who consider themselves usability "experts", but are demonstably *not*, are deciding that something (e.g. spatial nautilus) is cool BECAUSE IT'S DIFFERENT, and constructing a huge set of supporting claims, anecdotes, and broken analogies to support their assertion that it's the Correct(TM) way to do things.
Then again this is not the real problem. The real problem is that these same developers are so astoundingly arrogant that they have decided that they know better than some 30 years of interface evolution (not "design"). Instead of actually asking users how they prefer to work, they are instead removing one by one every normal interoperative paradigm that people have been using on their PC's for a decade, because it's "wrong".
This utterly insufferable arrogance is very visibly driving users away from GNOME. I've been a dedicated GNOME user (and developer!) since well before 1.0 days, and this kind of behavior is making me seriously consider switching to something else. This story itself is evidence, as while the comments seem roughtly balanced between the "love it" and "hate it" camps, I haven't seen a single message that says "love it, switched to it". Instead, I see many messages that say "hate it, ditched it".
If this pattern continues, I predict that a full GNOME fork will appear within a year. I personally would be happy to assist in reclaiming quite a few features that have been unilaterally decided as "wrong", if I had any time to do so.
Re:Someone explain? (Score:5, Insightful)
> I believe its more of an explanation of why people don't like it. Not why they are wrong in their opinions.
The whole article is why the users are wrong in thinking that spatial and the way Nautilus is bad.
From the article:
"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. "
He is pointing the finger not at opinions, but the behaviour of people.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
if you can explain why shallow structur is better for me i'll switch and use your spatial crap, o/w i want everything in one window.
also web browing (i tend to use webpages as info i need to recall and i like it tabbed - i hate new windows, i can't find stuff b/c i have too much open). tab 1 - lecture notes, tab 2 - assignment statement, tab 3 - checklist (when applicable), tab 4 - slashdot, tab 5 - other random crap i'm doing. i like to multitask, i don't like reloading web pages every time i need to check something
"bad" interface design (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the first things I always did in Windows 95 explorer (once I found the option for it) was turn OFF "open folder in new window", because its a pain in the arse.
As to the whole "but a web browser is like a book!" argument... well.... my PC is like a filing cabinet. I don't want to pull files out of the filing cabinet (open in new window) until I find what I'm looking for. I'd rather sift through the open drawer (tree list at side of browser window for example), until i find what I want.
"BAD" interface design is when the implementor makes decisions on behalf of the end-user that increase work-load for *no good reason*.
"Because its bad interface design" is NOT a self-justifying reason. If it makes my work more efficient, it is not bad.
I'll bet the supporters of this crock are akin to those who think that storing every file they create under the root directory is a good idea as well, because sorting through 10,000 files in the same folder is good interface design.
smash.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Speak for yourself, please. (Score:5, Insightful)
_I_ use computers, and I want _my_ needs catered for, not some mythical mother, or aunt, or grandmother, or whatever the current model "Average User" is.
I am a real user, I use computers now, I use them for fun, and I use them for getting work done.
I want an interface that caters to my needs - in other words, it doesn't force someone else's interpretation of my needs on me, and lets me configure and set things up how I like it without having to hunt around in configuration files.
I'm no stranger to a text editor, or the command line, but I also don't feel that editing config files by hand somehow makes you 1337 (god I hate that term).
A desktop environment that makes you leave the desktop environment (ie, go to a terminal session and fire up vi) to change it's settings, because having an option in the GUI to change it _might_ confuse one of these mythical users, is just a pain in the neck for us real users.
I recognise that there are benefits to be made by making things easy for new users. But too many people make the mistake of concentrating only on new users, and forgetting that existing users - even the advanced ones are users too.
Re:Someone explain? (Score:5, Insightful)
Completely misguided approach (Score:2, Insightful)
I haven't used the new version of Nautilus and therefore can't say much about it, but the article on Osnews is one of the worst texts about user interface design I have ever read.
It seems the author has not understood, at all, what the sense of metaphors in user interface design is. For him, it is a question of finding "the right" metaphor, on the basis of abstract considerations that have nothing to do with how programs are actually used. Then, he brushes away all other aspects and advocates adopting the option that has been chosen as the best for such abstract considerations and condemning everything else as "bad habits".
There are quite a number of things that are, in my opinion, wrong with this approach:
What is at least as bad as the total misunderstanding about metaphors and user interface design in general is that the author buys this crap about "innovation", "reviving" and "spaciality". Whether a new window should be opened for a folder is an absolutely mundane, practical question that has nothing to do with "spaciality" and "innovations". Good browsers (like Konqueror, in my opinion) make it easy to change the default for this setting in the option dialog, and it is also very useful that different clicks have different effects, e.g. with a middle click something opens in a new tab in Konqueror.
So, what's this fuss about "spaciality" and "innovation" - other browsers like Konqueror have the exactly same possibility, the only difference is that with the "spatial" Nautilus this setting is the default and the way to change it is much more inconvenient with Nautilus and gnome. I only hope that not providing a more convenient way to change the setting is just due to negligence by the developers and that it does not mean that they have similar views like the author of the article and want to force users to do something they deem "better" for absurd quasi-ideological reasons. Nothing against new windows for folders, sometimes that's good, but often it is better not to have to use too many windows.
Re:Someone explain? (Score:5, Insightful)
How DARE the users violate our carefully crafted metaphor!?
Their book/file drawer metaphor is flawed. I don't think of my web browser like a book. As a matter of fact, when I see book-like objects (like PDF files) on my screen, they're really annoying. My hard drive is not like a filing cabinet. I don't need to scatter all the enclosing folders around on my desk to get to the one I want.
I found the article to be very condescending. "Well, if you'd just go ahead and buy our metaphon, you'd like it just fine!"
I loved the spatial nature of Apple's old Finder. But the system was designed from the ground up to utilize it smoothly. Not the case with Linux.
My beef with nautilus and why it doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
What I dislike is the "mime-magic" feature, where it attempts to read every file in the current folder to determine the file types, for 3 reasons:
1) You can't turn it off without downloading the source and rebuilding.
2) It makes the file browser run unbearably slow.
