Re: Column View

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Mon, 2003-12-01 at 20:24, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="John McCutchan">
> 
> > What concerns me the most about this whole thread, is we have someone
> > willing to work and contribute a nautilus view and are being discouraged
> > because his addition may not be "usefull enough".
> 
> This happens all the time, and it's a good thing. Say I post to the list
> telling you that I would be very pleased to write a GNOME fstab editing
> program. How useful is that going to be? Should it be done at all? Would we
> ship it? Is it going to be useful to users? Is there a better way to solve
> the problem?  Was there a problem defined in the first place?
> 
> Personally, I think the columnar view ala Mac OS X is a terribly bad joke
> [1], and doesn't gel well at all with the current direction of Nautilus.

I disagree, somewhat.  The problem with column view in OS X is that it's
considered a "view" of a particular folder.  But you're not viewing one
folder in column view, you're viewing the whole filesystem.  Column view
sucks as a view of a spatial folder.

However, column view can work in a strictly navigational mode.  But it
would probably be very awkward to work it into the current browser mode
of Nautilus.  I think column view can be very useful, but I just can't
imagine how to make it work well in Nautilus.  (On a somewhat related
subject, I think column view really shines in a file open dialog.)

On a more general topic, if Tristan really wants to make a column view,
I think the slickest way to go about it would be to make a generalized
FooColumnView widget which accepts any GtkTreeModel.  Even if there's no
good way to work it into Nautilus, it might prove useful elsewhere.

--
Shaun