Re: [Nautilus-list] Nautilus Goals

[Jonathan Blandford <jrb redhat com>]

<mitch nuclear physics gatech edu> writes:

> 	I write with the concern of Nautilus' future.  As of now, Nautilus
> is completely unuseful. I'm aware that it isn't finished yet but it is
> unfortunately already labeled a  > 1.0 version. I'll just list the issues
> below in order to make things cleaner.

I beg to differ.  I use Nautilus all the time nowadays...

> A.)Mozilla:
> 	Why does Nautilus need to use mozilla? Doesn't this produce a lot
> of overhead? Nautilus should browse files, perhaps be used for
> configurations, and simple html use. Wouldn't gtkhtml get the job done and
> done quicker?  

gtkhtml is not a real display engine.  Mozilla is, and Nautilus only
uses it if you view a webpage.  It could be better integrated (see
Galeon) but claiming use of gtkhtml instead is silly.

> B.)Xrender
> 	What's the status on Xrender support? I realized that AA
> fonts,etc.. should be done via gtk 2.0 in the future but what about the
> mouse drag alpha? Wouldn't the use of Xrender on this speed things up for
> us that have the hardware support?

Mouse drag alpha can't be done with Xrender.  GTK 1.2 cannot really use
Xrender and stay both binary compatible, and internationalizable.  We
could spend a lot of effort working around the limitations here (and
certainly, there is a lot of code in Nautilus that does so) only to
ditch them in a few months when we port to GTK 2.  I don't see the point.

> C.)GTK
> 	Being realistic, how much is gtk 1.2.x slowing Nautilus down? In
> my experience, QT has proved to be faster. The worse case I can think of
> is for users in 16 bit and even worse in 15 bit. Gtk has to dither
> down. If the user is in 15 bit, gtk has to dither down to 16 and then
> dither down to 15. This makes things god awful slow. Gtk 2.0 should be
> faster and better but it's of course not mainstream yet and the extent at
> which gtk 1.2.x slows things down is not really known. Or is it?

I think you're a little confused here -- where has Qt been proved to be
faster???  How can we speed up GTK?  What do you propose to do?

> D.)UI
> 	No offense, but the current UI design of Nautilus itself and the
> desktop is horrible. More thought needs to be put into this. I'd love to
> help and play with ideas if anyone is interested. People keep blowing the
> UI off as if it's already fine or as if anything else will cause too much
> hand holding. The truth is that a good UI design is hard to accomplish and
> takes a lot of effort. Mac OS X is of course a note worthy example of a
> intuitive, simple, but powerful UI. As of now, gnome, kde, nautilus,
> etc... is too careless with packing options upon options in menus and
> even submenus.  The organization shows the lack of real effort towards the
> UI.

I disagree.  There are things that could be improved, but Nautilus shows
an impeccable attention to detail, as belied by it's Macintosh roots.
Do you have any concrete proposals to back this up?

> E.)Useful Features
> 	The features that go into Nautilus should be simple but
> powerful. Applications today pack way too many features in out of the fact
> that they can rather than the fact that they should. What you end up with
> is a bloated piece of software with menus full of options that are
> unproductive and useless. If Nautilus is for file browsing, we all need to
> think of more creative ways to manage files via a UI. As of now, file
> management via a UI can't even compare to a bash prompt. Some say it can't
> be done but I think it can. More effort is needed.  The pros of a UI need
> to be mixed with the pros of a bash promt and then merged together. There
> is no reason a popup window can't take input for specific styles of
> management. Ex. have two delete options. A.) Delete/move to
> trash. B.)Delete Advanced->delete files containing ..,, delete files
> starting with, delte files ending with, delete files of date, etc.....
> So one could click on "Delete Advance", a window pops up with a checkbox
> for the style of delete and a insertion field on the bottom. Anyway, you
> guys get the point

One man's bloat is another man's needed features.  Nautilus isn't meant
to replace bash, and I've never used it to do such.  There have been
proposals to build a shell-like interface to the location bar, but it
hasn't happened yet.

> F.)Clearer Navigation
> THe nautilus window should at all times show a clear way of moving between
> any disk and the network. Icons of each disk(cdrom, floppy, zip,
> individual partition icons making up the image of a whole hard disk,
> etc..) should be showed on the nautilus window. Then there should be a
> icon for the local netwowrk for browsing the shares of other
> computers. However, even these suggestions should be thought over much
> more carefully than I have done in order not to confuse the user of
> duplicate things. 

Sounds cool.  Your patches would be greatly appreciated...

> Anyway, all the possibilities is overwhelming and there doesn't really
> seem to be much use in planning out a good UI for nautilus unless everyone
> on the nautilus and gnome team can work together.Anyone have any thoughts
> on this or any info that I'm unaware of? Thanks.

Indeed, the possibilities are overwhelming.  The best approach is
probably for you to suggest what feature you're interested in adding and
post a suggestion to the list.

Thanks,
-Jonathan