Re: Nautilus epiphany integration & file transfers

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Mon, 2005-06-13 at 12:31 +0200, Raphaël Slinckx wrote:
> 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

I'm not sure of all of this. I think it over-emphasises the download
aspect in the file manager both in terms of the screen estate used and
in using animations to constantly bring your attention to something.

For instance, I don't agree with showing the download progress in the
target window. It forces you to keep that whole window around, and it
uses a lot of space in the window which is a problem for spatial windows
(which need to be very light). And anyway, most downloads is to the
desktop which doesn't have a status bar.

I agree that the current progress display in nautilus isn't all that
great. I'd prefer if all progress operations could be collected in one
dialog, and that you could easily hide it when you didn't need to see
it. But it should still somehow be easy to see the progress and bring it
back. It would be very nice if other applications could integrate with
this so that downloads in epiphany and firefox where visible too, and
other slow file operations that third party apps do. 

I think a nice system would be if all slow file transfer operations in
the system (say longer than 3 seconds) showed up in a shared dialog that
pops up when each new download starts. You can see each current file
transfer, either in a collapsed state where you see estimated time left
only, or in a more detailed state where you see things like download
rate, current amount downloaded etc. If you hide/close the progress
window it shows up as an icon in the panel (similar to e.g. the
NetworkManager applet or the battery applet). You can tell from the icon
if its downloading or if its finished, and if you click on it you get
the progress window back.

Actually, I'm not even sure such a progress dialog setup need to be
implemented in nautilus. Maybe nautilus is just a user of the progress
subsystem, just as epiphany is.

Having emblems for files being downloaded sounds nice, although I'm not
sure of the exact use case for this. However, I don't think animating
them or showing percentage on them makes a whole lot of sense. You don't
generally keep a whole filemanager window around scrolled to a specific
file just to see the progress of the download. Furthermore it introduces
lots of complexity and slowdown in the core file manager for a sort of
fringe "cool effect". Actually, maybe the download emblem will be sort
of confusing if not all forms of downloads/transfers will use it. For
instance, is it obvious to people that a file being downloaded from
epiphany is a "download", but not a slow copy of a file with nautilus
from an ftp site, or a slow usb flash memory?

About the epiphany:// stuff and using gnome-vfs/nautilus to do the
actual download. I don't see the point. Epiphany can do the download
fine itself. We just need an API where you can tell the nautilus about
the download state.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a war-weary shark-wrestling ex-con She's a pregnant mutant politician 
from aristocratic European stock. They fight crime!