[Nautilus-list] Nautilus Goals

[<mitch nuclear physics gatech edu>]

	I write with the concern of Nautilus' future.  As of now, Nautilus
is completely unuseful. I'm aware that it isn't finished yet but it is
unfortunately already labeled a  > 1.0 version. I'll just list the issues
below in order to make things cleaner.

A.)Mozilla:
	Why does Nautilus need to use mozilla? Doesn't this produce a lot
of overhead? Nautilus should browse files, perhaps be used for
configurations, and simple html use. Wouldn't gtkhtml get the job done and
done quicker?  

B.)Xrender
	What's the status on Xrender support? I realized that AA
fonts,etc.. should be done via gtk 2.0 in the future but what about the
mouse drag alpha? Wouldn't the use of Xrender on this speed things up for
us that have the hardware support?

C.)GTK
	Being realistic, how much is gtk 1.2.x slowing Nautilus down? In
my experience, QT has proved to be faster. The worse case I can think of
is for users in 16 bit and even worse in 15 bit. Gtk has to dither
down. If the user is in 15 bit, gtk has to dither down to 16 and then
dither down to 15. This makes things god awful slow. Gtk 2.0 should be
faster and better but it's of course not mainstream yet and the extent at
which gtk 1.2.x slows things down is not really known. Or is it?

D.)UI
	No offense, but the current UI design of Nautilus itself and the
desktop is horrible. More thought needs to be put into this. I'd love to
help and play with ideas if anyone is interested. People keep blowing the
UI off as if it's already fine or as if anything else will cause too much
hand holding. The truth is that a good UI design is hard to accomplish and
takes a lot of effort. Mac OS X is of course a note worthy example of a
intuitive, simple, but powerful UI. As of now, gnome, kde, nautilus,
etc... is too careless with packing options upon options in menus and
even submenus.  The organization shows the lack of real effort towards the
UI.

E.)Useful Features
	The features that go into Nautilus should be simple but
powerful. Applications today pack way too many features in out of the fact
that they can rather than the fact that they should. What you end up with
is a bloated piece of software with menus full of options that are
unproductive and useless. If Nautilus is for file browsing, we all need to
think of more creative ways to manage files via a UI. As of now, file
management via a UI can't even compare to a bash prompt. Some say it can't
be done but I think it can. More effort is needed.  The pros of a UI need
to be mixed with the pros of a bash promt and then merged together. There
is no reason a popup window can't take input for specific styles of
management. Ex. have two delete options. A.) Delete/move to
trash. B.)Delete Advanced->delete files containing ..,, delete files
starting with, delte files ending with, delete files of date, etc.....
So one could click on "Delete Advance", a window pops up with a checkbox
for the style of delete and a insertion field on the bottom. Anyway, you
guys get the point


F.)Clearer Navigation
THe nautilus window should at all times show a clear way of moving between
any disk and the network. Icons of each disk(cdrom, floppy, zip,
individual partition icons making up the image of a whole hard disk,
etc..) should be showed on the nautilus window. Then there should be a
icon for the local netwowrk for browsing the shares of other
computers. However, even these suggestions should be thought over much
more carefully than I have done in order not to confuse the user of
duplicate things. 


The real solution is for the Nautilus and gnome teams to get together,
discuss UI possibilities, compromise on a solution, and everyone stick to
it. The full UI should not be redundant or confusing. If I want to browse
the local network, I shouldn't have to decide between 5 different ways.It
should be clear that I must do it via Nautilus. The way in which the
system should be configured is a bit tough too. Will the setup options
stay in the gnome menu or will they move into nautilus? Perhaps they will
be in the gnome menu but open up within a nautilus window. Ex. Gnome
menu->
1.)System Setup 
2.)User preferences
3.)Services Setup

when clicked, they open up within the nautilus window. The question then
is if these options should be accessable via a vanilla nautilus window
that is browsing the users home directoy? Would this lead to confusion.


Anyway, all the possibilities is overwhelming and there doesn't really
seem to be much use in planning out a good UI for nautilus unless everyone
on the nautilus and gnome team can work together.Anyone have any thoughts
on this or any info that I'm unaware of? Thanks.