Real world metaphors are not always good (Score 2, Insightful)

There seems to be an assumption in the spatial Nautilus idea that real-world metaphors are a Good Thing (tm). I disagree with that -- a different medium needs sometimes a different approach.

Good examples of bad metaphors are:

• Quicktime (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