Last minute Nautilus change for Fedora 9

[Andrew Farris]

Callum Lerwick wrote:
> On Sat, 2008-03-08 at 17:52 -0800, Andrew Farris wrote:
>> I wonder how difficult it would be to get a patch accepted upstream for adding a 
>> second pulldown in the Preferences->Views pane which had Icon View, default icon 
>> zoom level, and default thumbnail zoom level.  The 'default' that option started 
>> at would be a minor issue, but exposing that as configurable more easily might 
>> be reasonable.
> 
> Less preferences, more direct manipulation. Ctrl-scrollwheel seems to be
> becoming a defacto standard UI for zooming of various sorts. The user
> should be able to just directly "zoom" a window, and then it should
> stick. End preference segregation. Put preferences right where they
> matter, such as in the context menu of the object it pertains to, don't
> mash them all together in a preference dialog.

I agree that ctrl-scrollwheel is a much more effective, and user intuitive zoom 
interaction... but you *obviously* must deal with the different icon/file sizes 
versus image thumbnail sizes in a different way, or you'll need 
shift-ctrl-scrollwheel... and then you cannot use that one for something else. 
Adding a widget to the preferences dialog to expose a minor preference is not 
the same thing.  You could still zoom your icon view in any way gnome wants to 
move forward with making 'standard', but whether the sizes match is a different 
issue.

There are only a limited number of finger contortions that users are capable of 
1) doing with their hands, 2) replicating in other means for accessibility 
support, 3) remembering.  The UI is very complicated when applications start 
taking on these advanced UI interactions without moving them to the control of 
the system itself.  Think for a minute how strange it is to have each window 
manager with differing window move/resize mousebutton shortcuts by default.

Having nautilus get patched to just zoom in a way that seems best is not the way 
forward for UIs.

> Its time for a major paradigm shift in GUI, based on zooming in and out,
> driven by ever higher LCD resolutions and the ubiquitous availability of
> scaling hardware. It's time to break free of the idioms developed for
> the machines of 1994 and begin designing a new generation of software...

Yes, but a paradigm shift is done in large scale *otherwise it fails*, not one 
application at a time.  Many people have taken up the torch of changing how 
people interact with computers but most are failing to have major impact with 
minor changes.  Things like multi-touch screens are a major breakthrough... 
handling keycombo zooms to nautilus without doing so from the larger GTK level 
itself is not.

-- 
Andrew Farris <lordmorgul at gmail.com> www.lordmorgul.net
  gpg 0xC99B1DF3 fingerprint CDEC 6FAD BA27 40DF 707E A2E0 F0F6 E622 C99B 1DF3
No one now has, and no one will ever again get, the big picture. - Daniel Geer
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