unity-design team mailing list archive

[Gregory Merchan <gregory.merchan@xxxxxxxxx>]

I'm completely at a loss as to what buttons are being discussed.

The only chrome I have in my folder views is the column headers in the
list view, but even when I turn on all the junk^W tool bars and such,
I don't see any button for sorting. I do see two little chevrons
pointing left and right that don't look like buttons and don't respond
to anything I do. I think the colors are a little muted, so I'm
guessing they're not enabled, but I can't even get that to change.

I know Thunderbird wants to get emails or set-up accounts, and I don't
use it, so I'm not checking that.

Rhythmbox isn't something I usually use either, but I opened it to
look. Again I see the column headers, but nothing that says "Sort By"
or anything like it. I do see a couple of things that make less than
perfect sense.
1. There is a slider next to a speaker icon, but it doesn't control
the volume; I eventually figured out it's a jog control.
2. On the other side of it was a skinny button with no label. It moved
down and up when I clicked, but otherwise didn't do anything. When I
played a song, the button expanded to display "<time remaining>/<track
length>" (the numbers corresponding to the things between angle
braces.) I clicked on it then and the display changed to
<elapsedtime>/<track length>, but nothing else happened.
3. There's a row that looks like it might be Apple-like scope buttons:
"Browse", "Show All", and "Import". Browse was pressed in, so I
clicked "Show All" out of curiosity. The button responded, but
otherwise nothing happened. "Import" popped up a dialog almost half
the size of my 1920x1080 screen. Finally I clicked the already pressed
in button and it revealed itself as a toggle independent of the other
two buttons.

I don't know where else I might look. I can certainly say that
changing the sort order is something I do often, especially at work,
and it's not the kind of thing that is an application preference.
Perhaps the default sort order is, but not the current sort order. If
I had to dig around in a preference panel to change sort order, I'd
give up and use dead tree folders. It's amazing I haven't stopped
using gedit given that the text-wrapping toggle is an application
preference and not something on the view menu for every file.

The only thing that makes sense to me as the buttons being discussed
is the column headers in some views, but not really because they don't
take up much height and they don't take up any width not taken up by
what they allow sorted.

As for the target user, I'm reminded of this:

The computer “user” isn’t a real person of flesh and blood, with
passions and brains. No, he is a mythical figure, and not a very
pleasant one either. A kind of mongrel with money but without taste,
an ugly caricature that is very uninspiring to work for. He is, as a
matter of fact, such an uninspiring idiot that his stupidity alone is
a sufficient explanation for the ugliness of most computer systems.
And oh! Is he uneducated! That is perhaps his most depressing
characteristic. He is equally education-resistant as another equally
mythical bore, “the average programmer”, whose solid stupidity is the
greatest barrier to progress in programming.—EWD 618

On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 5:01 PM, Florian Diesch <diesch@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Am Tue, 11 Dec 2012 21:55:40 +0100
> schrieb Thibaut Brandscheid <randaltor@xxxxxx>:
>
>> Yes, we need the sort functionality, but do we need this
>> one-click-buttons in the "front UI"?
>> If you would have to go to the settings, or would have to right click
>> to unlock and make the Sort-By buttons visible and editable, would
>> that be such a big loss?
>
> Non-expert users may not find out how they can sort things.
>
>
>> How important is the feature for an average user?
>> pretty unimportant
>
> Sorting for example files by name, size or date seems to be a quite
> common thing for me, even for non-experts. Like when you want to find
> the big files you could remove to free up some disk space.
>
> If this confuses some users I think it would be a better solution to
> make it even more obvious.
>
> Another idea could be to have an option "simple interface" at the
> accessibility settings.
>
>
> --
> Plugin for Nautilus to create and modify application
> starters (.desktop files):
> <http://www.florian-diesch.de/software/arronax/>
>
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