The Nautilus spatial interface

Posted Apr 1, 2004 14:30 UTC (Thu) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]

Fair enough, but this choice (new dir/page in new window, new dir/page in same window) has been around for a long time, and there are strong preferences in both directions. Many apps give you a choice, especialy web browsers, mail clients and file managers. It is a choice you really need to make wholesale or not at all, and you need to have a window manager and app-selector that works well with the idea (e.g. an icon bar/taskbar that shows every window, as opposed to every app, doesn't work well with it at all).

My users here all insist on the 'new window' scheme, for example, because they all come from RISC OS, where everything has always worked that way. They find it intensely irritating to have the last directory 'go away' when opening a new one, because they expect to be able to drag and drop between them. Joe likes doing it the way he is used to, which is fine - it's nice that we get a choice. Which the default should be is always going to be contentious, and everyone is free to choose, but I too felt that the article came across as 'I don't like this so it must be wrong', which is not really taking a sufficiently balanced view.