3) Nautilus will ignore your file type settings almost entirely, except to refuse to open a file when it disagreees with you on the type of a particular file. There's no way to tell it "screw you, I'm right and you're wrong, so stop bugging me and let me open the file with a double click"
This is not all entirely bad. Gnome has become an experimental desktop, with cool bleeding edge ideas mixed in with some bad or underdeveloped bleeding edge ideas, the better of which will survive in the long run. If we don't have at least one desktop environment on the bleeding edge, developing new ideas before anyone else, Microsoft, Apple, or some other company is going to patent those ideas and all open source desktops, not just gnome, will be held back by stagnation and threats of patent litigation.
So on the whole, we shouldn't be criticizing gnome, but helping to make it better.
Re:Understanding spatial (Score:4, Insightful)
You answered your own mystery: Gnome does it. ;)
It doesn't matter than Windows has offered a similar system since Windows 98. Now that Gnome is doing it, it's supposed to be treated as a hot new thing in computating, capisce?
Re:"likely to want to change" being the key phrase (Score:2, Insightful)
Gnome 2.6 provides one UI that fits person A to a tee, and one that fits person B, but they look differently and are intended to complement each other. No need to permanently choose - use the spatial mode some days and the "navigational" mode some. You have both modes readily available. Try it, you'll like it.
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
The spatial metaphor caters to deep directory hierarchies, but it desperately needs a bookmarking system.
Re:Understanding spatial (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
But that only works because roadways are relatively static. You don't have to worry about someone suddenly adding twelve stoplights, three left turns, and a stretch of one-way road between the last time you drove and when you're giving instructions.
With a shared data environment, though, you don't have that control. What was the forth folder down alphabetically is now the sixth as a new project comes in; or management decides your folders should be subfolders to match the latest reorg. (Or someone not in management--some people can't resist making improvements regardless of how much of a hassle it is for the rest of the team.)
Re:GNOME developers and the adundance of arrogance (Score:3, Insightful)
This is exactly the sort of thing that is a clear demonstration of arrogance, as the above author claims - opening in a new window or not is easily implemented with a simple check-box option in one of the preferences somewhere.
Deciding instead to *remove* a feature that is integral to the way people work, because some "Expert" thinks they know better is just laughable.
Even microsoft aren't THAT arrogant.
smash.
Corporate Environment (Score:2, Insightful)
I remember this sort of metaphor from windows 95. I hated it then and turned it off, not because I am an uninformed luddite, ignorant of the One True Way, but because I ended up swimming in windows and that was a real pain in the ass.
No doubt our fine author would tell me that I am at fault for having a directory structure which is too deep. This *might* be a valid argument in small scale home directories, but what about accessing the corporate network?
We have literally millions of files broken out by department or project. The directory structure is both wide and deep, and not because we don't know how to organize our files. Just try rolling out spatial Gnome in this environment. No one wants to pay for this level of retraining and no one wants the aggravation.
A good idea? Maybe. Scalable to even a mid-sized corporate environment? No.
Re:I don't see what the big deal is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Take the so-called "evil" windows key. It's a key, and I want to use it. It you don't like the fact that it has a windows logo on it, then paint the stupid key your favorite key and call it the command key.
My experience with gnomites is that they are forgetting that in the end, it isn't always about the itch you want to scratch. It's about users wanting to accomplish tasks with relative simplicity without worry about Admin tasks.
Personally, I use KDE because I can get things done. I press the windows key and I can navigate the "start" menu. I have both desktops loaded, but I use kde more. GNOME is the default desktop that comes up with startx, but I find myself continually type kde more than startx.
Re:What the hell? (Score:3, Insightful)
It would be nice if we could make objects we find in real life more like what we find in a computer.
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What an arrogant jerk (Score:2, Insightful)
So, if the interface is well thought-out, it can in fact improve user experience, even if the user is initially hostile to the idea. But it better be awfully compelling...
Re:Who says it's hard to turn off? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm a die-hard Linux fan and I still know where to look for this in windows. For anyone with some intelligence it's not hard to find it in under a minute, certainly a lot easier to find than the single entry in the Gconf editor. I had to go through this just this weekend when the GNOME 2.6 packages finally made their way into the main Debian repository. I hadn't paid too much attention when this whole "spatial" controversy had started. Mainly because the term "spatial" didn't mean much to me in the context of a file browser. And any discriptions were long-winded and didn't quickly point out the biggest point: it opens a new f**king window for each folder! A quick google turned up a few pages with the simple instructions for turning it off. It wasn't hard, but it was certainly more trouble than simply going to the Preferences dialog box.
(To twitter: I'm starting to think you really are a Linux zealot troll. You're off my friends list for now)
Book analogy (Score:3, Insightful)
If books were like the spacial nautilus, every time you'd turn the page on your book, another book would suddenly appear. And if you wanted to go back and catch what you may have forgotten, you'd suddenly have twenty or thirty copies of the same book sitting in front of you.
Is this what he wanted?
Heh. (Score:3, Insightful)
I love OS, but I'll tell you one thing that commercial software does right:
It eliminates people who make crappy software that doesn't sell.
Not so here, they can continue to make mistake after mistake after mistake and will only realize years down the line they have shitty market share and should have been declared dead long ago. Contempt for your users is not an effective way to impress anyone.
BTW, middle clicking in Spatial Nautilus will open said folder while closing the parent folder, leaving you with just ONE folder.
Re:Spatial for shallow, Browser for deep. (Score:5, Insightful)
This worked for a while to categorize spam. Perhaps we could use it to categorize documents automagically. With the bonus that everytime its wrong, it learns more. The "distributed" part is where we share our filters and gain from each others effort of training the filters.
Thoughts?
Dear Editors (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Best spatial review on the web (Score:2, Insightful)
The topic of a spatial finder has been up for many discussions when OS X went departed from a spatial finder. However I have to defer to ArsTechnica for the best information about it.
John Siracusa offers a coherent explaination [arstechnica.com] of what it means to be a spatial finder and why it can be better.
-nicnakjuggling affordances & constraints (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Re:what nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you have any evidence for that, or are you just guessing?
I'll assume you're just guessing, because anecdotal evidence from my life suggests just the opposite.
