Hello, On 8/22/06, Calum Benson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > To be honest, I'm also not clear what 'spatial' means for other > applications anyway. E.g. Daniel Borgmann writes about your scratchpad > example: > > In true spatial philosophy, it is not possible to create a new > document from inside a scratchpad window, instead you will have > to create a new document using your file manager and then open > it. > > which I'd say, in itself at least, isn't much to do with spatial UIs > (and as an aside, it would probably drive me mad!) Without having used > it, it sounds to me more like it's just a document-driven rather than an > application-driven UI, which always sounds like a great idea until you > try to design a whole desktop around it :)
What spatial means to me can basically be summed up as "object oriented". It means that each window of the application represents a unique object with persistent (spatial-) state. This can be an application object, a document object, a project object or something else. The current release of Scratchpad is purely document oriented indeed, for the next release (and this was my initial plan as well), I'm working on the project oriented interface which will be used when Scratchpad is launched independently. I have written some details about it[1] on my blog and would very much like to hear usability related critique about this plan. The reason why I don't allow new documents from within a document window is more related to the spatial interface than part of it. The point is that it's not possible to have a direct window<->object mapping, when the object doesn't even exist yet. I could offer a new document interface that would require the name and location of the document beforehand, but that appeared like a rather crude method to me compared to using the file manager directly. Scratchpad has an "Open Folder" option to access the document's folder, so it flows nicely. I doubt that it would drive you mad. :-) In general, I don't think spatial interfaces are the right choice for every application yet (my chess viewer doesn't use a spatial interface for example), but I strongly believe that it (or rather object orientation in general) is a worthwhile idea to pursue, mainly because it makes interfaces more consistent and their behaviour more reliable. It's just important to remember that object orientation doesn't have to mean document orientation and that a document UI isn't always the best choice. Then maybe most of the obligatory flaming about this topic could be avoided. Daniel [1] http://dborg.wordpress.com/2006/03/25/what-the-f-is-scratchpad/ _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
