Re: removing spatial viewer from GWorkspace

[Robert Slover]

I'm not using GWorkspace at present, since I've not had time to set up any 
machine that isn't 100% necessary for my everyday use since I moved last fall.  
Anything with GNUstep installed is still sitting down in my garage.  However, I 
can say that the spatial finder view is useful in a few specific contexts.

I think Apple made a train wreck out of merging the Workspace Manager and 
Finder in Mac OS X.  The amalgam of the two is less than the original sum of 
either part.  But that is more due to a fundamental lack of understanding of 
*either* interface (in my opinion) on the part of the implementors than any 
particular incompatibility in concept.  The browser-style interface of NeXT 
works incredibly well for deep directory hierarchies (something most of us 
encounter in everyday use) for the most part, but is crippled in OS X by (in my 
opinion) lack of the browser shelf and the nastiness of right-hand scrollbars; 
necessitating having to hop back-and-forth with the mouse while scrolling 
around and clicking, instead of working smoothly from left-to-right.  I know 
there are people who claim this is just a matter of getting used to it, but in 
10 years I still haven't "gotten used to it".  I also *hate* not having the 
shelf to drop something onto temporarily, it requires me, quite often, to have 
to have multiple windows open to move or copy things when only one would have 
been necessary on the NeXT.  From the Finder viewpoint, up until very recently 
it was just insanely buggy, the "spatial" part of things was barely evident, 
the Finder would forget the position I had placed things in at random times, 
and it is often *much* slower than Classic Mac OS ever was when opening a new 
window, since Classic Mac OS didn't go the Windows route of determining file 
types from extensions and such, choosing instead to store that information in 
resources along with the particular icon to use.  I experience this kind of 
thing every time I drag something to the folder I store scans of my daughter's 
artwork in -- those scans average around 220 MB compressed, and when you drag 
across a spring-loaded folder and it opens and then tries to generate 
thumbnails for those things on-the-fly, the "spring loaded" feel, the "smooth" 
feel, goes completely out-of-the-window (so to speak).  These are all aspects 
of poor design choices and implementation, though.

The spatial style view is certainly useful for those of us who have very 
"spatial" memories.  I certainly do.  I probably keep a couple hundred 
WindowMaker terminal windows open at any given time, spread across one or at 
most two virtual desktops (I'll open a second one for short-term tasks, making 
it easier to throw away all of the windows related to that task when done).  I 
keep the WindowMaker "Windows" menu parked in the lower-right of my screen, and 
I just drop the mouse down there to get it to scroll onto the screen.  All of 
the windows are named the same (I log into too many different machines as too 
many different users to bother with naming terminals).  I remember which window 
is which by position in that list, and I often don't even need to look at it, I 
can judge when to click intuitively by the length of time it takes for things 
to scroll up.  That's spatial memory.  It freaks a lot of people out when they 
see my desktop, because I don't minimize anything, and i don't have a taskbar 
or any of that other nonsense.  It is just clutter to me; I want as much 
unmolested screen real-estate as possible.  However, on my Mac, where I tend to 
keep a lot of folders and a *ton* of files, I tend to use the browser-style 
view in the Finder, *except* for the leaf folders.  There, depending on the 
folder type, I will use either the detail listing (usually sorted by file type 
or date) or the spatial view, depending on context.  If it is a code directory, 
it will be one of the former, if it is something like a folder full of artwork 
or design layouts, it will be the spatial view.  Each of those views will have 
an intuitive (to me) layout that isn't going to come out of sorting by some 
file attribute.  I also tend to organize PDF's this way. (By the way, for those 
of you who have ever seen "Delicious Library", I've always thought it would be 
truly useful to have a "Library" view style, since that's what I'm really 
trying to accomplish when organizing my PDF's).  

