GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 311339
GtkFileChooser double entries of Home is irritating.
Last modified: 2005-11-11 20:01:12 UTC
I was quite irritated some days ago when I reported my last bugreport about ghosted entries and then got shown two "Home" dirs in the top. I wanted to show the contents of my home dir and by mistake pressed "home" instead of "Home". I think this needs some rethinking here and thus I file it as usability issues.
Created attachment 49624 [details] What is What ?
Similar bug report here: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=311340
How would you suggest fixing that? rename Home when it isn't the leftmost entry?
No, there is even a far better way of solving this I think. Look at this screenshot: http://media.arstechnica.com/images/tiger/spotlight-open-dialog.jpg Instead of naming it "Home" they named it to the name of the user.
Created attachment 49630 [details] Mockup #1
Created attachment 49633 [details] Mockup #2
Created attachment 49640 [details] [review] Patch changing behavior to Mac OS style.
Created attachment 49641 [details] How the patch looks #1
Created attachment 49642 [details] How the patch looks #2
Ali: Your mockup also includes the term "home" twice, i.e. on two buttons. I do find it less confusing, but still it isn't very clear/obvious. Just because Mac does it, it is not neccessarily the best solution. Also note that your proposal won't improve the situation for some locales. In German for instance, we don't include the strdup'ed $HOME owner into the home link description, since it causes grammatical headache. If I remember correctly, this is true for Swedish as well, just to name two problematic locales. On a sidenote: Bug 310413 also talks about inconsistencies in $HOME naming and has another screenshot (attachment 49190 [details]). Usability team, we should really find a better solution than two "Home" buttons IMHO.
Created attachment 49643 [details] How the patch looks #3
Christian sure, these are just some ideas and a few mockups + a small patch. These things can be worked on but yet I still find the two "Home's" irritating too. Either way, this is just an idea.
...and you should rather get the NAUTILUS_PREFERENCES_DESKTOP_HOME_NAME string from Nautilus, since we have to sync the file chooser with nautilus wrt home naming. This may even demand for a new GtkSetting. We have to iron out how we solve this, though before getting random patches into CVS. Thanks for your efforts, though. Usability squad, any suggestions?
> We have to iron out how we solve this, though before getting random patches into CVS. I know, but random patches usually starts conversation :)
+ user_name = g_strdup_printf ("%s's %s", g_get_user_name (), _("Home")); isn't i18n friendly. You'd rather want to use /* Note to translators: If it's hard to compose a good home * icon name from the user name, you can use a string without * an "%s" here, in which case the home icon name will not * include the user's name, which should be fine. To avoid a * warning, put "%.0s" somewhere in the string, which will * match the user name string passed by the C code, but not * put the user name in the final string. */ return g_strdup_printf (_("%s's Home"), g_get_user_name ()); (from nautilus-global-preferences.c:default_home_link_name)
Created attachment 49644 [details] [review] Patch changing behavior to Mac OS style. Updated version, though it still is quite basic and still an idea.
Ali: You didn't include the proposed comment, which is important for translators since they'll actually read this when translating. Usability team, any comments?
Christian, I haven't received any feedback so far either, neither from the usability people nor from the nautilus maintainers. I will fix all the issues of this (proposal / patch ?) once we get a step further.
Hmm... well, I'd certainly be quite happy to see the end of "$USER's Home" everywhere; it can be quite a long and unwieldy string to have to accommodate in a UI, and it's not always very i18n friendly as Christian says. To be honest I'm struggling to think of anything that's notably better than the Macintosh way, though, where the home folder name (=username), in conjunction with the 'house' icon, is just used everywhere that the home folder is displayed. (See screenshot in comment #4). [Only thing that might be friendlier would be to use the user's first/given name rather than their username... but then you either end up with inconsistencies like the sidebar icon saying "Calum", but the path bar showing "/home/cb114949"; or the path bar showing "/home/Calum", but the actual directory name being "/home/cb114949". Yuck.] FWIW, in JDS we get around the problem by eradicating most instances of the home folder in the UI and replacing them with "Documents" icons/buttons (that correspond to $HOME/Documents) instead, since we figured there was nothing in most users' homedirs that they ought to be messing with anyway :) Nobody's complained so far...
Shit, I wish I had seen this bug in October. I did a very similar fix on Oct. 04; it will appear in GTK+ 2.8.7. Sorry for missing your patches, Ali; I had not gone through the file chooser's bugs at that time and your patch would have saved me some time :(