Many people whined about the lack of an entry in GtkFileChoosers located inside file chooser dialogs, probably because they were to lazy to press Ctrl-L and loved to flame. Federico did it: He merged code for a GtkEntry in GtkFileChoosers into GTK+ HEAD. This means that even the reactionists among the GNOME/GTK+ users will not cry anymore. Hooray! 🙂
Meanwhile, I’m improving GnomeVFS documentation and getting used to “Tango Nuevo”. If you also want to learn about that passionate music, I recommend you to grab Tango: Zero Hour, which contains excellent accoustic Tango, Maria de Buenos Aires, which is an excellent record of THE Tango Operita (doesn’t seem to be available on amazon.com, though), and Libertango, which is a real classic of Tango Nuevo, although I find the drums to bold sometimes. All of the above are excellent records, and for the more advanced of you there is also the very brilliant Tangoklezmer by Giora Feidman available.
It amazes me how strong, distinct and spiritual the musical visions by many modern and classical artists are. Unfortunately, popular music lacks this kind of visions, and often creativity. I assume it is not too uncommon that the way music sounds is dictated by producers, who seem to think that people are not interested in quality music. This applies for roughly for 90% of the music that can be found in charts in western countries. I mean, there are excellent modern works available, and there is an unbelievable amount of great classical music from Schönberg, Eisler, Bach, Dvorak and MANY others, and popular music nowadays just seems to be essentially a lifestyle product instead of something both the creators and the audience identify themselves with, which is a pitty.
Update
It was pointed out in the comment section of this blog posting that my claims about some people who complained about the lack of an entry in the file chooser were arrogant. I accused them of being to lazy to use Ctrl-L.
I’m very sorry, I didn’t want to insult anybody (I obviously did), and I appreciate ANY constructive criticism. Having spent hundrets of hours on bug triaging and polishing of GNOME software, I am aware that much feedback out there is very useful, and I’d like to hug everybody who invested time to give the developers feedback, or to help the developers dealing with the huge amount of feedback (i.e. the bugsquad).
I must also admit that while we offer some nice features to advanced users in GTK+, they are not really documented wery well (at least from the user’s POV), so people keep asking the same questions over and over. Unfortunately, to my knowledge we have no publicly available documents explaining why the entry is not in the GtkFileChooser dialog by default, and how quickly it can be accessed as of writing (~, /, Ctrl-L are all shortcuts). A GTK+ manpage and a GTK+ web FAQ might save both our users and our developers much stress :).
Well, ok, but wouldn’t it have been easier to just point out that you can just type in a file name beginning with / or ~ without having to do anything at all?
“Many people whined about the lack of an entry in GtkFileChoosers”
Try not to piss on people for having a different opinion. I don’t care about this feature but come on, grow up.
“Try not to piss on people for having a different opinion. I don’t care about this feature but come on, grow up.”
Holy overreaction, Batman!
“probably because they were to lazy to press Ctrl-L and loved to flame.”
Oh dear god don’t blame the users, as if Gnome developers don’t have a bad reputation for arrogance already. Insulting users only makes you look foolish especially since the correct phrase should have been “too lazy”. It was not laziness it was a geniune complaint about the design which had some merit – not a huge issue but not deserving of your condescending remarks – and has been addressed. Thanks Federico.
nobody, Alan: I have to pull out of the deck the Dilbert’s Principle here – “When did ignorance become a point of view?”
the discoverability of the ctrl+l keybinding was low – everyone admits that; but the sheer amount of places where it’s spelled out clearly (forums, mailing lists, usenet, pages) is overwhelming nowadays.
user do *not* have the right to stay ignorant. they have the right to *be* ignorant, at first – but willingly staying that way is stupidity, and I’d prefer not to waste my time developing software for stupid people.
Sheesh! So many occurences if the word Tango and it’s not about us? What a disgrace 😉
“probably because they were to lazy to press Ctrl-L” …
That might sincerely be your opinion, but you have to realize
that even though some of the GNOME people thought it was good,
it was not accepted by everybody. Any feature that is still
controversial 1-2 years after introduction is BROKEN, does not matter what its designers think.
It’s as simple as that.
Obviously the same thing is true about “spatial” Nautilus.
I totally agree with you about the poor quality and diversity of today’s commercial music.
Personaly, I’ve found a great French webradio which broadcasts eclectic music for sensitive ears as they defined theirself. You can hear every kind of music from experimental to classical, or reggae, rock, electronic, hip hop, etc. During four days of broadcast, I didn’t hear twice the same song !
http://www.radio404.org/
And they have an ogg stream !
It’s worth trying it !
“probably because they were to lazy to press Ctrl-L and loved to flame”
They weren’t lazy. They just couldn’t read the mind of the developer who implemented this feature. Control-L?? Could this feature have been made any more obscure? Well, I suppse it could have been Control-F9. Or Ctrl-Alt-ScrlLk or something…
I hope that this file selector change is optional. I have really enjoyed having a file open dialig that is not cluttered by widgets I never use.
Very good of you to post the update Christian. Thanks for recognising the difficulties on all sides.
(The greatest thing about the File Chooser was the new cleaner API which made it possible for groups like GPE or Maemo to drop in their own replacement File Chooser. It is an idea I had hoped more programmers would try out.)
There’s a wiki FAQ at http://gnomesupport.org/wiki/index.php/GnomeFrequentlyAskedQuestions