On Sun, 2008-06-29 at 16:07 +0200, Andre Klapper wrote: > Am Samstag, den 28.06.2008, 17:33 +0300 schrieb Sorin: > > - Windows Vista file manager look (kind of Mozilla Firefox look in > > terms of nav. buttons, address/search bars) > > - compact list view (nice when working with lots of files) > > - tabs (Windows Vista, and Apple's OS X are far behind this feature) > > - support for archives > > - support for encrypted files/volumes > > - support for network files/volumes (including FTP, and Windows) > > - secure delete feature (sweap) > > - preview/embeded view for different types of content (office > > documents, images, videos, web pages) > > - indexing/searching support > > - global bookmarks > > - support for plugins > > did you ever try nautilus? much stuff of this is already possible, and > most descriptions are totally vague. feel free to come up with patches. > > andre Besides which, I for one think the /perfect/ file manager would have to change things quite a bit, with a completely different view mode -- one which groups items based on how important they are to the user (as determined by file type and variables like image width). Icons would have many different levels of visibility, each level adding more preview information. That "importance" measure could also peak inside of folders. I think that would have a really interesting impact on usability. For example, a shocking number of users are baffled by the task of navigating photo CDs, and I noticed that the reason why is because they are afraid of randomly trying things with computers. If the photo CD's horribly named DCIM folder had a larger preview level and some images from inside visible, that would really help! It would look cool, too. (Keep in mind, the file manager is also a huge component of the shell). On another thought entirely, there is a nice trend toward there being many different file managers. Eg: F-Spot behaves like a file manager since it still plugs directly back to the rest of GNOME, with drag & drop to copy the images from place to place. I think it would be worthwhile to keep an eye out for patterns in these designs; this may be the perfect opportunity to throw in a helper library. Something else to keep in mind is that the lines of what a "file manager" is could be blurred quite a bit if GNOME came to have something like the Tango project's Window Experiments[1]; thoughtful programs talking to a library to say "I am working on file X", resulting in a nice icon on the top left of the window (and that knowledge being available to other interested applications, like window lists). The icon could then act just like a file icon in Nautilus now, being draggable / droppable with options to copy, move and link the file. Where file management begins and ends would then be less obvious, more natural to the end user. We still have Nautilus to be the way of viewing folders and opening files, and generally the target for any file-related DnD operations, but the environment as a whole would be closer linked to the concept. As it is right now, managing files is only "properly" done from one place [2]. That a program is currently working on a file in a particular window is not as well defined as it could be, either to the user or to other software. [1] http://tango.freedesktop.org/Window_Experiments [2] I mention this, because I have encountered a Windows user who utilized the File -> Open dialog in a particular program for his generic file management tasks. That truly sent a chill down my spine. