Re: Sharing the places sidebar between Nautilus and GTK+

[Cosimo Cecchi <cosimoc gnome org>]

Hi Jannis,

On Wed, 2011-09-07 at 01:53 +0200, Jannis Pohlmann wrote:

> To be honest, I think we can do better than this. The user experience
> offered by the current places sidebar is far from ideal IMHO. In
> Nautilus 3.x 
>  
>   * the sidebar has no mount/eject progress indicators,
>   * the eject buttons do not look/feel clickable, i.e., they don't
>     change their appearance on hover events, 

[ This should have been fixed now if you use a recent enough GTK+ and
Nautilus ]

> I realize that, aside from the code still being somewhat rough and
> imcomplete, this is nothing we'd want to stuff into GTK+. In
> particular, faking the look of a tree view with custom widgets may seem
> like a hack to most people (even though standard GTK+ drawing routines
> are used). On the other hand it is fun to use and shows how the places
> sidebar *could* work IMHO:
> 
>   * progress indicators for async operations, 
>   * real mount/eject/cancel buttons ('cuz spinners alone are not
>     enough),
>   * individual row/button highlighting on hover,
>   * keyboard navigation works (even switching between rows and
>     buttons is possible), 

I agree with these points, even if some of those might be possible to
implement with cell renderers and a tree view; to me, another added
bonus of not using a GtkTreeView but a custom container and a separate
widget for each row is it allows themes to easily style different rows,
which is used e.g. in the Documents mockup [1] and might not be very
easy to do otherwise.

[1]
http://gitorious.org/gnome-design/gnome-design/blobs/master/mockups/documents/documents-sidebar.png