Re: [Usability]Dealing with files in Gnome

[Julien Olivier <julo altern org>]

> I don't really like that idea. It would introduce different "modes of
> operation" in Nautilus. When a user would activate this, go somewhere else
> and come back again, how would (s)he know if the second window is in
> "file browsing" or in "folder" mode?
> 
> Also I think your idea places the role of Nautilus as an application too
> much on the foreground. By this I mean that I believe Nautilus should act
> as "transparent" and unobtrusive as possible. By having users perform a
> magical dance to activate internal viewers I think you're not doing them a
> service.
> 

After some thoughts, I think you are right. We shouldn't mix Nautilus
file management views with a universal viewer app. But what could be
great then would be to have an app dedicated to universal viewing. A
totally independant app. Or, another possibility would be to have
Nautilus sort files on their mime-type and allow you to view each group
of file in a dedicated viewer. For example, if yu have pictures and
music in a folder, you should have an easy way to open all pictures in
gthumb and all music files in xmms.

As for the abiword view, it should be trivial to create an
abiword-viewer using the bonobo part and enable users to open multiple
doc|abw|rtf|etc documents in it, instead of opening them in Nautilus
directly.