The first thing you should understand is the that people I hang out with and work with in the digital realm are all fairly hard core geeks. These are not geeks as in "wrote a website that used Perl once" or "enjoys fiddling with kernel compile options", these people are hardcore in terms of "knows 6 dialects of assembly language", "programs satellites", "reverse engineers Windows for a living", "knows and uses 8 different languages" etc. They all use either Gnome or fluxbox/kahakai/whatever (sometimes both). I'm a geek. I get a kick out of writing programs like this [sunsite.dk]. Yet I use Gnome, and I like it. What gives?
From what I read on Slashdot, I would believe that anybody who is even remotely geeklike would hate Gnome and run away from it. All I see is bitching about whatever it is the Gnome developers have done now, whether it be adopting a HIG, changing the button ordering, spatial nautilus or whatever. Yet all around me there are geeks using Gnome. In fact, only a few I know use KDE, and the ones that do tend not to be the serious coders as such but more the ones who enjoy fiddling with their computer, perhaps know a bit of scripting etc.
OK, so having countered some anecdotal assertions with even more anecdotal evidence, let me try and explain what I see.
The thing is, Nautilus prior to Gnome 2.6 was not very useful. At least, I never used it, and from talking to other people they seem to be pretty much the same. Why use the slow and cumbersome GUI when the command line was so much faster?
With Gnome 2.6, that changed. Once people got used to it, they found it was in some cases actually faster to use the spatial GUI than it was to use the command line. Not for everything! I'd never use spatial Nautilus (or, for that matter, any GUI file manager) to manage my source code trees, which are enormously deep. I do use it to manage my desktop and home folder, which is not that deep.
So, for me and it seems many others that I know, spatial Nautilus is a win. Even for those who don't like it, it's not a big deal because almost universally when questioned they did not use Nautilus before.
Now, all this would be academic if spatial file management did not solve a real usability problem. Does it? I don't know 100%, it's too early to tell, but I do know one thing: I've met many, many Non-Geeks who don't really grok directory/folder hierarchies.
My mother is a classic example of this. She uses computers as part of her office job, but she does not grok file management. She knows how to go through the motions, but if anything changes, she is stuck. She doesn't really use directories, at least, not in a meaningful way. I've explained it to her of course, but she does not grok it (by "grok", I mean to have a zen-like understanding of something) in the same way we do.
Does spatial Nautilus solve her problem? Yes, I think so. I've seen a lot of evidence both from HCI texts I've read and real world experience watching friends and relatives use computers that many people don't connect with tree structures. Presenting a tree structure is a bad plan, they won't really understand it, and it's all too easy to end up with people saving files in the "wrong places" because they don't have any concept of where places are relative to each other.
So spatial Nautilus is about trying to help these people. It might well piss off some other people, but I've found that very few of these people really used GUI file management before - they were almost always shell users, so it's no big loss. And it's fairly easy to revert back to the old way, for those who did.
Free software isn't just for geeks anymore. There are some people who are trying to write software for whom computers are not a natural thing. Don't flame them just because it's not what you would want! Instead, understand their goals, and think critically about whether they are good or bad. I wish I saw more of that here.
Comments on the article... (Score:3, Insightful)
Say what? My icons don't change everytime - Windows or KDE. I'm really not sure what he's getting at here.
This is pretty much opinion though: You may like your icons in every folder to stay where you put it. I prefer them to always be sorted in alphabetical order. If I reshuffle them, I want them auto sorted back to alphabetical order when I reopen the folder. Especially since I have a lot of crap (more than one screenfull) and it's much easier to find alphabetized. I alphabetize my file cabinet, after all! (How's that for your real life analogy?) The exception is my desktop, where icons should stay where I place them (so I can see that nice wallpaper I put up).
I personally see nothing wrong with opening multiple pages in tabs. A person that has to put up with limited desktop resolution looks at tabs as a god send allowing you to only have to keep one window open and no minimize/maximize between windows. When I read /. I open the articles in another tab so that I can go back and forth (cut & paste) like I'm doing now.
While I agree that ten folders is too deep, just because someone keeps a folder stucture deeper than say three levels doesn't mean it's not organized or a lack of thought. Come see my anal retentive layout of the files and you'll see what I mean. I tend to categorize and then sub-categorize such that it's not uncommon for me to reach 4-5 folders deep.
Understanding spatial-MS apple in the barrel. (Score:1, Insightful)
"
Note that most people are saying that "windows tried it" and therefore it must be a bad idea. Windows tried the registry and it must be a bad idea. Windows tried the command-line and it must be a bad idea. Oh wait, guess that means that because Windows did it, and failed, DOESN"T mean that it's a bad idea.
Chalk up another reason to dislike MS. It takes good ideas and ruins their reputations. Apple is relatively immune to this effect because one they show good implimentations of good ideas, first! Two they simply aren't afraid of "think different". Bet you that if MacOSX still had the classic spatial? We wouldn't be having this argument. Everyone would be pointing out how bad MS did it, and Apple did right, and praising Gnome for doing the right thing.
Re:"likely to want to change" being the key phrase (Score:5, Insightful)
Using the "browse filesystem" feature requires right-clicking and making a selection from a drop-down menu. Using spatial view, by contrast, requires only a double-click. In other words, there is under the current situation a small penalty attached to browser view that becomes non-trivial when compounded over multiple instances.
Why is it such a big goddamn problem to add a "browser-view-by-default" menu item to fscking Nautilus? What is the major malfunction of people like you such that you're so goddamn opposed to making it trivial for users to do things the way they damn well please?
The Gnome team seems to forget that in between "newbies" and "31337 h4x0rz" is a large middle ground of "power users" who may not be up to programming and shit, but who understand the behavior of the apps they use in fairly sophisticated ways.
Windows does not win because it bends over backwards for newbies. (Apple does, and it loses). Windows wins because it aggressively cultivates power users. These are the people who shut off spatial view as soon as they booted up Win95. They are also the people who drive purchasing decisions.
Do not fuck with them.
It eliminates people who make crappy software that (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Spatial for shallow, Browser for deep. (Score:5, Insightful)
IMO, the reason this keeps being debated is because of the great diversity of preferences among computer users. For instance, I find GNOME's new spatial thingy to be wonderful (for file managing, at least) in deep folders, as compared to a browser-type file manager. (incidentally, I find spatial browsers to be awful if all I want to do is open a file.) 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.
