Hi all, I am here because I would like to discuss two issues I originally reported as bugs in lauchpad, but that deserve more attention in my opinion (and are not bugs in any case).
1. Automatic contacts enabled by default in evolution Many e-mail programs automatically collect e-mail addresses. This is especially useful because they are completed when sending an e-mail. In evolution you can do this with the auto-contacts plugin, which is enabled as a plugin, but whose behavior is not enabled by default in preferences. Of course, none of the two choices is going to make everybody happy. What I propose is to use a different address book or a different category than the default one for automatic contacts and enabling it by default in preferences. Rationale is that an user who does not need auto-contacts will notice them, and disable, and in any case they won't be in the way since they are marked by a category, while not having them enabled by default currently makes evolution look like it lacks this feature, while especially newbies and elder people make heavy use of this feature - for example, my mother does not use the address-book at all consciously, but only auto-completion. 2. Deterministic drag and drop in nautilus Nautilus is an innovative and usable file manager, but I notice that it has something in common with the one in microsoft operating systems: drop is not deterministic, but the action chosen (copy/move) depends on the target in a not-so-obvious way: it does not choose based on owner of the directory or physical location, but it seems to make the choice based on wether the target is or not in an user's home directory. This has bugs if the home directory is a symlink to a directory in another partition. In any case, I find that not knowing what action will be taken is rather confusing for newbies. I see that there is the icon indicating what action is going to be performed, but in my opinion it is not sufficient. My mother is 69, and after years from having learned how to use a computer she is still not completely aware of the filesystem hierarchy, so I didn't succeed in teaching her the concept of sub-location. She can use the PC without difficulties for her everyday tasks, but she only makes use of a couple of desktop folders (documents and pictures). However, using KDE, she is comfortable with the default popup menu. If we had desktop profiles in gnome, perhaps the easiest way would be to create an entire "newbie profile" and a gconf key letting the popup menu be the default. Since this is not the case, and I understand that many people would tag a default popup menu as "in the way", I propose that, instead of a not-so-easily learnable symbol which looks like a box-corner in case of move, and like a box-corner with a "+" inside in case of copy, translatable words should be displayed saying "copy here" or "move here" while dragging, without interfering with normal flow of interaction. Maybe, also a second row saying "press alt to show available operations" could be displayed, or simply the popup menu could be popped up with a delay. I would rather prefer a deterministic behavior (e.g. always move, always copy or always popup) because I think that user interfaces should not change their behavior depending on the context, or at least change it in a clear and "observable" way (this is the reason behind disabling menus instead of just hiding them). Thank you all for your great work in ubuntu and for reading my comments :) Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
