[704] in Athena User Interface
Re: [Nautilus-list] Results of MIT usability testing
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Miles Lane)
Sun Mar 4 13:09:10 2001
Message-ID: <3AA2852D.1050605@megapathdsl.net>
Date: Sun, 04 Mar 2001 10:10:53 -0800
From: Miles Lane <miles@megapathdsl.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: tom georgoulias <tmgeorgo@io.com>
CC: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@mit.edu>,
John Sullivan <sullivan@eazel.com>, "Susan B. Jones" <sbjones@mit.edu>,
nautilus-list@eazel.com, arlo@eazel.com, eli@eazel.com,
Andy Hertzfeld <andy@eazel.com>, aui@mit.edu, kcahill@mit.edu
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tom georgoulias wrote:
> tom georgoulias wrote:
>
>> "Christopher D. Beland" wrote:
>>
>>>>> Actually, they did, or at least one person did, but the Duplicate
>>>>> command was not active, greyed out.
>>>>
>>> It wasn't an AFS-related bug. It was because the users had already
>>> opened the files in "View as Text" mode. In PR3, in this mode, the
>>> Duplicate option on the File menu is not greyed out; it just doesn't
>>> exist at all.
>>>
>>> My personal recommendation would be that a double-click launches an
>>> external editor, or optionally a dialog that asks the user what app
>>> they want to use to edit or view the file.
>>
>> I fully agree with this. Even after using Nautilus all day, every day
>> for a month, I still find myself double clicking on files to open them
>> up and work on the contents. It's a hard habit to break.
>
>
> Actually, I just found out you *can* do this by changing the default
> application in the file handler. I'm a little ashamed for writing my
> statement above before fully investigating, but I don't know how long
> this feature has been active so it may have just been added or
> implemented.
Well, a lot of usability for the majority of users
has to do with defaults that give them familiar
GUI behavior. I think all such options should default
to Windoze-like behavior and then geeks can tweak those
settings to their heart's content.
Miles