With spatial Nautilus, I find it a breeze to see both folders open on my desktop (even though it's awful clutter), and Ctrl-C Ctrl-V (or Alt-drag) just like that.
I guess my mind is spatially-oriented instead of timeline-oriented. But that's my point -- there is no one perfect way to do things. For instance, maybe the next person really likes the hybrid browser-plus-tree-sidebar approach that mixes spatial orientation (that tree), easy access to all the folders in the filesystem, and a wee bit o' browsing metaphor.
I was going to smugly inform the "why do I have to use GConf to get back my old Nautilus" posters that my stock GNOME allows you to change from spatial to browser view right in the Preferences... I was, of course, shocked to find out that I was talking through my hat and in fact there was no such setting. Although I'm very stuck on new spatial Nautilus, I agree that the lack of an easy-to-change option was a rash decision on the part of the GNOME devs.
One person's abuse is another's organizing princip (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
What's his problem with this? I tab pages by theme, not "not subpages of the same web site". For example, I keep a weather window open. I prefer one website's forecast page, two overlapping doppler radar pages on other sites, and a local temperature page from another site.
People will choose to use or abuse his precious metaphors and he should get over it.
Real life metaphor ??? (Score:4, Insightful)
serious, my "desktop" is 120x60cm, which is 0.7m^2 waaaaay larger than my 17" CRT, how can you possible put in such a small screen all that i put in a "real" desktop ? answer: you can't.
another thing is how people work with papers. well, i can't say how others do, but when _i_ work with papers i tend to _stack_ them, then shuffle through the papers, and when i need to compare papers i put one besides the other and _no more that two_ at the same time.
see how _my_ metaphor is closer to the tabbed file manager in KDE ?
but this all theoretical. fact is: COMPUTERS ARE NOT DESKTOPS, and people know it. people react diferently to the glowing and the size and the colors and the everything of the computer screens than they react to a phisical desktop. puting icons that resemble folders or sheets of paper does nothing to change this. i know of a lot of people who are excedingly good dealing with and organizing paper that are lousy doing the same on the computer, and is not lack of inteligence or trainig, is just that computers are diferent. period.
just to make sure i'm clear on the diferences:
size: a desktop is much bigger, paper is much bigger and readable than windows in a screen
feel: grabing, shufling and sorting the real thing (paper) whith bare hands is faster and more intuitive than doing the same with the mouse
space: the computer screen is a flat 2D surface, while the desktop allows for stacking, which makes for a visible volume. there's no way for a person to tell if under there is or there isn't other windows under another (unless you use tabs like in KDE). this reason is enough by itself to make the spatial idea bad in the computer. computer screens are _not_ spatial devices. they lack the 3rd dimension, which the desktop has.
in other words: drop the spatial mode as a default and bring the tree view with tabs. Konqueror nailed this right on the spot. i'm pretty happy using konqueros with a tree view on the left and a bunch of tabs, one for each folder moving and copying stuff from one to another. much better and productive than several overlaping windows.
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Someone @ Apple decided "spatial is passé, browsers are the way forward" and that was that. I haven't used Nautilus, but what people are bitching about here is a similar phenomenon, GNOME 2.6 gets Nautilus for its default file manager, and for some reason the onus is put on the user to get used to it. Luckily for linux users, you get a choice of GUI / file browser system to bolt on over your OS. With the Mac, we were just told this was how it was going to be, like it or lump it.
My feelings about he Finder were best summaried by Ars Technica [arstechnica.com] a while back. The author of the OS News piece seems to have drawn from the same sources of reasoning. (Some of the Nautilus designers were from Apple too, as I recall).
I cannot even begin to understand... (Score:1, Insightful)
2. Spatial Nautilus is intuitive because people want to organize their files in large, flat directories.
3. If you want to organize your files in deep, small directories, you are using your computer wrong. Use large, flat directories.
4. Thus, Spatial Nautilus is completely intuitive.
I cannot even begin to understand what sort of mind could concoct this travesty of an argument.
Spatial != lots of windows (Score:3, Insightful)
It's missconceptions like this that is half the reason Linux has so many GUI issues.
Re:Someone explain? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:poor UI design... (Score:3, Insightful)
The remote control is an excellent analogy. Why? Because remote controls work great when you want to control just one or two things.. but they totally suck when doing more. I've never met a universal remote that I liked. They all suck.
How this relates to nautilus, I'm not sure. I for one love spacial nautilus. Mainly for the simple reason that most people only use the file manager when they want to move files around.
I've seen a bunch of people complain about how deep their mp3s are nested etc. Who the hell uses nautilus or explorer or any file manager for their mp3s? They have itunes or whatever their mp3 player is manage them.
People use applications to edit files.. be it word, or openoffice or itunes or photoshop. They only use nautilus to copy files, usually to and from a removable device or a server. Spacial nautilus rocks for this purpose.
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Amounts to Don't know how to use GConf? Then Gnome's not going to let you revert to your preferred method that it changed without asking your first.
Or better yet:
Don't know how to use GConf? Then fuck off, dear user.
Seriously, it's that rude.
Re:"likely to want to change" being the key phrase (Score:4, Insightful)
It's great to have lots of stuff in config files for advanced users to fuck around with, but when you put mundane and common stuff in there (which seems all too common, as this is an exampel), and when the user finds out how to change it and goes to try, oh fuck, he just rendered his system unbootable and calls tech support to ask why his mouse isn't responding.
Support (Score:2, Insightful)
Now, I'm well aware that you're advanced enough that what I've said above doesn't apply to you. I'm also well aware that there are very few linux users to which the above applies. But eventually there will be, and if those users can change anything willy nilly it'll destroy which ever software company lets them.
Re:"likely to want to change" being the key phrase (Score:2, Insightful)
Who do you think is most likely to be running a Linux system in the first place? All this "Desktop for Grandma" shit is getting annoying. Everyone who matters to the adoption of Linux has used a computer before, most likely Windows.
While the GNOME people may be excellent programmers, they suck at demographics. Even users who end up using Linux without installing it are likely to be corporate users and they'll have been using computers everyday if they're employed.
