[Nautilus-list] Design for allowing speed tradeoffs, especially for slow connections

[John Sullivan <sullivan eazel com>]

Darin, Ian (WereYak), and I discussed the topic of doing less remote work
for slow network connections to make using them with Nautilus more bearable.

Here's the gist of our solution, which is also written up as bug 995.

Make a "Speed Tradeoffs" panel in Preferences. (Other names bandied about
included "Performance" and "Speed vs. Features".) This panel will be home
for all the decisions about turning features on or off to balance speed.
It's not only about network performance, because some people might want to
optimize their local performance by turning off some features too.

Initially it will have just the one preference that's already implemented,
the "don't show text in remote icons" preference. This will use three states
though instead of the current two, something like this:

    Display text file contents in icons:

    o Always    x Local Files Only  o Never

This isn't necessarily the exact right wording or layout, but it's the basic
idea. (Note that the "Never" choice does not currently exist, and will have
to be implemented (which is trivial).)

Then we'll add other 3-state choices too, including "Use images as icons"
and "Store metadata in directories". The wording of these two is definitely
not correct. "Use images as icons" would control both thumbnailing and the
small-enough-images-just-display-directly trick that's closely tied to
thumbnailing.

Thoughts? Improvements?

John