Re: Nautilus 2.6 - We're going all spatial

[John Siracusa <siracusa mindspring com>]

On 9/16/03 4:25 PM, Arik Devens wrote:
> To make matters more interesting, Apple is actually adding spatial
> support back in for Mac OS 10.3 Panther. They are, in fact, doing
> basically what is being suggested here, except that the navigation
> model will still be the default. One click of a button or so and you
> will be back in a spatial one-to-one Finder.

The Panther (10.3) Finder behaves essentially the same as the Jaguar (10.2)
Finder.  The differences are primarily those of appearance (metal vs. "aqua
with a toolbar") and the addition of some new browser-style features (e.g.
the new sidebar when in browser mode.)

> Oh, btw, one of the ways that the old Mac Finder made spatial easier
> for more advanced users was the inclusion of the tree view. You could
> open one window at the root level of the drive that was in tree view
> and see the contents of the entire drive. It unfolded to even include
> the files in the various folders. When you would double click on any of
> the folders though, it would open in its own window, and close the
> expanded view in the Finder window in tree view mode. This way the
> spatial model was still being followed, while allowing a more advanced
> view of the filesystem. Could be a useful thing to have in Nautilus,
> and less likely to be patented then spring-loaded folders.

That's called simply "list view" in Mac OS.  I know I could not live without
it, especially when editing, say, a group of Perl modules which are nested
in dirs according to the class hierarchy.  AFAIK, there are no relevant
patents, and many Mac apps use the same kind of list view (e.g. Interarchy,
my GUI FTP client).

-John