Go ahead and make a spatial browser, smash all preconcieved notions of a user interface and come up with someething cool like mouse gestures for all I care, just don't make it the default. In short, make the default whatever appeals to the people who matter, not your mom.
I don't get it (Score:2, Insightful)
Spatial interfaces suck (Score:5, Insightful)
The "real world" system is intuitive, but it's too damn inefficient. I mean, why can't I have the pub, toilet and a selection of restaurants right next to my bed? Why do I even have to get out of bed? Why can't I just have a list of places I like to go and click one and go straight there?
At least on my computer I can use the equivalent of a teleporter, even if doing so upsets some wannabe hack on OSNews.
Too late to be modded... (Score:5, Insightful)
The main point of a spatial interface that he fails to emphasize (but mentions briefly in passing) is that every time you open a window everything is exactly as you left it. The icons are in the same spots, the view options are set as they were, the window looks the *same*. Each folder is unique.
I can glance at my screen for a split second and tell you exactly what folders are open, just based on their position and view options - all of the "major" folders have distinctive views set. As I click through windows, I'm already moving the mouse to the next icon because I know exactly where it will be. Although he beat his metaphors to death, it *is* just like a desk. I always keep these files here, I can look at my filer and tell how much I have left to do, etc.
Many of you are using spatiality in your web browsers and not even realizing it. When you open a lot of tabs at once, I'll bet you know instinctively where each site is (Megatokyo, Real Life, then PVP, etc) and don't necessarily have to read the titles - you just know that "that's the one I want". That's spatiality.
The reason spatial interfaces on Windows and most Linuxes have failed is *not* because spatial = bad, but because their implementations have generally sucked. The whole point of a spatial interface is that everything maintains its state - it's where you left it and predictable. Linux and Windows (especially Windows) fail in this regard because thye only seem to keep state for a while, or not in all circumstances. Every so often on Windows all the folders lose their state information. That makes a spatial interface impossible to use effectively.
Recently the Mac (where all of this really got started 20 years ago) has screwed it up with its brushed metal windows that interfere with state maintenance in particularly brain-dead ways. Nautilus is the first really good implementation of a spatial file browser in a long time.
To all of the people touting the explorer view, consider this. How often do you need to copy files and end up scrolling the tree pane up and down, clicking through directory trees, or even try opening two explorer windows at once and resize all over to copy? It happens a lot because you're trying to show the entire directory structure in a window at once, and *that* doesn't scale well. However, having one window for one folder does scale. In a spatial model, I open each folder (maybe by clicking through other folders to it, maybe by using a menu or shortcut) and then drag.
Honestly *try* it for a while. Don't like it? Switch it off. Done.
Re:Spatial browsing can be good if... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me make sure I get this...
It's more efficent to go into EVERY file, individually type in keywords for over 100 photos every time you upload a set of photos?
As opposed to popping open irfanview, going through the photos and sorting them into individual folders?
I'm definitely missing something.
It's quicker for me to set things into groups of 20 quickly and search through those 20, then spend the time upfront with these keywords.
I feel the same way about spatial browsing. If I place something in a folder, I will know where to find what I want. That's preferable to grouping everything together and depending on remembering what keywords I chose so that I can search for it.
But then again, I prefer MDI, so I've already gained the experts' ire.
Re:Spatial for shallow, Browser for deep. (Score:4, Insightful)
Analysis of the files reveals the following statistics,
the phrase" McGillicuttys Stormdoor and undertaking" is used in 10% of the documents while "Mrs Greencows Dry Cleaning" appears in 5% of the documents and both appear in only 1% of the documents.
The software can then make three piles - called McGillicutty, Mrs, Greencow, and Summaries
Within each set of documenst - it is found that the phrase 2004 appears a great deal in some docs while 2003 appears in others - mostly exclusively - so the next level of distinction reads 2003, 2004
At every level - the choice is statistically optimize to provide the very best indicator - I have guessed that customer name and year are good divisions - but I guess - statistically other metrics might be better.
It isn't hard to devise a fitness function for how well a term serves to identify a given group of documents with respect to the other documents heaps at a given point x.
AIK
UI Religion (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks for the religion lesson. Spatial interface fans are the True and Faithful, critics are the Infidels. I get it.
Looking at it another way, some people want the UI itself to act like as much as possible like a collection of objects, while others want it to be more of a viewscreen into the world of objects. I don't see any right or wrong about any of this. The only thing that seems wrong is deciding that there can be only one right way.
It's all so obvious now (Score:4, Insightful)
"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..."
Most everyone I know who uses tabbed browsing uses it to minimise the number of windows used rather than some shoddy 'temporary bookmark' system, but the way the author puts across his opinion is that this way of using a browser is OBVIOUSLY wrong - because he can't see PAST the real world metaphor and see that computers really aren't constrained to emulating 'real' objects.
How about this:
"Don't know how to use gconf? Then you shouldn't change the way Nautilitus works, I presume."
Yes, I can see how not wanting a new window for every mouse click is EXACTLY like navigating a Windows Registry style set of configuration data - just like it in fact. Except not at all.
It appears that this is worse than most opinion pieces on the subject as it assumes the one thing that opinion pieces should not - that the author's opinion is the 'correct' opinion and all else should listen up and realise their mistake.
Re:what nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
As far as I can tell, nobody is calling gnome a joke. In fact, I thought the gnome 2.6 desktop was way more usable than both previous gnomes, KDE, and even OSX!
Now, the spatial file manager seems great for desktop file browsing. In fact, that's the only file browsing I do with a file manager... browsing source trees and other large depth things are best left to the actual programs that need to do something with that data (e.g. IDEs).
Besides spatial file browsing, what else do you have a beef with?
Re:Spatial for shallow, Browser for deep. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know why this keeps being debated. Spatial interfaces work for when you have few files and shallow directories, just like in the real world on your desk.
What I want to know is why GNOME and it's proponents have to keep justifying their decisions. How good can their decisions be if they have to keep saying "Well, this is what you really like". I'm getting so sick of GNOME zealots telling me how great GNOME is when GNOME is just guilty of the same Microsoft "This is what you want, I don't care what you say" syndrome. If their UI decisions were so good they wouldn't have to keep trying to justify them. If they're not so good, well, lots of people will criticize them.
