Some points/issues to discuss about the desktop

[Scott James Remnant]

On Wed, 2004-09-01 at 14:00 +0100, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:

> >>We either need to restore the "Home" icon, or put a "Documents" icon
> >>there.
> >>    
> >>
> Both of these should be accessible through the "Computer" top panel 
> menu. As should anything that you would expect to find *inside* the 
> Computer icon on the desktop. So I'm hoping to eliminate all of these 
> icons from the desktop and have them accessible through the menu. It's 
> possible to reinstate them on the desktop using gconf preferences, and 
> possible these are exposed in the Gnome UI somewhere.
> 
From an "ordinary user" point of view, this is actually totally the
wrong thing to do.

If we're going to cater to people who aren't experienced with computers,
we need to move things *off* the menus and onto the desktop where
they're going to look for them.

Here's an experiment for you ... go find a completely non-technical user
and delete all their desktop icons and ask them to find (e.g.) Internet
Explorer.

It's quite an amusing battle before they break down and cry ... it very
rarely occurs to them to look inside menus.

(*Really*, go and do this to someone, it's quite a shock to those of us
who keep our desktops relatively clean :-) )


"Home", "Filesystem", "Network", etc. should be accessible via the
desktop (I actually think they should be first-class desktop icons, but
I'm sure Jeff disagrees).

Scott
-- 
Have you ever, ever felt like this?
Had strange things happen?  Are you going round the twist?
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