nautilus, panel menus and vfolders

[Dave Bordoley <bordoley msu edu>]

While beta testing gnome2 (about the only productive thing I can do
along with bug hunting due to my lack of programming skills) I've had a
couple of ideas about how vfolders could be used to make gnome even more
integrated and coherent.  Most of these suggestions are a little too out
there though to be put into bugzilla, so i thought i might just drop all
my ideas into one big email to spark some constructive discussion.
Basically what these all amount to is that start-here in nautilus could
be really cool.


1. Preferences, server-settings, system-settings, etc. are all seperate
uri's. It would be really cool if they were subfolders of start-here:
instead. Why? Well if all these special uri's were actually just
subfolders of start-here: we could create a really cool second root node
in the tree-view where all of these directories branch out of
start-here. Also this would allow users to use the up arrow to go back
from these uri's to start-here: in nautilus creating a central starting
point for accessing all system and user configuration settings and
preferences. In my opinion these uri's really appear to be subfolders of
start-here: to the user, similar to how control center is a subfolder of
my computer in windows, but currently aren't.

2. Personally, I don't like how removable media icons appear and
disapper from the desktop, probably my windows root showing through :(.
Maybe we could add launchers to start-here: that are always present and 
use emblems to display if the drives are mounted or not. just an idea.

3. the coolest part yet. There has been alot of talk about adding extra
pull down menus to the foobar (preferences and help). How about creating
a subdirectory in preferences called menus where you can add folders
like applications, actions, or any other pull down menu's we or the
users might want to add. This would make editing the menus really easy
and would allow for easy customization by users, distros and
administrators.

Hope these are clear and if i'm on crack please let me know.

dave