When's the last time KDE got knocked for making a controversial UI decision? I don't recall it happening recently, anyway. Of course, KDE has this nasty habit of bringing in UI changes in a fashion that we don't even notice them, or they make it an option we can enable (or easily disable, if that's what we want to do). None of this "Oh, you have to take it because that's how we're giving it".
Before you criticise spatial nautilus... (Score:4, Insightful)
As one of the gnome devs points out [gnome.org], when people test a file manager, they often go and browse around their files. If they do this using spatial, they'll come to the conclusion that it sucks. But that's because spatial _does_ suck for browsing files - if you want to look for something, use the file browser (it's right there on the main menu).
But spatial is incredibly good for day-to-day file management. I finally got round to reorganising my home directory yesterday, and it's incredible how easy spatial made it (after all, file reorganisation is a task which you _want_ loads of windows open for).
So, before you attack spatial nautilus, try reorganising a few directories with it, because that's the sort of task it really shines for.
Re:Someone explain? (Score:4, Insightful)
I certainly don't use any such "file cabinet" metaphor. And a realworld cabinet with the capacity to match my HD would not be the size of a desk. More like a whole flippin' office building.
"Or wheels are a bad mental model, and all land transportation should use legs." Nah, we should all use magic carpets.
Re:Spatial for shallow, Browser for deep. (Score:1, Insightful)
With spatial Nautilus, I find it a breeze to see both folders open on my desktop (even though it's awful clutter), and Ctrl-C Ctrl-V (or Alt-drag) just like that.
Huh? I do the same thing in browser-style Windows Explorer. Browse to the source folder, select "New window", browse to the destination folder, and copy files by drag and drop.
You just said yourself that you hate spatial navigation for moving around the directory tree. And the thing you like about spatial navigation is just as simple in browser-style file managers. So tell me again, why do you like the spatial Nautilus?
Re:Spatial for shallow, Browser for deep. (Score:2, Insightful)
The construction of business rules cannot be fully automated, as they are abstract constructions from particular real world situations.
Ha! I and others have made considerable progress in research areas that will almost assuredly automate this and many other abstract constructions. That is, specific instances of operations from a large set are discovered and resolved into their most specific general rule. When they are adopted as commonplace, you might feel a little short-sighted for your comment.
If you have resigned that this is not possible, please speak for yourself. I am one of those folks who believe that research has yet to reveal the limit of what is possible.
You have to decide for yourself which drawer is appropriate to store your socks in, or even whether storing them in a drawer is appropriate at all.
How about "Computer, bring me my socks" and forget about what you used the drawer for in the first place!
A simple exercise is to imagine terabytes of file names, not just the files themselves (not that you believe storage use would increase in the future). Now, where are all of the socks in the world stored? What drawer might that be?
I'm going to borrow some of a previous post. You are a pinheaded luddite if you oppose this "innovation."
"All those who believe in telekinesis, raise my hand."
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Q. What experience do most new Gnome users have with computers?
A. Basic Windows use.
Q. Are these people going to like spatial browsing?
A. No, they've learned to use a different technique, and non-techies hate it when an interface changes.
Q. So it's going to cost a lot of money to train them to use GNOME?
A. You got it.
Q. Is this going to encourage people to use GNOME?
A. No, it's going to encourage people to stick with Windows.
Hmm... I wonder how much Microsoft are paying the GNOME core developers...
Re:My beef with nautilus and why it doesn't matter (Score:3, Insightful)
The new behaviour is to use the file-endings (if any) while listing the directory and sniff the file when trying to open it.
This is an important security feature that helps against scripts disguising themselves as other files. Remember that there is nothing stopping you from creating a bash-script with "rm -rf ~/" with the name family.jpg.
Windows have lots of problems with this because the default behaviour is to hide the file endings making family.jpg.exe look just like family.jpg, and since UNIX does not work exclusively by file-endings, ignoring this aspect would make this even worse than on Windows platforms.
Besides, you can override this in the new system.
What a classic! (Score:4, Insightful)
Apparently, Radoslaw thinks everyone who doesn't like the new uber-spatial FS browsing is just too dumb and unorganized for it. When did "technology should adapt to its users" get abolished? And puh-leeeeze what's that about the drawer metaphor? The last time I saw a drawer with over 40,000 socks and subdrawers in it was, like, never!
Re:"likely to want to change" being the key phrase (Score:4, Insightful)
But this isn't a mundane option. The "navigational" browser is readily available. You don't need to disable the spatial browser for that.
This option is only for those who passionately hate the spatial mode and wants to completely remove it.
Those users aren't mere "power users". They're people who've, most likely, used old versions of Gnome and wants it back.
I see three kinds of people here.
A lot of people seem to think that category 3 is larger than it is, and that category 2 is smaller than it is. "My dad migrated from windows at age 12 and will go blind if he ever opens spatial nautilus by mistake"? Yeah, I think he'll do fine with being in category 2, thanks. Category 3 is the very vocal OSNews / Slashdot crowd. Learn gconf-editor, dammit, since you're geeks already.
Re:"likely to want to change" being the key phrase (Score:3, Insightful)
I meant "religious and/or nostalgic", not "religious and nostalgic".
And they can use the old UI which is readily available without any gconf-fiddling needed.
I believe the backlash is due to the very condescending and somewhat ill-informed article in OSNews, and also due to the (otherwise very nice) article available here [bytebot.net], in which the impression is given that you need to open gconf-editor if you don't want spatial.
Re:Spatial for shallow, Browser for deep. (Score:3, Insightful)
If you use konqueror, simply split the (konqueror) screen and be done with it.
As for the windows users comment.
Ever since win95 it has annoyed the hell out of me that the windows default was to open a new winodw for each new folder
Re:How to turn it off. (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyway, gconf is the worst idea that the Gnome people ever had. I don't have a problem with having extremly obscure and dangerous functionality that pretty much no user is ever going to touch into GConf, but fact is that Gnome hiddes a whole lot of options that are pretty common in other application deep down in GConf and doesn't even provide the user with any way to get there (advanced button in the preferences dialog or such). Gnome seems to go the road of making it easier for the completly clueless newbie, while making it a whole lot harder for the casual computer user.
