On Mon, 2004-07-26 at 13:49, Emanuele Aina wrote:
The old file dialog was very ugly, as it was a leftover from GNOME 1.x (which was ugly for a thousand reason).
I don't think that's in dispute.
The new file dialog is a lot better to use. It needs only a little bit of pratice to get used, but is a lot simpler, in particular using it with the mouse.
Research has shown that most users keep their files in rather broad, flat hierarchies.
Scroll-and-click by itself is neither a simple nor an efficient approach for them.
What users really need is a simple (live) substring or prefix search to winnow the list and reduce hunt-and-scroll.
One possibility would be to use the entry field for that role -- explicit (fully typed) filenames or paths would become simple degenerate cases. (on the other hand, entries disappearing as they typed might be disconcerting)
The decision to hide the text entry (it is still here, just press Ctrl-L as in a web browser) was taken to hide the complexities and the differences of the underlying OS from the user.
From a UI perspective, that is a failure. How is the user supposed to
know Ctrl+L does this?
Most of the Inkscape developers are pretty hardcore. If _we_ were totally unaware of the text entry hidden by Ctrl+L (how were we to know? where is it documented?), there's a serious problem. And we're the target audience for that shortcut.
There needs to be a visual "affordance". For example, Mac OS X's open dialog also hides part of its UI from the naive user, but it provides an expander widget -- a standard visual metaphor both indicating that there is more hidden UI, and providing a _visible_ means of revealing it.
IMO, at least adding an expander widget to the dialog would be a reasonable compromise. Pets and small children will not be scarred for life if they click it out of curiousity. The text entry widget is not Janet Jackson's boob.
-mental