[Nautilus-list] cool things people are doing with Nautilus

[Bart Decrem <bart linuxone co kr>]

Hi everyone,

First off, congrats to Darin and the rest of you for the 1.0.5 release! 
It's exciting to see Nautilus continue to get better (well, I can't see 
it just now because my libraries are a bit broken, but I'll find out in 
a few days).

I was reading through the /. posts and came across Miguel's post 
(below).  It made me realize that I, too, don't really have a good sense 
of the cool things I can do with Nautilus.  Maybe it's time to put 
together a screenshots/cool stuff people are doing with Nautilus.  Kind 
of like a Nautilus portal that has links to screenshots, and the RSS 
page, and a page that has bunches of scripts, and themes etc.  I'd love 
to go there.

Is anyone interested in working on this?  I wouldn't mind lending a hand 
but can't do this alone.

Bart


> For a long time I stuck to GMC as my desktop manager, because I 
> figured someone had to run it if we planned on keeping people with 
> small systems happy (there are a lot of under powered machines out of 
> the US).
>
> I finally made the switch because of the simplicity and cleanliness of 
> Nautilus. I did not like Nautilus 1.0, I felt there were too many 
> taste differences between my way of working and Nautilus way of working.
>
> But the Nautilus hackers were quick to respond to the input of the 
> user community, and by the time Nautilus 1.0.3 came out, they had 
> addressed most of the community issues.
>
> Today people are using Nautilus in really creative ways, and I finally 
> made the switch because of all this creativity. Tuomas has a `magnets' 
> package for his desktop and a set of images to play free-form 
> solitaire on the desktop. Sure, they are just toys, but like that 
> there are hundreds of other things being done with Nautilus.
>
> The core foundation in Nautilus is sound, and a lot of people are 
> doing really creative things. For example someone wrote a "3D" viewer 
> for directories. You can at any point switch your default view into 
> 3D-view inside the window. It is just a Bonobo component, you do not 
> even need to touch the Nautilus code to add these third-party views.
>
> Some other people have been writing Nautilus scripts, and I have been 
> using a few of them. They could use some polish, but for being 
> user-contributed things, they are pretty nice.
>
> I also noticed that the new Windows XP shell incorporated various 
> ideas that were in Nautilus or earlier versions of Nautilus and some 
> others were demoed as concepts by Andy as potential services to 
> consumers.
>
> I would like to extend's Andy's idea of "actions" that are available 
> on the left pane to be more comprehensive as it is on XP.
>
> Other features in Nautilus are its support for SVG-icons. Something 
> that has been overlooked for some time. I did not knew about this 
> until I saw someone's desktop with these huge icons (common used 
> things were huge, others were there just for reference). Those huge 
> icons looked perfect (maybe they were 100x100 size), when I asked I 
> found out that it was the new Tuomas/Jakub set of SVG icons.
>
> Many hackers have been using pictures of themselves as their desktop 
> "home". For example Nat's personal home directory has a `Friends' 
> directory, and each `Friends' folder has a high resolution picture of 
> his friends, where he keeps his information. He has a picture of his 
> car for details about his car. Maybe he can post a screenshot of his 
> desktop so you get an idea.
>
> There are many more creative uses of Nautilus out there, but I have to 
> say that as the product matures, more and more options are available.
>
> But Nautilus overall makes for a terrific file manager, but it takes 
> some time to get the best out of it.
>
> I still want to see some of Andy's experimental code that allowed live 
> objects to be shown in Nautilus. At some point I saw someone's desktop 
> contain various "web sites" in a folder. Instead of using an RSS feed, 
> various mini-web sites (fully functional) were embedded into a 
> directory. I wish someone could send me a link to this url.
>
> Miguel.