[plug] Oxymoron: Microsoft, innovation

[Cameron Patrick]

William Kenworthy wrote:

> Gnumeric has the same braindead behaviour.  I open csv's a lot, and it
> sucks compared to excel in this aspect.

Did you file a bug?

> However the gnomes are the true practitioners of 'idealism triumphing
> over user friendliness' in the open-source world.  They do some things
> right, some wrong - unfortunately they seem to have the knack of really
> really annoying the userbase with the wrongs! (spatial nautilus is just
> one of them!)

Tangent: I am one of two people I've met who like spatial file managers.
The other is a GNOME developer.  (I'm pretty sure spatial is off by
default now, and the setting is exposed in the preferences box rather
than hidden in gconf.  I believe that the GNOME devs learned a bit from
that debacle...)

The user interface idealism as espoused by GNOME is "things should just
work without having to fiddle with settings"; unfortunately [a] they do
not always practise what they preach, and [b] they underestimated how
many user interface niggles people would find to argue about, and just
how much the people cared about being able to tweak this.  Example: One
thing that persistently annoys me about Metacity is that I can't close a
window by double-clicking the left hand side of a window.  (Yeah, I used
Windows 3.1 a lot :-P)  The next release of GNOME will have this as a
hidden setting you can enable; the default will be off because
apparently more people have complained about having accidentally closed
windows this way than have requested this feature.

Cameron