Re: [Usability]Re: Nautilus toolbar simplification

[Ali Akcaagac <aliakc web de>]

On Tue, 2003-03-11 at 16:43, Julien Olivier wrote:
> OK, I agree. Merging Nautilus and a web browser is a bad idea. But,
> then, the implementation detail (urls) should be dropped ! I mean,
> Nautilus just has to be coherent. If it's decided that it's just a file
> browser, then why is there a location bar ? A file browser should be
> called by opening a folder, not by typing an URL. And what about
> "previous" and "next" ? I know this has also been discussed but the fact
> is that you'll always such threads if Nautilus developers don't take a
> final decision about WHAT Nautilus is used for and make it look like the
> thing it should be.

A Localtionbar is definately an advantage and removing it will seriously
confuse (if not piss off) a lot of people. Look at a practical example:

Say you want to dive into some subdirectories:

/
/usr
/usr/local/
/usr/local/include/
/usr/local/include/libgnome-2.0/
/usr/local/include/libgnome-2.0/gnome/

You would probably do it step by step that way with Nautilus. You see
the location you are right now in the locationfield. Now think about
this locationfield removed. You now dive into this directory, someone
calls you up via phone you are away talking to that person for half a
day and then later come back. You see Nautilus running, somewhere in a
directory and you can't recall where you are right now without going
back 1-2 dirs and dive back into that just to find out where you are and
what you wanted there.

Say you are talking with someone and he types you quickly some location
where you have to look if the file exists then it may be easier to
cut&paste his entered location into Nautilus locationbar and go there.
There are many situations and cases where I manually enter some stuff
and I would be happy to have the locationbar stay there.

There are 4 ways I met during my computer business doing graphical
filemanagement:

1) The way Nautilus, Konqueror, and Microsoft Fileexplorer does it now
by having one mainprogram showing folders where you can do actions.

2) The Dualwindowed Filemanager way such as DirectoryOpus,
DirectoryMaster, FileRunner where you have a window left, a window right
and then you can select files from left and have them copied, moved and
whatever to the right.

http://www.cd.chalmers.se/~hch/screenshot.html
http://www.obsession.se/gentoo/screenshots/main.png
http://dopus.free.fr/index.html

3) The integrated way in the Desktop itself like AmigaOS is doing it.
You are presented with Icons on your Desktop only and by clicking on
them you get a Lightweight window opened, No fancy stuff like toolbars,
menus, locationbars. A simple Window pops up with a Canvas inside and
where your directories and files are being listed. Giving one the
feeling that this is a nice integrated cool way of managing files. You
can open many of these litte Windows, arrange the Files and Dirs inside,
you can drag&drop stuff across the windows. You can layout and arrange
the Icons inside it in Groups, Grid or manual layout. The only
information you see is the Location written as Window title.

http://www.nowee.org/overshaker/dknw.html
http://www.nowee.org/overshaker/cdnw.html
http://www.nowee.org/overshaker/blnw.html
http://thendipo.alias.domicile.fr/img_show/shenfield/c/woa_cd.jpg

look at the little windows on the desktop containing folders and files.

4) A new way but similar the way to 3) is the way Directory Opus
Magellan does things. Quite powerful imo.

http://gideon.campus.luth.se/GAH/DMbild.html

on this picture you see dopus magellan in action, the screenshot doesn't
look really pleasing but that is just a theming issue but you see that
some windows there have toolbars and a filelist below them. in this case
the filemanager integrates as workbench replacement that is taking over
the whole desktop it's similar like in 3) where you play with the
original workbench but here you get more features and more stuff to work
with. it's so said not bad.

maybe an idea to think how stuff should look like.