November 19, 2003
Browsing the Windows Neighbourhood
Mental note to self, check out LinNeighborhood. Its a way of graphically checking out the windows devices on your local network.
Extra bonus marks for being available as a Debian package.
As recommended in this LinuxWorld article. Just whatever you do, don't point MPT at it. He'll never stop laughing at the suggestion that any desktop software is intuitive and easy to use, least of all packages like evolution, gnucash and (ha ha) OpenOffice.
Posted by Andy Todd at November 19, 2003 02:19 PM
Well, from the screenshot[1], it looks reasonably good. There are are a few rough edges (Why is it called “LinNeighborhood” when it shows Windows computers, not Linux ones? Why does the bottom pane merely repeat stuff already shown in the top pane? Why isn’t there an “Edit” menu for easy transfer of name/path data with other programs? Why is there both an “Options” menu and a “Prefs” toolbar button? … Etc), but nothing that would frighten away anyone with an IQ above, say, 105.
The biggest flaw is that it’s not just another file manager window, so its interface is gratuitously inconsistent with whatever file manager you happen to be using.
And yes, I have previously criticized the designs of OpenOffice 1.0 [2], OpenOffice 1.1 [3], Gnucash, and Evolution [4].
[1] http://bnro.de/~schmidjo/screenshot/
[2] http://mpt.phrasewise.com/2002/12/18#a414
[3] http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/geekroom/comments?u=geekroom&p=76 (“I work at…”)
[4] http://www.livejournal.com/users/owen/255168.html?thread=166080