Nautilus Elementary Collaboration

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Hi all,

Me and a few others had some good design discussions with the Elementary
developers last Friday. See below for an outline of where I think we
stand on a range of feature initiatives. Further comments and discussion
are welcome.

The short version is (I think) this: in terms of design, undo/redo and
Zeitgeist integration are areas where both projects can definitely try
and collaborate in the future. There are also possibilities around
sharing code for a Places sidepane, toolbar editor and the view
switcher, though there has already been a bit of divergence there.

I'd like to thank the Elementary developers for the time and effort
they've put into talking this through. It's great that the communication
channels are open now. We should definitely keep talking.

Here's the discussion feature by feature:

 * Breadcrumb bar: both projects want to have a breadcrumb bar. We seem
to differ on what we want from this though. Elementary have ambitions to
integrate search functionality within theirs [1]. I personally don't
think this would be a good way for Nautilus to go: a separate search box
would be more discoverable. This approach has already been advocated by
Garrett [2] and is in Bugzilla [3].

 * Places sidepane: Elementary have created a Places sidepane with
headings. This is something that Nautilus also wants to do, though we
have different ideas about how it should be done [4] (our design lacks
expanders, has different headings and a different section order).

 * Zoom slider: this is something that Elementary have implemented. I
don't think this would be right for Nautilus, and I haven't heard many
arguments to the contrary.

 * Editable toolbars: Elementary have incorporated Midori's toolbar
editor, which isn't the standard one used in other GNOME apps. So,
though we're aiming to have editable toolbars in Nautilus, the work done
by the Elementary devs isn't very useful for us.

 * View switcher: Elementary have a kind of grouped toggle button for
this, which could be nice to have in Nautilus, but the implementation is
a bit problematic. kitkat from the elementary crew has recommended that
we should steer clear of their implementation. Maybe we could work
together to do something a bit more solid in the future?

 * Zeitgeist integration: this is something we could collaborate on,
since both projects seem to have similar aims. It would be nice to have
Places entries like 'Today', 'Yesterday', and 'This Week' in Nautilus
[4]. Elementary have already done some work in this area [5].

 * Undo/Redo functionality: Elementary currently have this working and
they've pointed us to the latest code [6]. It would be great if we could
draw on this work.

Let me know if I've misrepresented anything. ;)

Allan

[1]
http://danrabbit.deviantart.com/art/Nautilus-Pathbar-Breakdown-155760035?q=gallery:DanRabbit/2418059&qo=6
[2] http://linuxart.com/log/archives/2009/07/24/nautilus-streamlined/
[3] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=615549
[4] http://live.gnome.org/Nautilus/UIRoadmap/Places
[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbHsO2GL9lM&feature=player_embedded
[6]
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~elementaryart/nautilus-elementary/nautilus-elementary-2.30/diff/60


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