Re: Beyond Nautilus 1.0

["Michael T. Babcock" <mbabcock fibrespeed net>]

> 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?

What I would like to see happen is the use of component architectures so as
to create an extensible file "interface" system.  I would like to have the
system of "views" such as that I have "components on" and "components off".
Where the former is all the features on, and the latter is just a list of
files and sizes like an ls -l.

I think something like a well-designed Nautilus is a good idea, but I don't
believe its being done properly.  I see the interface as needing a bit of
work, but being fairly good.  I just don't like the underlying code from
what I've browsed of it and what I've read by the authors.  I think the
'right way' to do this is to have the ability to handle certain MIME types
in certain ways and allow the user to pick which handler to use (I may have
3 spectral analysis programs and 12 mp3 players) when previewing certain
types of files.

As long as its done with a good component interface, the software writers
will end up writing more component based software to allow their programs to
fit into the interface (the file manager ends up being a 'chrome' or 'skin'
of sorts for various programs).  Zooming in (maximising) would let you use
the file right from that interface having at some point loaded the program
to use it behind the scenes.  Zooming back out shows that preview view of
that file along with dozens of others.  Depending on the file type, this
interface works well, if properly designed in code.

I'm just not convinced that the Nautilus team is as concerned about their
back-end code as they are about eye-candy.