On Tue, 2005-08-23 at 17:24 +0200, Christian Neumair wrote: > If the user wants to browse to hidden directories, he can also use > ctrl-H (in Nautilus). We could add that binding to the file chooser as > well for toggling display of hidden files. > > If you are bound to use the keyboard anyway, isn't a simple ctrl-l > reasonable?
The current methods to reveal hidden files and get a location entry were completely undiscoverable for me. I only found out about them by reading this mailing list. There's not even a help icon in the file selector that could be used to figure this out. I like the idea of adding a location bar and making the folder names clickable. Users are used to seeing text-based location bars when web browsing. As the user scrubs the mouse over the names, the underline will appear and the mouse cursor will change, signalling a clickable element. Again this is feedback learned when browsing the web. Advanced users could go a step further and edit the text directly, at which point tab completion becomes useful. I think it's a bad idea to use arrows instead of slashes, because a power user might wonder if they are supposed to type an arrow somehow. And if one had to explain how to type in a location to a newbie, there's a good opportunity for confusion when the slash becomes converted somehow to an arrow. It seems easier to teach that a slash separates items than to try to come up with a new, untypable separator. (And once beagle becomes ubiquitous, that location bar could double as a beagle entry box for users who just type a filename in the bar and expect it to search the drive, like how URL bars auto-search google) Owen Williams _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
