Re: Beyond Nautilus 1.0

[Heikki Keränen <heikrnen ees2 oulu fi>]

Marc Fearby wrote:
> 
> What Heikki seems to be suggesting is a Microsoft Explorer gone power-
> hungry to do everything you could ever want in a simple file manager!
> How many people actually need spectral analysis or even powerpoint
> support in a file manager? Isn't that what waveform editors and slide
> presentation programs are for? I thought file managers were supposed to
> give you a simple, bloat-free, fast, and efficient way of accessing
> your files?

Microsoft Explorer is not well done. If you turn on the thumbnail mode
it is really slow. Nautilus preview 1 is better for this (faster when
you open folder second time, but perhaps not fast enough), but this
could be done even better (and faster) way.

The main problem for the user is: With traditional file manager you can
see all file names in a folder, but you still have to open files to see
what is inside -> looking for the right file is SLOW! Time to open the
application takes forever and after that the application has to open a
file which may be many megabytes by it's size. We should not only
optimize the speed of the system (and UI) but also the time required for
the user to make a realworld task. With the application you can open and
see one file, but not multiple files (in fast and handy way). There
should be something between those extremes! 


> What you appear to be suggesting is a mother-of-all-file-managers which
> wants to be all things to all people. Let me tell you now that it's
> never going to happen - not in Linux anyway, I hope! How useful are
> spectral analyses to 99% of the file-browsing community anyway? Maybe
> a hex-view would be useful as well - I know *lots* of people who can
> read hex!

On the other hand you are right: Spectral and waveform thumbnails are
not suitable for everyone, but audio professionals could like this
feature. You can learn different things from those figures: e.g. silence
and louder parts of the sounds are easy to recognize. By default this
feature could be turned off, but audio professionals could turn it on.
This module could be replaced by a better one when people invent better
ways to represent audio (room for creativity and innovations). You could
make hex thumbnails for yourself if you find it usefull. This could be
even default for the binary files not yet registered by other
components.

And to avoid misunderstandings: In the case of filemanager view, I mean
a view which can contain MULTIPLE files. To view and edit ONE file a
separate application window is better. Thumbnail is usually associated
with images, so I avoided "audio thumbnail" and used audio visualization
instead. 

Of course applications could provide browsing tools for multiple files
(as PaintShop in Windows does). The problem however is that you have to
start application and you can't easily change to a view which can
present all media types (a feature which the user probably needs much).

> I may seem a little harsh in my reply and for good reason. Linux got
> where it is today by modularising everything and resisting the one
> ...

Take a look to the problem statement I presented above. Perhaps the
modularisation used today should be done differently. I'am not saying
that programmers of the filemanager should do everything. They just make
the filemanager module, and developers of applications makes modules
which can understand the file their application creates.

If you think Linux, you can do a lot of things with it. It fits everyone
(if you don't count those people who think it is too difficult and those
who can't find their favorite program for it). Application programs are
like modules which make linux customizable. I think filemanager should
be like linux. It lets you to do a lot various things, but still be
customizable by users and extendable by various programmers.

	Heikki Keranen