Christian: I agree that it would be a good idea for one of the nautilus maintainers or usability experts to write up a “spatial advocacy and justification” article. In the meantime, you might enjoy this article which goes into great depth on the idea of “spatial interfaces”.
Tags: GNOME
February 19th, 2004 at 2:28 pm
Spatial mode can be a Good Thing (TM), but it takes time to get used to. My personal preference is browsing mode, but I will try spatial mode also. Nautilus developers needs to make users able to change the defaults in a very sane and easy way.
Just my 2 cents.
February 21st, 2004 at 11:16 am
I would argue the opposite: the spatial model is intuitive because it’s based on how we interact with the real world. The only reason it takes some getting used to for some of us is that we’ve been introduced to this “browser model” by using browsers such as windows explorer, konqueror, and nautilus (until recently). Let yourself break a few nasty habits, give up the convenience of using only one window in a browser mode for a bit and force yourself to use the spatial mode for a few weeks. I think you’ll see the advantages.