Spatial Nautilus or windows training

[Z]

On Wed, 2004-04-07 at 17:45, Steve Bergman wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-04-07 at 18:47, Colin Charles wrote:
> 
> > > I'm curious, was spatial just someone's neat idea or is it backed up by
> > > some sort of usability study, or commonly accepted UI principles?
> > 
> > Plenty of usability studies. Read desktop-devel-list at gnome archives, or

Such usability studies (the ones that I saw, at least) used novices or
end-users. Secretaries and the like, people that by the nature of their
jobs only "frequent" a few directories on their machines and use a few
applications.
On the other hand, my wife is an english teacher and only users a few
apps, but if she can't have a tree view of her stuff she'll
rip your balls off.
Anyone who needs to manage a large number of directories, or several
nested directories, will not use "spatial" (GOD! I hate that term.
There's nothing "spatial" about it)

> > even usability at gnome. Many websites out there have links to stating why
> > its useful, its not only the OS X feature... Ars Technica had a writeup
> > that did bear a lot of influence on the GNOME team though

Which happily / gladly ignores the need of a tree view, which is to me
it is a fatal flaw. Also ignores the popularity of treeviews in
alternatice file managers, source browsers, menuing systems, etc.
As mental masturbation is a fine article, but disconnected with reality.

> Could you point me to a specific thread?  Searching desktop-devel-list
> and usability archives for "spatial" only serves to indicate that there
> was very little discussion and that most of the commentary about opening
> folders in their own windows was negative.  I saw no mentions of any
> usability studies at all.
> 
> As to being a nice player, if the nautilus guys jump off a bridge, I see
> no reason that Fedora necessarily needs to follow.  Spatial still looks
> like a UI disaster to me.  I hope I'm wrong.

Actually, I think I'm being a nice player by letting them know how wrong
it is to impose a point-of-view that didn't had even a _hope_ of ever
being the majority's opinion. Witness the controversy on the usability
list.
I also must point out that MS Windows had that flat view option for ages
and it never became the dominant setting. Not a single poerson that I
know uses it, except some of the Mac freaks. But these people are sick
:-).