[Nautilus-list] vFolders and such

[Ryan Muldoon <rpmuldoon students wisc edu>]

I thought of something today, and I was kind of stumped.  vFolders are
really cool, and I am *REALLY* excited that they will be integrated into
Nautilus.  However, I was wondering how Nautilus would handle the idea
of saving (or copying/moving) a file to a vFolder.  They are kind of
naturally read-only, in that they don't exist on hierarchical
filesystems.  So, if I'm downloading a file, and I want to save it,
where should I put it?  And what happens if I *do* save it to a vFolder?

Here are a couple things that I thought of, and I'm sure others have
better ideas, or have solved this problem already:
1. Treat vFolders differently than normal folders, and don't allow
copy/save/move operations to them.  This is ok, but would probably be a
little confusing.  To do this, vFolder icons would have to be very
distinctly different from normal folders.
2. Let users copy/move/save files into vFolders.  Just create a
"vFolders" directory in the user's home directory, which is then
subdivided into a directory for each vFolder.  XML descriptions of the
search queries for each vFolder would be present, so Nautilus would know
how to generate the vFolder.  So, there would be a physical location on
the hard drive for the files to go, but the user doesn't really need to
worry about it.  But if the user does, they can get at the normal files
that have been explicitly saved into the vFolder from the command line
in a pretty sensical way.
3. Have Nautilus have a mode where it *only* shows vFolders.  So it is a
consistent UI, and saves just goes into the home dir, or something like
described in 2.  This would probably be a good solution only after
vFolders have been used for a while, and users are used to them.


And also, my other thought about folders and vFolders:
Mac OS X has a really nice little touch, where directories can have an
extra descriptive icon overlayed on the folder icons.  That would be
pretty nice if either Nautilus or I could put an icon on there.  So
music folders would have a music icon on top, or document folders have a
document, etc.  And vFolders could have some description of what the
search is based on.  I don't quite think Emblems cover this so much, as
they are more general-purpose.  It would be a nice quick visual cue.
Any way Nautilus can add additional visual cues (like more thumbnails
for different types) is a big improvement in my eyes.  

Anyway, that's my little rant.

    --Ryan