RE: [Nautilus-list] Re: [gnome-love] GNOME user environment brainstorming

["rpmuldoon students wisc edu" <rpmuldoon students wisc edu>]

I thought that I'd jump in with a few things that I think would make GNOME a more pleasant desktop.


1. An "Open" dialog for the foot menu.
Basically, you type in a filename/uri, and it uses gnome-vfs to figure out how to open it...whether it be a nautilus instance for a directory, or a galeon/mozilla/nautilus for a web page, or eog for an image.  
Either add this functionality to Run, or make it a separate dialog. (maybe a command line utility called "show" or "open" or something could do the same thing)

2. A "Recently used" submenu
A recently used documents submenu (or virtual folder would be even cooler) would be really useful.  

3. "Favorites" should allow applications as well as documents/urls.
Web pages and such should be treated on par with applications.

4. A "News" submenu in the panel menu.  Basically, use the information in the Nautilus News sidebar, and put it into a panel submenu.  It lets a user quickly scan to see if they need to bother to open a web browser or not.  I would personally use this feature constantly.  The News sidebar is cool, but you already need to have opened Nautilus to use it.

5. A "Find" program that uses medusa as the backend.  Whether it just launches Nautilus' find mechanism, or it is a more stripped down UI, this would be useful.  It should probably use the nautilus list view component to list the search results though.  

6. Virtual folders.  Virtual folders really are an awesome idea, and I'd love to see them integrated into the desktop.  Things like a "music" folder that has all of my music files in one place would just be convenient.  Same goes for things like Recently Modified, Documents, and anything else the user comes up with.  It should be trivial to make new ones (like a checkbox in the find program to make the current search a virtual folder).

7. Allow Nautilus Emblems to be associated with scripts/tasks/whatever.  Like "secret" should encrypt the file.  "Shared" should actually share the file.  "Important" should back it up.  Things like that would make somewhat complex tasks pretty trivial to accomplish.

8. Improve Medusa
Things like adding FAM support to the local file indexer, adding modules to allow for remote searches, improving speed, etc.  Medusa has a ton of potential, and I really hope that it gets improved, and fully exploited in future GNOME releases
Other comments:
I am really in favor of having GNOME ship with fewer, higher quality apps than a ton of decent apps.  So trimming the number of applets is a great idea.  Also, if changes are going to be made to xscreensaver, I would suggest pruning the demos that are shipped.  90% of those really suck, and look bad.  I'd rather have a choice of 10-15 good screensavers than 100 crappy ones.  Same goes for themes and such too. ;-)

On the subject of themes, and a new capplet to make changes to fonts and colors, I hope that fonts and colors are uniformly applied to both the WM and the gtk theme.  I *really* like the fact that the Crux Sawfish theme can use the gtk theme's highlight color.  More themes should do that.  It just makes it easier to get a consistent look for your desktop.

Also, with gconf-based preferences, something that would *totally* kick ass is some means of doing roaming preferences.  So, no matter where I log on to a gnome computer, I can download my gconf settings for how my desktop should behave.  That would simply be unbelievably cool.  It would probably be at least half of a solution for making locked down configurations.

Anyway, those are my thoughts for now.....

   --Ryan

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