[Thunar-workers] [DokuWiki] page added: ui:spatial

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A page in your DokuWiki was added or changed. Here are the details:

Date        : 2005/02/21 21:19
Browser     : Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20050122 Firefox/1.0
IP-Address  : 217.229.251.5
Hostname    : pD9E5FB05.dip.t-dialin.net
Old Revision: none
New Revision: http://thunar.xfce.org/wiki/ui:spatial
Edit Summary: created
User        : benny

====== User Interface - Spatial View ======


===== Motivation =====
There have been quite a lot of discussion in the Open Source desktop
community lately, about the adoption of //spatial user interfaces//.
While spatial interfaces are commonly used for things like Web
Browsers, it has been quite unpopular to use it for File Managers
on an Open Source desktop (Gnome added spatial view to Nautilus
with 2.6 recently). Many file managers (and users) still stick
to the navigational view (the browser view).

The basic question is: Why would we want to use it? And the answer
is quite obvious: Thunar's major goal is //easy-of-use// and that's
exactly what we get with the //spatial view//. Now, if that matches
the requirement, why not simply use //spatial view//? Why write this
Wiki page, instead of writing the code already? Mostly because of
the users (useless to talk about trolls here, so we'll concentrate
on the real target users):


===== The user problem =====
While spatial views make things easier (that's the whole point in
about them actually), many people are too dependent on the more
complex views. They've used them for years, and their minds have
trouble getting used to a "new" concept. If you are new to computing,
it's definetly easier for you to get used to a spatial interface,
than a non-spatial/complex interface. But for someone, who has used
a browser interface in file managers for years, it costs them quite an
effort to realize that it may be easier to use a stripped down
interface, rather than a fullblown one.

For example, many people (like myself) have/had totally cluttered
home directories, and a horribly bad directory structure, which
didn't matter for me, since I hardly use any file manager, but most
of the times, I simply use the shell, where I have aliases for the
important directories (a ''zsh'' feature). But when I recently
started to use a file manager, I realized how bad my home directory
layout was - besides that I even re-discovered some files I had
been missing for a long time, quite confusing. Being ignorant, my
first thought was: //GUI file managers (esp. spatial ones) are for
wimps//... ehm, did I say that I work on a file manager? ;-)

Ok, then I decided to power-on my brain, and I realize that it
wasn't the file manager that was bad, but my handling of files and
directories was wrong. I had way too many nearly empty directories,
and everything was nested too deeply, and the result was that my
desktop was cluttered with folder windows (browser mode wasn't
better here, since the treepane on the left gets useless as well,
if you browse deep into a directory structure). I could tell more
about my personal inabilities, but we're not here
to blog, but we're to work - **blog less, work more!** ;-)

So to sum up: The basic problem with a spatial file manager
interface is located in the (advanced) user's mind. Unfortunately
patching the corresponding code is impossible most of the times,
which brings us back to the basic question: 

//Can we use a simple UI even if half of our existing user
base will complain at the first sight?//

==== Analysis ====
It's worth to analyse the reasons why people complain about
a simple UI. The following points are mostly based on
research concerning the spatial Nautilus:

  * People try to use the spatial view like a navigational view, which of course won't work, and the result is confusion and frustration.
  * Some claim that it's too much effort to get used to the new concept (judging from the reports, many of them haven't even tried, so this argument is probably useless).
  * Others claim that a simple UI doesn't allow them to perform complex tasks.

Concerning the last point, I have to say, that for me a simple UI has two
basic qualities:

  * Make //simple tasks// easy to accomplish.
  * Make //complex tasks// possible to accomplish.



===== Prototype =====
The [[ui:overview#prototype|existing prototype]] was extended to include
a spatial prototype (in the ''spatial'' sub directory).

{{ui:spatial:20050221-iconview.png}}

A screenshot of a desktop with several spatial Thunar windows is
available [[http://www.xfce.org/~benny/tmp/20050221-spatial.png|here]].


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