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
E.g., when Windows 2000 switched to non-spatial by default (after Win 95 had already proved that spatial is a pain in the butt), they do give you the option of changing it back to the way it was before.
E.g., when for whatever idiotic reason they decided to hide file extensions (and we all know about the flurry of viruses that flourished just because Joe Average could be tricked into thinking that an executable is really a
E.g., when they switched to the (IMHO stupid) use of "web folders" where half the space is taken by a pointless extra frame (presumably to justify why they have to tie IE into the kernel), they give you a big option to disable that.
E.g., my old copy of Win95 still had the old Win 3.1 Program Manager around, if I remember right. You did have to manually add it to Autostart and presumably also move your Start menu icons to it. But if you really wanted to, you could have your old Win 3.1 interface back.
E.g., I'm told that Win XP lets you get your old Win2000 interface back. I wouldn't know, since I never got Win XP.
E.g., when at some point Microsoft switched the cut, copy and paste to CTRL+X, CTRL+C and CTRL+V, the old SHIFT+DEL, CTRL+INS and SHIFT+INS combinations remained usable by us dinosaurs who were already used to the old keys.
Basically all I'm saying is: making the computer usable by grandma is a good and noble goal, but I doubt that squeezing grandma into a strait-jacket is the way to go about it. And if grandma is already used to doing things in a speciffic way, I still think it's smarter to give her the option to keep using her existing skills.
Re:Someone explain? (Score:3, Insightful)
Comments like that guys have me seriously glad I don't use GNOME as my desktop. Flux is my WM and I like it for the most part. Sadly this GNOME idiocy invades other apps. Galeon still hasn't recovered after it attempted to be simplified (the devs would later split and start the near optionless Epiphany). If Firefox could make everything tabs (instead of sometimes opening in a new window) I'd switch but all this hiding of options and we know better than you stuff has me watching alternatives. Sad it's come to that.
UI Experts (Score:2, Insightful)
Surprising that a bunch of UI experts who are so much smarter than everyone else would go and hide the option they should know most people will want way down in some hard to find place.
When you break how a program works on purpose you should make it clear how to fix it.
Re:Spatial for shallow, Browser for deep. (Score:4, Insightful)
Stupid metaphors (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
"clicking a link [in a browser] replaces what you are seeing with the new content, unless the link points to another web site (in which case it may open a new browser window for your convenience)"
And later:
"Sometimes they [users] 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..."
WTF? So I'm wrong to use tabs unless they're pointing to the same website, while websites which open links in a new window are "convenient"?
Is it just my imagination, or is this the complete opposite of what people normally do when they get a tabbed browser?
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
As for all the whiny bitches going on about loads of new windows, have they forgotten middle-click (or double-middle-click) will open the file/directory and close the parent window? I love it, but it seems I'm in a minority.
Re:Spatial for shallow, Browser for deep. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is my opinion, but the thing I can't stand about "spatial" file managers OR the strange "non-spatial" things many people mention is that you can only see where you're currently at. I actually loved the tree-view in Win95+ Explorer and am glad that OSX 10.3 at least put something kind of like it back in the Finder (though WinX is, unfortunately, still better in this respect I think).
What I want in a file system, at least from a "physical layout" standpoint, is the ability to see from a high level the overall structure of the system - how things are stored relative to each other. Basically, a summary "map" where you can see the organization without having to traverse it. The tree-view is currently the best implementation of this - I'd love to see innovations related to some kind of multi-demensional tree-like view that's easy to use and not necessarily 3D or too much animation (I've been trying to think of some but not come up with anything yet). Having an expanded tree view in the side of my explorer window allows me to get to just about ANY location (assuming an intelligent organization of files) in 1 click (perhaps 2 clicks and a scroll). The Windows implementation actually allows you to drag files / folders from the "browse" window over into the tree view, so you don't even need to open a second window at all to do your "spatial copy or move". <Prior Art>I could even envision an implementation where in the tree view you could have something like a "query shortcut" that when you clicked would run a query to show in the browse rather than just contents of a physical directory.</Prior Art>
The thing that gets me is all this "trying to make a computer mimic the physical world" for things like "desktops" and "files" and that sort of thing. One power of computers is that it frees us from some of the limitations of the physical world like having to store things in drawers and the like. I think we'll contstrain ourselves greatly by trying to make computer interfaces mimic the physical.
I could go on, but I've got to get back to work. Hopefully this gives the crowd enough more discussion for a while...
Re:Someone explain? (Score:3, Insightful)
The Macintosh had a set of Human Interface guidelines that suggested a standardized interface, with the goal being that any Macintosh user could use a novel program without the bother of investigating which Function Key was bound to the "print" function. Apple's lawyers did, of course, try to ensure that if Mac users ever tried to leave the Macintosh, they would be condemned to relearn a new set of interfaces. This move is regarded with much scorn and derision, of course, but I do wonder what would have happened if various GUIs were not bound by a slavish adherence to what Apple thought was appropriate in the early eighties.
Linux does not have to look and feel like Windows, and it does not have to look like the Macintosh. But the usability of the system would improve if application designers were able to use a consistent, well designed set of human interface apis.
Unfortunately for linux users, certain human interface designers are quite taken with the "Steve Jobs" style of design -- "Take away those arrow keys-- people should learn to use the mouse properly" -- and fail to understand when their idealism should be tempered by a realistic understanding of how users use Linux.
Re:Spatial for shallow, Browser for deep. (Score:3, Insightful)
Having a filter automatically file an document in a folder called 'Articles about GNOME' is fairly easy. Having it also file it in a folder called 'Articles by John' (or worse, 'Articles by John's friends') is a lot harder, and I'd love to see the AI in a filter that could file it in 'Articles that I find interesting'.
Re:Spatial for shallow, Browser for deep. (Score:4, Insightful)
A Bayesian filter calculates the similarity between two files for any number of aspects. With spam filters, these are normally just 'how close does this match spam', and 'how close does this match legit mail', but they can rank on anything.
It's perfectly possible to sit there and tell a filter that 'these groups of files are personal', and then when another file containing personal information comes in, it will be ranked high on the 'personal' axis.
