Re: Spring Loaded Folders Reloaded



Curtis Hovey wrote:

On Fri, 2003-02-28 at 12:43, Alexander Larsson wrote:
On 28 Feb 2003, Christophe Fergeau wrote:

However, looking at the Apple latest patent [1], it is clear that the patch would make Nautilus violates claim 1 of that patent.
To my eyes, the more sensible thing to do with respect to patent is to
never read any so that you can say you didn't know about it if there is
some problems :)
Moreover, this apple patent is probably valid in a few countries, and I
don't think it's really fair to reject this patch because it's illegal
in the us (and maybe a few other countries). You can #ifdef it out in
the problematic countries if you want to be safe :)
That would mean you can't distribute nautilus.

From the GPL:
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.


Thanks.  I wish I had remembered to check the license when I first
mentioned the patented issue and distribution complications.  I knew
there were real legal complications and I stopped after reviewing the
list archives.

I hope all is not lost.  I think this feature is valuable, and I we can
improve it (innovate it) so that there are no patent issues.  The
behaviour, restated in hopes of seeing an alternate implementation, is
that a gesture involving a selection of objects in nautilus will display
something that will help navigate the folder hierarchy using only
gestures.  I believe someone suggested displaying the tree instead of
opening folders.  And now that I think of it, Spring Loaded Folders are
never easy to navigate up the tree.  While hovering over a folder seams
natural to me (wanting to move, but hesitating) as a means to display a
helper, I'm not sure that is intuitive when you want the files to go
outside any desktop folders.

Another alternative idea. Press a particular hotkey at any time (not necessarily while dragging and dropping) while hovering over a folder to create a temporary window with the contents of the folder. You could also use this to open a file down a deep heirarchy without moving the nautilus 'current directory'...

This would be unrelated to dragging and dropping (although usable in that case, of course), and so close to zillions of other old ui techniques there couldn't possibly be a patent on it :-)

Just an idea.

Darryl.




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