[321] in Athena User Interface
Re: Nautilus for usability testing?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Maciej Stachowiak)
Fri Jul 21 22:52:03 2000
To: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
Cc: aui@MIT.EDU
From: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@eazel.com>
Date: 21 Jul 2000 19:51:38 -0700
In-Reply-To: "Christopher D. Beland"'s message of "Fri, 21 Jul 2000 18:31:08 -0400"
Message-ID: <lq7laeyj0l.fsf@pythagoras.eazel.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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"Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU> writes:
> So people have been talking about getting a Nautilus pre-release to
> use during formal testing. However, it would need to be made
> AFS-friendly and deal sanely with lockers (i.e. /mit/ paths vs /afs
> paths) and home directories.
>
> How much pain would this cause, and is it really worth it?
>
> We only have about 10 days left in which to fix everything else we'd
> like to have ready.
>
> It would be better to test with Nautilus rather than gmc, but only if
> Nautilus is stable enough to use for say, 15 minutes, and it has a
> reasonable amount of functionality (navigating and opening files) has
> been implemented.
>
> I do think that one of the tasks we want to have users execute is
> "download a file and open it" so we have to have *some* sort of
> graphical file manager. The sort of question we want to answer is,
> will novice users realize that the GFM exists, and how will they try
> to use it? We will also be looking at GFM vs. command line access,
> but which particular GFM we have installed is not that critical.
I wouldn't reccomend trying to do this Nautilus work now, on a tight
deadline; it has basic functionality (and even a fair bit of non-basic
functionality), but it's not very stable and adding AFS support might
not be totally obvious (part of the support at least would need to be
at the gnome-vfs level).
- Maciej
