Some Bad Nautilus UI

I’m normally pretty impressed with Linux and it’s gains in the desktop, but every once and a while I find something that makes me cringe, and I know if I’m cringing, I know my UI expert buddies foz and engel would be rolling around and screaming in pain.

This came up to me under the new “spatial” nautilus in the gnome development release, due to something not coming up fast enough (I think). The title of the window is “Cancel Open” and the text is “Opening ‘Filesystem'”, with a cancel button. The first time I saw it I thought I was canceling a cancel of something, but then I thought I wasn’t, and then I thought I was. What am I doing when I hit cancel? Am I removing the dialoge or actually stopping something from happening?

I was mostly impressed with the new spatial nautilus, but when I tried the simple task of copying a file (the above screenshot in fact) from my home folder to this server, I found it was far more complex than it should be, as noted by my email to the nautilus mailing list.