While I say I have a spatial memory, in reality I am probably somewhere in the 
very middle, and most other techies are probably in the other corner all 
together.  When I was in college, one of my professors gave us one of those 
left brain/right brain tests.  This being an engineering school, almost 
everyone in the class came down solidly in the left brain category.  I scored 
exactly the same for left and right.  She claimed she had never seen that 
happen in all the time she had been teaching.  It didn't surprise me at all; I 
was a self-taught artist, and had been doing commercial art on a small scale 
since I was age twelve.  I had been writing software since age ten.  I was 
undecided whether I was going into an engineering school or an art school until 
late in my senior year of high school, so applied and was accepted to both.  
Campus visits settled the question; this straight-laced Indiana country boy was 
not comfortable at all with the "artsy" crowd, though I certainly could have 
held my own there creativity and skill-wise.  So I opted for engineering.  But, 
I married a graphic designer, and both of our daughters are artistic.  The 
older one intends to study art, and is quite accomplished already.  We just 
returned Friday from the Congressional High School Art Competition, where she 
was the winner for our congressional district.  I believe she was the youngest 
participant (she is a year ahead in school, and was a freshman (first year) in 
high school).  At any rate, both daughters and my wife use Macs, and not one of 
them *ever* uses anything other than the spatial view of the Finder, except on 
the very rare occasion that they are looking for something by date.  This is 
despite the fact that I have repeatedly shown them the advantages of the 
browser view.  When I use one of their machines, I will often put large 
directories in browser view (like the Applications folder, so that I can 
find/navigate to the Utilities folder) and I inevitably find it set back to 
spatial view the next time I am on the machine.  Obviously, they find using it 
that way to be more comfortable than I do.  Dorothy, the older daughter, has 
been using a Mac since she was two years old (she is fourteen now), and my wife 
has been using one since I met her and started training her on a Mac II in 
1989.  I've been using one longer than either of them.  My daughter gets along 
OK with a PC, since she has to use them at school, but my wife has never been 
able to tolerate using one, not since trying to train her to use XyWrite and 
Ventura Publisher (under DOS/GEM) in the early 1990's.  Even where the software 
was substantially the same (Aldus PageMaker was a great port and almost 
identical across platforms, as was FrameMaker until Adobe butchered it), the 
file manager completely frustrates her; she simply *cannot* deal with using it. 
 On the rare occasions she's had to do stuff on the PC, I've found poor 
imitations of the Finder to install to help her out, but that's been a long 
time.  I find the way she uses things to be very interesting.  She has created 
something similar to "templates" for just about everything she uses, whether 
Illustrator or whatnot, that has all of the drudgery for a particular layout 
pre-done.  She sets up page sizes, margins, page and printer preferences, guide 
positions, default text block positions and typography settings, etc., in an 
otherwise blank document and then saves them in a "Builders" folder.  That 
folder is organized spatially, though I couldn't tell you what that arrangement 
is really.  She knows right where to scroll to in order to find a particular 
Builder though.  And that is really what the spatial view is about…letting you 
organize things in a way that suits your mental paradigm, whatever it is, and 
keeping it that way when you return to it, just like the top of your desk.  
Despite the fact that I know more about most of the software that she uses than 
she does, I can't come close to matching her in speed when she is working.  
She's amazing.  Anything that slows her down or gets in her way is met with 
frustration and loathing.  If GNUstep ever wants to be useful to users like 
her, it needs to be capable of providing the same kinds of workflow that people 
like her find useful.  I am not equipped to evaluate how or why certain things 
work better for her than they do for me, but the empirical evidence is enough 
for me to know there is a real difference.

Best regards,

--Robert

On Jun 18, 2010, at 6:48 PM, Riccardo Mottola wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I am thinking of removing the Spatial Viewer from GWorkspace.
> 
> TI was added after a discussion on the mailing list long ago, it was a 
> popular opinion.
> 
> However I think it doesn't fit the NeXT paradigm well at all, I never use it 
> and it adds code in GWorkspace that needs to be kept from bitrotting.
> 
> Does anybody use it? Or otherwise feel good about it? Stand up and speak your 
> defense!
> 
> 
> Riccardo
> 
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