unity-design team mailing list archive

[Ian Santopietro <isantop@xxxxxxxxx>]

What about moving the sort functionality to a menu? Then, it can be easily
accessed through HUD, preserving easy access fit who use the functionality
who use it, while decluttering the UI and keeping a simple appearance for
beginners.
On Dec 11, 2012 7:28 PM, "Gregory Merchan" <gregory.merchan@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> 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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>
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