[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List:       kde-look
Subject:    Re: kde's future
From:       Peter Lyons <peter.lyons () oberlin ! edu>
Date:       2001-01-10 2:56:51
[Download RAW message or body]

I definitely agree with Henry that all the functionality should be there, 
but you can shield your novices who click randomly until something works 
from it.  The pre-fab settings for Basic, Intermediate, Advanced (I would 
suggest the word basic or beginner over easy) sound OK, but I think if you 
just keep it out of reach of the click-happy novice, you can keep a wider 
audience happy.  For example, more advanced and potentially confusing 
options are fine in the context-sensitive right-click menus because novices 
are not going to be right-clicking anything, and if they do, they are 
willingly going beyond their usual scope.  So, putting delete, rename, new 
folder, etc there is fine. Also, having things come with keybindings is 
fine because novices have never realized that you can hold down a key and 
hit another, and if your like me, you use the keyboard as much as possible. 
Anyway, here are my preliminary thoughts on how this could work: (this is 
working within the idea of dialogs, which I think are bad and unecessary, 
and I think we should move away from them, but for now, let's make them 
good)

    The default dialog you get the first time you use KDE is completely 
simple, obvious, and plain.  It  should just have the navigation arrows, an 
"Open" (or Save, etc) button (I'm not a fan of OK), and a "Cancel" button. 
It should not have the filter menu, but the list of files should use a 
filter to list all openable files first in alphabetical order, and then a 
list of non-openable files that are dimmed-out.  I like this because the 
idea of file types is confusing to novices who don't understand the 
relationship between applications  and  different types of files, however, 
if they know that they have a file called hawaii.jpeg in their home 
directory, they will get confused if it doesn't show up, but the dimming 
out makes it pretty clear that it does not make sense to click that.  I 
think the dialog should say "To Open a file, click on it and then click the 
Open button".  There should be no deleting, no new folders (obviously not 
in the open dialog, but maybe not in the save dialog either), no renaming, 
no right-click menu, no nuttin'.  Also, the refresh button does not make 
sense to the novice.  They don't realize that you read the directory once 
and then display a snapshot of how it was right then, they think that those 
icons ARE the files.  This is probably a much more low-level thing  to 
change that would probably have to be done by trolltech and have some 
implementation complications (I'm not a Linux developer myself, at least 
not yet), but really if you are in an open dialog and a new file appears in 
that directory, it should just appear.  For now, the refresh button is fine 
in the other levels, but novices won't understand why it is there.  I 
realize that they could be confused as to why some new file isn't showing 
up, put since they rarely multitask, I wouldn't worry about it.  they can 
cancel and try again.  Somewhere out of the way, there should be a 
pull-down menu that allows them to switch to Intermediate or Advanced. 
Obviously, this should somehow be protected from the random clickers, 
although I'm not sure exactlly what might be appropriate.

    If you switch to intermediate, you get basically the current (well, 2.0 
as I haven't switched to the 2.1beta1 yet) dialog, but the right click menu 
should have delete, rename, etc as well.  Once you switch, you should 
always get that level in all applications for that type of dialog until you 
manually switch back.


Hope this is useful,

Peter Lyons

   The advanced could have maybe a few more features, like regex-based 
filters or custom filters, and maybe more sorting options, but I'm not sure 
what else.
--On Tuesday, January 09, 2001 07:09:02 PM -0500 Henry Stanaland 
<henryst@MIT.EDU> wrote:

>
> Well, I have a friend who is very computer
> illiterate(she hasn't even used her Mac in
> years).  But the one thing she DOES do
> on my computer is use Napster & XMMS.  She
> uses the Rename & Delete button all the time.
> She has never "accidentally" did something wrong
> or gotten confused.  What does confuse her is
> Konqueror or any other file manager(really
> the problem is the Unix file structure).  So
> we have one vote from a computer-illiterate Mac
> user to have rename/delete options in the
> file-dialog.
>
> If anything, I agree with the use of Konqueror as
> the File Dialog.  That way, you could open an image
> directly from a webpage or your digital camera.  Heck,
> you can't currently open a file that is on the Windows
> Network through the File->Open dialog!
>
>
> *********
>
> On a side note.  Has there been any talk of making a
> universal "Difficulty" setting for KDE?  Similar to
> what is available on Nautilus, where a user chooses
> "Easy, Intermediate, Advanced, Custom"?
>
> If KDE did implement something like this, perhaps we
> could have all these ideas.  Easy would only permit
> saving files,  Intermediate would allow renaming/deleting,
> and advanced would give you a Konqueror-like file-dialog.
>
> These types of things could apply to almost anything
> in KDE.  In other words, the difference between a
> Hacker's OS and a Newbie's would be a single click.
>
> Regards,
> Henry Stanaland

[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]