However, that is possibly the stupidest idea for a file system I've ever heard. It might be useful for sorting random incoming files, aka, 'This file appear to contain information about goat herding. Woudl you like to save it with your other goat herding files?', or even searches if you can't remember a certain filename or any keywords in it, just what it was vaguely about, but it would be a very sucky way to actually locate files day to day.
The Iron Curtain Mentality is Alive and Well (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's get one thing right, right now, right here all you programmers and system analysts:
The user is your GOD! YOU serve the USER. YOU make systems and appplications that give the USER maximum flexibility. What the USER wants is paramount. If you think the user is abusing your metaphor (sheesh!) it's because your mind ain't right. Get right with your god. Listen. Serve. Adapt. Obey.
Yeah I know I'm flaming but this is no troll. I'm just sick and tired of the insanely arrogant attitude that SOME (I emphasize some, but it's too many) developers have towards the people who feed and clothe them.
One bright spot in the gloom of the high tech bust is that it drove some of these characters into careers more suited to their attitudes, like being prison guards.
The problem is the mindset of the developers (Score:1, Insightful)
Metaphorist GNOMEs scare me (Score:3, Insightful)
According to Webster "a metaphor is the transference of the relation between one set of objects to another set for the purpose of brief explanation; a compressed simile; e. g., the ship plows the sea. --Abbott & Seeley. 'All the world's a stage.' --Shak."
The purpose of a metaphor thus, is not necessarily to think of the relation in question as the metaphorical relation, but to clarify a relation by referring to a metaphorical relation.
To force a metaphorical relation in favor of an actual relation is just plain sillyness.
I never liked the folder metaphor, because I think it severely distorts the semantics of a directory. Whereas the concept of a computer directory very closely maps to the concept of other well-known directories, like, for instance, a business directory, the concept of a filesystem folder resambles a real folder in nothing:
Have you ever organized a big amount of personal (or an even greater amount of company) files without the aid of relational databases or the good ol' directory concept?
Clearly you have never sensed the advantages of a hierarchical directory structure, or you'd realize that having 10000 files in one folder does not only decrease your performance because it complicates finding your files, but that this also decreases the computer's performance because it has to actually scan an do something intelligible with all these thousands of files. Who were you accusing of "bad file organisation coupled with a bunch of old bad habits" again?
A directory does not require a metaphor, because, as long as directories will be around, they'll be easy enough to explain through the concept of ... a directory.
Now that I have explained why the folder metaphor is one of the most worthless modern desktop metaphors (Don't get me started on the 'desktop' metaphor.), it's time to explain why spatial file management is a bad idea as well, if each folder is supposed to represent a drawer:
I don't like real-world drawers, because
Real-life drawers seem to be most usable when they're subdivided using smaller containers like those used for separating forks from knives and the likes.
I adjust my user interface to the task at hand:
Two pane window ( mc, nc , and others) rules (Score:2, Insightful)
File manager must provide convinience, and not an analogy.
Try copying bunch of files from one dir to another using keyboard in good old mc (Midnight Commander - grandfather of gnome file managers ), and then try doing same using mouse in spatial Nautilus. Whats faster and easier?
Using lots of different OSes over my 15 years of career in IT, I've seen it all, and I can attest that nothing beats simplicity and convinience of two pane file managers, originally introduced by Norton Commander. Proper GUI version of it is whats needed, not spatial-shmatial garbage.
Note that simple-minded users who may require this spatial mode are extremely unlikely to use any file manager at all. All they are going to do is open the word processor and save files in single directory. They almost never do any File management. It s a pity, that gnome developers can't see such a simple thing.
Sado-Maso (Score:3, Insightful)
Who figured this out? An academic researcher? Some corporate R&D person? This is blatant failure to use common sense. Most people love when machines work in a way that is easier than the behaviour of real-life objects. (Hint: think deeply about why do people want machines?...)
Most of the time, people don't sort drawer contents because it is a chore (it is just easier to throw it in unsorted). I would love to have physical drawers where I throw a piece of clothing and it neatly sorts itself (and I strongly doubt I'm the only one who would like such a wondrous device -- btw: wifes/moms don't count as these "devices", they have way too many side effects)
In very few cases I want a specific arrangement (because a specific arrangement implicitly carries the obbligation to manually arrange items every time). Those few cases perhaps justify having the spatial interface as a choice for specific folders.
Otherwise, designing the inefficiencies of the real world into our machines too, it is outright masochistic (or sadistic, depending which side of user/designer you're on).
Gnome designers, if you keep doing this, I'll hire a PI and expose you in leathers and whips for the world to see :P
Thought process changes... (Score:3, Insightful)
I have grown quite accustomed to tabbed browsing (thanks to mozilla, and firefox). I hate the idea of keeping everything in separate windows based on which site I'm visiting. I browse with everything in the same window (separate tabs), based on the tasks I'm working on. For example, right now, there are four different slashdot stories (the ones I'm interested in reading) in four different tabs. When I finish with one, I'll close it and move on to the next. If a link sparks my interest, I'll open it in a new tab (set to open in the background) and move on to it next.
In another browser window, I have another browser session waiting for my attention. What would be really neat is if I could save these browsing sessions like files and open them at a later date.
If my file manager worked like this, I'd be thrilled. I'd love to have different folders open in different tabs for a related work session and drag-and-drop files between them by hovering over a tab (which would then become active so I can drop files into that folder). Again, I'd love the ability to save the state of the tabs, so that those common file-management tasks are facilitated more readily.
THAT would be real progress. Even better -- abandon the strict file hierarchy altogether, and instead use a database system that allows you to combine the hierarchial file paradigm with labels (anybody use gmail?). A single file might seem to live in a variety of places... For example, if you have some business graphics, you could browse to it from the "business" branch, or the "graphics" branch (both root folders). Attempting to work this way with symlinks and shortcuts is messy, at best, and nobody wants to create a complicated query just to find a file they could have openned with three keystrokes, given a decent thought-hierarchy file browser.
It seems to me that the user interface should mimick the way we think -- not the way our physical office works. That's the advantage of a computer -- we can make it work better and faster than related physical processes.