Andrew Farris wrote:
And when they go more than a few folders deep they'll still be annoyed
at all the useless still-open windows left around even if they expect
them.
Not necessarily.
How can anyone possibly want all of the intermediate windows left open
when they really just want to get to some deep path location?
A person new to nautilus spatial browsing but who has experience with
linux may find it surprising, and so will someone who has experience
with Windows Explorer but who has never seen Apple OS.
The finder in OS X doesn't clutter my screen that way - at least in
10.5. What Apple OS do you mean?
Thats because Apple has chosen not to make it default behavior, not
because it is not included.
And that's because Apple makes some effort to give people a better
experience.
Take a look in the Finder preferences and
you'll find it right there (always open in new window) and then set your
finder mode to icon view (cmd-1) and start browsing spatially.
But I don't want to browse spatially.
OSX will
behave very similarly to Gnome when you've done that, remembering window
placement for any directory you have opened.
I'll control that myself, thank you.
Whether it is the default behavior is not something I'm really concerned
about, only the perception that it is somehow 'wrong' because you don't
like it.
No option is 'wrong' if a user sets it himself. In that case it isn't
anyone else's business. The default behavior is the only one where you
can pass judgment.
I suggest you go have a look through gnome development mailing lists for
discussion on spatial browsing if you really are interested (especially
if you want to argue it should not be the default for upstream). You
might also find this [1] interesting (see point 6).
If I understand point 6 to mean that spatial browsing relates more
closely to physical objects, that makes sense and is why I don't like
it. If I wanted things to be as inconvenient as physical objects I
wouldn't be sitting at a desk using a computer. I want the objects to
come to me, not to be frozen in some inconvenient distant space. And I
want them to clean up after themselves better than things in the
physical world.
This thread is one more example of why HCI is still (3 years after this
blog) in the stone ages.. because people continue to demand things work
the way they first learned them to work even when it makes very little
sense from a perspective of how a human might best work with a computer.
I'm not demanding things to work the same as I first learned them, I
just want changes to be for the better, not worse. The problem is not
so much about the attributes of spatial windows, although I much prefer
to control those attributes by my view instead of having them attached
to the object itself, the real problem is that opening unwanted windows
is a side effect of navigation. I don't want to have to remember some
unnatural action for navigation vs. end point choices and I want an
explict 'open a new window' when I reach locations that I want left open.
And interesting read [2] on why the 'desktop' itself is a poor interface
destined to be forgotten and left behind as we learn to interact with
our computers in far more complicated ways.
No argument there, but again, I want the objects/options to come to me,
not to be hiding in locations distant from my mouse pointer, especially
as screens get bigger.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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