USB drive unmount

[Scott Balneaves]

On Tue, Aug 07, 2007 at 01:19:18PM -0400, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:

> If the user doesn't know enough to care (or just plain doesn't care)
> about outstanding requests, there's no way to get them to wait anyway.

Same with right clicking and selecting eject.

Let me relate a short story on human interface design.

Older busses in my neck of the woods used to have a "gate" on the back
door in order to get it to open.  You had to pass through the gate in order to
get to the door to get off the bus.  It was simple, obvious, and failsafe:
if you wanted to exit, you HAD to go through the gate.  No one ever had
problems figuring it out.

Now, in order to save space on newer busses, they've got rid of the swinging
gate, and replaced it with a tactile yellow strip on the door.  You push
the strip (which, while long, and vertically aligned, is only about 2 cm wide),
which triggers the door opening mechanism.

Even though there's signs EVERYWHERE telling you how to open the door, 
I'd estimate 40% of people can't do it effectively.  They either stand there,
unsure of how to get the door open, or push too hard on the strip, ringing
the "door being forced" alarm, or don't push hard enough, etc etc etc.

It's just a bad design.  Because it's not blatently obvious what you should do.

The same goes for forcing people to right click and select a menu option
to "eject" something that, really, doesn't physically eject (like a vcr tape,
or a cd, etc) anyway.

ltspfs mounts the media with no cacheing, and unmounts in the background
promptly on idle usage.  I've yet to receive a bug report from anyone
of corrupted media because of an early eject.

It just makes sense: I'm done with the usb key, so I wait for the light
to stop flashing, yank it, and stick it in my pocket.

It's simple, obvious, and what the users expect.  Try explaining to your
grandma why you should "eject" something that doesn't eject?  You'll be
reduced to saying "Well, it's just something you have to do."

And if something's a thing that "just has to be done", why not let the
computer do it?

</soapbox>

Cheers,

Scott

-- 
Scott L. Balneaves | "Eternity is a very long time,
Systems Department |  especially towards the end."
Legal Aid Manitoba |    -- Woody Allen