On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 8:03 AM, Allan Day <allanp...@gmail.com> wrote:
Federico Mena Quintero wrote: 
.. 
> The anti-pattern for both removals is like, "there's some peeling paint 
> in this house - let's bulldoze the neighborhood". 
.. 

How do you know that was the reason for the decision, if the 
background hasn't been explained? The anti-pattern for that statement 
is like, "assuming motivations out of ignorance". 

I'll let Jon speak for himself. However, I can at least give you my 
personal design opinion on the issue. First of all, I do think that 
compact view is problematic, and I don't see any why we shouldn't 
remove UI if it isn't of sufficiently high quality. Some issues with 
compact view: 

* Horizontal scrolling is unergonomic with mouse and touchpad input 
* It is hard to scan multiple columns when they scroll, and it is 
difficult to find a particular item in an alphabetical list if it 
wraps over multiple columns 
* Filenames have a tendency to become truncated, and filenames also 
disappear off the side of the screen. 

The other reason why I think it is good to remove compact view is that 
it is inelegant as a solution to users' needs. List and icon view have 
clear roles and are easy to communicate to users. Grid view 
prioritises visual representation of files. List view focuses on 
finding my name. With these two options we offer a clear and 
straightforward choice. 

Compact view doesn't fit neatly into our existing functionality. It 
overlaps with the list view (since it focuses on finding by name), yet 
it misses some of its advantages (such as the ability to easily 
reorder the list). It also overlaps with zoom, which is the standard 
way to display more items at once. 

I'd much rather offer two, clearly differentiated views that work 
well, rather than have three poorly distinguished options, 
particularly when one of them has serious usability issues. 

Allan, thanks for your thoughts.  I've responded on a new thread on 
nautilus-list, which seems like a good place to continue this discussion:

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2012-July/msg00005.html

adam
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