On Tue, 2004-12-21 at 09:21 -0400, bulia byak wrote:
On Tue, 21 Dec 2004 13:10:30 +0000, Mike Hearn <mike@...333...> wrote:
I guess I should re-iterate that the reason this was done is because
the
GNOME guys want to eliminate file paths from the UI a la MacOS
Classic.
As anybody who has ever tried to explain what ~/
or /mnt/net/homes/d20xt3
is to a non-technical user can appreciate, hiding the UNIX filing
system
is probably wise ...
I don't want to start a flamewar, but I still think it's an incredibly stupid idea. "Non-technical" users are NOT INTERESTED in what ~/ means. They are well aware of the fact that this computer thing has some stuff they do not understand, so they don't mind if it's cryptic sometimes. All they want is some way to get the result they need quickly and reliably every time.
I'm not sure if I agree that people don't mind things being cryptic, especially if they are exposed in the UI, but I think that just hiding stuff isn't the goal; consistency is, including treating network virtual file systems (gnome-vfs can e.g. use an SFTP-accessible remote server as a file system) identically to local files; with this, the Unix single-rooted directory tree simply doesn't make any sense any more. The only thing that does make sense is actually an URI, but those are really ugly and besides for the user the netword transfer protocol should be pretty irrelevant. So they chose to work on making it look the same whether a file is on an actual mount point or on a virtual network filesystem. You may disagree with the decision, but there certainly is method to the madness.
With typeahead find I actually find the stock GTK+ filechooser to be pretty good. Without that feature (which IIRC was always patched into the Fedora version) I could see it being quite bad though. I would possibly agree that there should be a more obvious way of getting to the path dialog than '/' or ^L.
So, even for non-technical users, this "improvement" is dubious at best. For the rest of us, it's a disaster, plain and simple.
I bet that it really depends on what you're used to. I'm not one of the designers but I do find the design to be a huge improvement over many other file dialogs, much less cluttered and confusing than many of them.
/Per