unity-design team mailing list archive

[Luke Morton <luke.morton@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2010-05-13 at 16:34 +0200, Conscious User wrote:
> 
> > honestly, please name the use cases for file operations.
> > i want to see thumbs for photos, not filenames.
> > i want to read metadata (artist, album, title, artwork) for songs.

I thought long and hard about the use cases for wanting to select a file
last night, and the best I could come up with centres around metadata:

Miranda likes notes. She leaves them plastered around her house as
reminders. She also annotates her files using the Notes Sidebar in
Nautilus. She uses these notes to help her identify files, and as a
reminder of what the file contains and sometimes as a checklist of
things that need to be done to the file. 

To enable this kind of metadata review in a single-click environment,
Miranda will need to learn to use either the Ctrl key as a modifier to
switch from 'activate' to 'select', or she'll have to use the keyboard
to navigate. If using the mouse she'll have to select a file, deselect
it, then select another. That's a lot more overhead than just one click
per file. But it's also an edge case.

> Which, again, is another argument *against* single-click to open
> rather than *for* it. If the usual way of dealing with files is
> supposed to be *not* via a filebrowser, then it's reasonable to
> assume that when using a filebrowser actions *other* than simple
> opening will be frequent.

All other use cases (renaming a file/folder, moving a file/folder,
moving multiple files/folders) are supported just as well in a
single-click environment.

Luke.