Nautilus plans for 3.0

[Cosimo Cecchi <cosimoc gnome org>]

Hi all,

with this mail I want to summarize the state of nautilus for GNOME 3.
Although the list has been a bit quiet lately, lots of changes went in
git master, and we also have some plans for the future! :)

== 3.0 readiness ==

- nautilus has been tracking GTK+ 3.0 deprecations since some releases,
and it should now build and work fine against the latest GTK+ master.
There might be some rendering glitches or drawing regressions we didn't
catch yet; if you find one, please file a bug in Nautilus bugzilla.

- it uses GSettings for pretty much everything now, except for some
metadata-related code that still needs to be migrated.

- one of the things we've been working on to make nautilus a good
citizen in the GNOME 3 world is moving its "session service" duties
elsewhere. This is because in 3.0 ideally the file manager is just
another application, and not a required component of the core session.
Tomas moved the volume automount and autorun code to a
gnome-settings-daemon plugin, and I moved the media preferences to a
gnome-control-center panel, replacing the old "File Management" capplet.
As usual, there might be regressions here; testing is really
appreciated, and if you find something wrong, please file a bug against
the relevant component and CC me or Tomas. In the same spirit, handling
of the desktop background has been delegated to gnome-settings-daemon.

- most of the MIME-related widgets have been moved directly in GTK+,
under the GtkAppChooser widget family. Nautilus is one of their primary
users, and is already ported to the new API.

== Cleanups ==

- with the 3.0 release, I took the opportunity to remove quite some
legacy code; see [1] for the most prominent example of such cleanups.
Removing some obsolete/not properly designed features, has been a way to
improve the codebase stability and to make an UI redesign possible (see
the next paragraph).
- other removed items include the History and Notes sidebar, and support
for the Beagle indexer. This last item has been done with the idea of
allowing a deeper Tracker integration in the future.

== UI Redesign ==

- Allan, Hylke, Lapo and all the other people in the Design team have
been doing a great job in mocking up possible revamps of the nautilus
interface. You can find the latest iterations here [2]. We really want
to get there, possibly improving things incrementally, one item at a
time.
- the sidebar has been already redesigned to match the mockups!
- the "Connect to Server" dialogue has been already redesigned too!

== Yet to be solved ==

We still lack some guidelines on how gnome-shell should interact with
mounted volumes and files on the desktop. For this reason, nautilus at
the moment is still drawing desktop icons by default, and it's still
started up automatically together with the session. As Alexander and
others previously discussed on the list, this might change in the
future, but it's not yet clear how. Design input very welcome.

== Get involved ==

One of the reasons I did not send this mail earlier is that it was quite
hard to contribute something to nautilus with all the GTK+ 3
deprecations coming and going. Now this should be over, and jhbuild
should work really fine for building nautilus on most environments (or
any other GTK+ 3 application), so it's the perfect time to jump in and
help the development.

We have a list of outstanding UI bugs we'd like to fix here [3], and
some big features, like Undo support, in the pipeline. Feel free to pick
some of those items and write a patch, I'll do my best to review it.

The best way of getting in touch with us if you want to get involved is
using IRC, (#nautilus on GIMPNet) or this mailing list.

[1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2010-July/msg00023.html
[2]
http://gitorious.org/gnome-design/gnome-design/trees/master/mockups/nautilus
[3] http://live.gnome.org/Nautilus/UIRoadmap/

Cheers,

Cosimo