Hi ! I have been messing with nautilus sources to quickly hack a demo of nautilus-epiphany integration. The result can be seen on my blog (pictures+ a little video, the last two posts) http://raphael.slinckx.net/blog Now i would like to discuss about some points here. * Epiphany for the moment must use the mozilla download engine for various reasons, mainly because you have to deal with cookies, POST-data, authentification, referers, etc when downloading things, which epiphany knows (since it's the browser) but not gnome-vfs. Knowing that, for the moment i just send over dbus notifications about the download progress, that's quite ugly if you ask, and maybe another solution can be used, i need help here. We thought about a gnome-vfs backend which would use for exemple epiphany:// urls, mozilla writing in a named pipe, and gnomevfs reading from it and delivering the data to whoever reads in for example epiphany://download-id. Is that possible, i don't know, but it would allow a simpler dbus protocol, just telling to nautilus "can you copy file from epiphany://download-id to download-destination-folder" and making use of standard nautilus mechanisms. * Concerning file progresses dialogs, is it envisionnable to replace them by somthing like in the screenshots ? for all transfers (moving/copying from/to any kind of source/destination). This has advantages: -Operations related to a folder only show up in that particular folder (goes along with spatial mode) -No annoying un-closable popup for each transfer you start, they don't scale up. -Most of the time i don't want to have a big window saying basically "wait, i'm copying files", i just want to know when it's done, and maybe have a quick look at the progress. Most of the time i just launch an operation, then forget it, and come to it later. Watching a file operation progress is loosing time. -Use of the status bar to what it's there for, giving status, of the file progress in this case. -Eye candy, but we don't care, don't we ? * Finally concerning emblems. You notice that the emblem fills up when the file is being downloaded. That was a quick hack, cause emblems shouldn't be used for that, but here are my ideas about that: - For every file transfer (not only download) show something, a progress bar, the icon changing from grey to color progressively, a pie filling up, on the particular icon representing the file. That way you can have a precise feedback for the progress of that file. Maybe using a text saying "55% complete", like it is possible now to show the filesize under the file name. - Provide a context menu item for an "active file" proposing to cancel the operation on that file (deleting it would result in the same thing) So far here are the problems i see with this approach: -How to cancel a whole job ? maybe a cancel button in the statusbar, beside the progress bar ? -How to handle the desktop being shown by nautilus, you don't have any statusbar ? either fallback on a dialog, or just providing the progress "emblems" can be enough, you don't do that much transfer to your desktop except single files. -Should file operation emblem be recursive (ie. a dir being copied could show the progress for the entire directory, subdirs only for the content of subdirs, etc) ? -Part of these ideas can be implemented in an extension (the emblem filling, in part at least). Providing a better solution than emblems for that, somthing built-in, and the statusbar need to modify nautilus core. My personnal goal would be to have a perfect integration of epiphany downloads with nautilus in a nice way, that's why i propose the above enhancements, cause i think not only downloads can profit of these. What do you think of all this, i personally think it would be a great step forward for nautilus. I am willing to work on that, but i need guidance and advices concerning the nautilus architecture, files, etc, and i don't know if it's possible at all with the way nautilus works ! Raphael
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