On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 03:06:37PM +0100, Allan Day wrote:
Hi all, I've been taking another look at the "add drive" designs for Nautilus, which will hopefully be worked on as a GSoC project this summer. There are a few elements to the design, and there are some open questions about it (both design and technical), so I wanted to lay it all out in writing. There are a couple of goals for the design: 1. Retire the existing "Browse Network" part of Nautilus - it's clunky, seems rather old fashioned, and overlaps with "Connect to Server". 2. Stop showing all internal volumes in the sidebar - they're not relevant a lot of the time, and clutter the sidebar. The design aims to address these goals by: * Merging "Browse Network" into the "Connect to Server" dialog. Where you currently see a list of recent servers, there would also be a list of servers that have been discovered on the network. * Instead of showing all internal volumes in the sidebar, hide them by default but add controls to allow the user to configure which ones are displayed. A further step could involve merging Connect to Server with drive configuration, into a generic "Add Drive" dialog (which could be called something else, such as "Add Drives and Servers") [1]. As far as I'm concerned, there are a number of open questions which could influence the final design. These are: 1. Is it possible to discover servers on the network, in order to present them in a list? Are there scenarios where this wouldn't work for UX reasons (say, in environments where there are a lot of servers)? 2. Should we include online account configuration? This could be a good place to advertise that you can add OwnCloud to the sidebar (and hopefully Google Drive in the future).
It would probably be good to include available cloud drives (e.g. if you've already signed into an owncloud account) with a link to Online Accounts if you're not signed in.
3. Related to the previous question - what is the best way to describe "Connect to Server"? Common terminology is evolving in this area - are these servers, "cloud drives", "online accounts", or something else?
I dunno, "network volume" maybe? Perhaps that's too geeky. What do other OSes call them? I think cloud drives is good for personal storage over the internet (e.g. an owncloud setup) but not so good for a local windows share.
4. Depending on question 2 and 3 - does it make sense to merge Connect to Server and a dialog for adding internal drives? To some people, "servers" and "disks" might not logically go together. Also, disk configuration might work better as a preferences dialog, rather than an action dialog. The mockup experiments might help to clarify the significance of some of these questions [1].
I like the last one "Add Disks and Servers", although I think it should be possible to also include online accounts in that list too. From a technical perspective, an owncloud account is just a webdav share, so it seems weird to treat it differently. Having a single list of mountable volumes regardless of their location seems like the cleanest approach since from a user's perspective, there should be little difference in behavior between a local disk, an sftp mount and a Google drive. Perhaps the UI for adding a drive to the sidebar can be unified with adding a bookmark for a network volume? -- Ross Lagerwall
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