Re: [Nautilus-list] Advanced feature request (learning tasks by example)

[John Sullivan <sullivan eazel com>]

This is a very large task that would take a long time to get right.
Hopefully somebody will eventually get around to adding such a thing to
Nautilus.

Note that this is very similar to recording AppleScripts in the Macintosh
Finder. So it's not completely untrodden ground.

A much simpler feature that we hope to add in the not-too-distant feature is
a way to invoke arbitrary scripts on the selected files & folders in icon or
list view. The bug report describing this feature is at
http://bugzilla.eazel.com/show_bug.cgi?id=4875.

John

on 2/13/01 12:10 PM, Daniel Wang at danwang CS Princeton EDU wrote:

> 
> I was musing about why, I hate file GUI's soo much and boiled it down to the
> fact that I can't script the darn things to do silly repetitive tasks.
> 
> Like for instance move the mp3 files and only the mp3 files from one folder
> to another. Or rename uniformly rename a group of files based on some pattern.
> Or invoke the same program on the the same set of files. This is why, I'll
> never give up my command shell... However, there are times when writing the
> right one liner is just as much a pain as doing it by hand.
> 
> What I'd like to see in Nautilus, is a feature includes some relatively
> simple AI. In particular, added a button called "learn a task by
> example" to nautilus. Once the button is pressed nautilus goes into learning
> mode. The use than does some set of tasks, such as moving a few files and
> then hits another button "done with example", which tells nautilus that it
> should be able to figure out what to do next.
> 
> Between these two button, presses nautilus is logging all the user actions
> to some file, once it's done. We run the file through some fancy yet to be
> written AI pattern recognition engine, which spits out a program in a
> command language, which the user can use to automate a task.
> 
> The script generated by the AI engine doesn't have to be perfect, as long as
> it gets most of the simple cases. Advanced users can edit the script to get
> exactly what they want. Novice users could step though the script step by
> step to see what it does. If it does the wrong thing they, can try to give
> the AI more info by doing a bigger example.
> 
> I'm not an AI expert, but it seems that for lots of daily things, you don't
> really need that much smarts.. and it's not to hard to architect things so
> the engine is completely separate from nautilus. There just needs to be some
> way to log users events.
> 
> Anyway, can I convince anyone to bite this one off and build for me the
> perfect file manager GUI?
> 
> 
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