Re: connected-servers / bookmarks mess

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Wed, 2008-10-15 at 14:12 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-10-14 at 10:30 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> > > How does OSX handle connected servers these days?
> > 
> > I'll check on my OS X box when I get home (am out in Westford today).
> 
> OK, I tried playing around with this. I had to set up a Samba server
> because OS X didn't recognize my DAV shares.

> http://file.rdu.redhat.com/~davidz/osx-connected-servers/finder-connected-to-media-share-2.png

Interesting. They approach smb different than we, and count the
conntection to the machine as one "connected share" in the sidebar,
instead of listing all the mounts on that machine in the sidebar. Not
really sure this is better. I guess it depends on if you view smb as
mostly "browse around peoples machines looking for stuff", or "set up
common company project shares at some (users care not which) server
machine". Apple targets mainly home users, so focus on the first.

However, one thing we could take from this is to show the eject button
on currently mounted shares when browsing an smb machine.

> When you log out and then log in, mounts created in a session are gone.
> Notably OS X doesn't have a concept of bookmarks at all. If you drag one
> of the mounts to the sidebar or the desktop nothing happens. You can,
> however, create what is known as an Alias. It looks like this is a
> kernel-side or HFS+ feature

What happens if you drag a folder from a share to the places location on
the sidebar? I think you can do this with normal folders.

> As a conclusion, I don't really feel OS X gives me a good user
> experience and that there's not a lot we can take away from this. I
> think we can do a lot better. Except for maybe the expander in the
> sidebar, that's kinda cute. Maybe I'm doing it wrong though.

At least its not significantly better than what we do. Noting to get
there then...

So, what about this then (mostly similar to your proposal, with some
name tweaks and general ui additions):

We use bookmark as the main user settable entity, adding custom icons to
the bookmark store.

Then we add a checkmark in the bookmark dialog that says "Treat bookmark
as volume". Enabling this means the bookmark works as a "sever
bookmark", i.e. it hides any containing mounts (except in computer:),
and it gets an unmount/eject operation (if the containing mount exists).
It can also be availible on the desktop. Its still positioned in the
bookmarks part of the sidebar/panel menu, allowing manual positioning,
etc.

We also add the volumes/mounts currently showed in the places sidebar to
the spatial window places menu, making it as easy to use these as in the
browser view. (Sort of unrelated to the issue, but I think this makes
sense.)

We also add a "Desktop" group to "Display" preferences tab, where we
allow a more fine-grained configuring of what virtual objects to show on
the desktop:
Home, Trash, Computer, Network, Mounts, Connected servers

If connected servers is set we show items for bookmarks set as
treat-as-volume, and hide their underlying mount. If unset we still hide
the underlying mount, but don't show the volume icon.

This adds a few preferences (actually it mostly makes hidden ones
visible), but I feel that if we're adding to much stuff to the desktop
we need to make this settable to avoid swamping people not interested in
things. And this is a pure "preference" after all, nothing "unbreak
feature" about it, and the desktop is a highly visible resource, so
configuring it is probably common.