[Nautilus-list] Nautilus Feature Idea

[Ryan Muldoon <rpmuldoon students wisc edu>]

I had an idea today for a nice addition to Nautilus - basically, I want to
see increased application integration through bonobo and gnome-vfs.  My
idea is to add a "global search" fallback to searching with
medusa/nautilus.  

For example, if I am searching for a radiohead mp3, and it isn't on my hard
drive, I want nautilus to use a gnapster or gtk-gnutella driver for
gnome-vfs to find it for me.  The same idea works for a lot of different
files - tarballs, graphics files, rfcs, etc. Rather than using gnapster,
nautilus could send a search request to ftpsearch.lycos.com, hotline or
something similar.  Or the local SMB/NFS/AFS/whatever filesharing system. 
I think that it is basically an extension of how Nautilus already treats
remote files as it does local files.  The simplest case is probably mp3s,
since there is a solid infrastructure around searching for music because of
napster.  But things like Scour and iMesh work for more files as
well.....the ability to add search services like these into a file manager
would be pretty powerful.  

I also have a question about how other applications are going to be able to
interact with nautilus - one of the nice things that Explorer lets you do
is let other apps add in shell extensions into the right-click menu.  There
are 2 that I find useful - the "mail this file to someone" and the "ICQ
file-transfer this to someone"......will Evolution and GnomeICU be able to
add this type of thing (trivially)?  Or will you just rely on drag and drop
to accomplish the same tasks? Drag and drop is definitely nice, but across
multiple virtual desktops and viewports, it can be a hassle.  Also, you may
not have evolution or whatever open yet.  

I hope that these suggestions are of use......

	--Ryan