On Thu, 2005-12-22 at 01:00 +0100, Tomasz Janowitz wrote: > "So, this gets to the heart of the question. In spatial mode this > situation can only occur if the user commonly uses lots of directories, or > deeply nested ones. > Is this the most common scenario for our target user?" > > Designing a behaviour of file manager assuming that it won't manage many > files/folders and deeply nested ones (which is what the filesystem was > designed for) isn't the best approach IMHO. > > "I think it is not. I observe people saving files to the default save > location for the application (web browsers, office tools, etc). And > leaving them there." > > I don't know one such person. Maybe it's just friends I've got are such > a pedantic puritans. Or maybe organizing files in deeply nested trees is > normal way of dealing with lot's of files. I've got over 3 thousand mp3's. > Putting them in one location is a joke. Hundreds of documents, books and > other stuff has to be managed with directories. It helps, not stands in the > way.
All right, I'll bite. I'm an audiophile and a music addict. I buy tons of music nobody's even heard of. I record concerts. My ~/Music folder has roughly 8000 oggs and flacs, totalling about 120 GB. I never used Mac or Amiga much. I used Windows long ago, back in the mid-90s. Then a professor showed me GNU/Linux, and I never looked back. I'm a programmer. For my programming tasks, I don't touch the file manager. Not because the file manager isn't useful, but because I don't use many other GUI tools. I'm just going to call emacs and make anyway, so I might as well be at a shell. Outside of programming, I'm very big on dogfooding. So I use GUI tools pretty much exclusively, except on the off occasion where automating something with a shell script would save me hours. It's not some masochistic endeavor either. I generally prefer using GUI applications. Now, with all that background on me, I'm telling you that I love spatial. And I especially love it on my very large music collection. Everything just feels natural. I just always have a clear sense of where I am and what I'm doing. Do I have to manually set some folder positions and sizes? Yeah. And hey, if somebody put some code into Nautilus to do some heuristics on the initial folder size and position, that could be cool, if it worked well. But I add maybe nine or ten folders a month. Nine or ten times a month, I take five seconds out of my day to put a folder where I want it. Just like nine or ten times a month, I spend five seconds finding the right place for a CD on my shelf. And that five seconds makes my life simpler the rest of the time. -- Shaun _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
