File Selector designs

These are some mockups of alternative file selectors for GNOME 2.6 or higher. In the lead-up to GNOME 2.6, the new file selection dialog was highly anticipated, and many people produced mockups of what they thought the new file selector should look like. Some of these were good, some, not so good.

Mockup 1

One thing that most of them did was to include a single pane for selecting both directories and files. This is a pet-peeve of mine; showing files and directories in a single pane belongs in the User Interface Hall of Shame. At that time, I made this mockup:

This design, while I feel now that it has several flaws, also has several advantages. Obviously, the panes for files and directories are separate. The directory pane is a multi-rooted tree view, similar to the tree view in the Nautilus browser mode, with the different roots being the root filesystem, the user's home directory, and any mounted removable media. This way, the design of the file selector lets the user see their position in the directory hierarchy at any time. Also, there is no need for a widget for climbing up the directory hierarchy, such as the option menu in the old GTK file selector, or the path navigator in the new GTK file selector, because all of the parent directories up to the root are available in the tree view. There is also no need for bookmarks or shortcuts of any kind. Because the user's home directory is always one of the roots, it is simple to add "shortcuts" to frequently used locations by putting symbolic links in their home directory, a practise that also works well with a spatial file manager such as the new version of Nautilus.

The official GTK 2.4 file selector

In the end, the official GTK 2.4/Gnome 2.6 file selector came out looking like this:

It's actually quite good in many ways. It's rather clean and uncluttered. It does not include superfluous controls such as New Folder or Delete. My only real criticism of it is that it combines files and directories in the file selection pane. With the bookmarks pane there, there is no place to put a directory selection pane, however.

Alternative proposed file selector 2

This is my proposed alternative, based on the official GTK 2.4/Gnome 2.6 file selector. It combines my earlier idea with the layout of the official file selector, and also manages to reduce UI clutter somewhat in the process.

It differs from the standard file selector in two ways. First, each bookmark (which can still be added to or removed from the bookmark pane as in the standard file selector) is treated as the root of a tree. To move down through the directory tree from a bookmark, you just expand the tree using the arrows. Directories are not shown in the file selector pane unless the file dialog has been called by the application in 'directory selection' mode, in which case only directories are shown. This way, there is a clear differentiation between navigating into a folder, and selecting a folder, something that has never been entirely clear either in the old file selector or the official new file selector (where selecting a folder also navigates into it). Finally, the path navigator has been removed. This provides more room for files in the file selection pane, and removes unnecessary widgets. Although the path navigator is, at base, a good idea, its visual representation as a row of buttons is not very good and is possibly somewhat confusing. Also, because the user can now navigate up and down their path structure in the directory/shortcut pane, it is no longer necessary.

Coming soon

Though I actually quite like the new official 'Save' dialog, I intend to make some mockups of a proposed improvement. The main features of this will be an XDS icon, for saving by dragging to an open Nautilus window (may not be currently possible?), and updating the expanded view to incorporate the ideas in the proposed 'Open' dialog above.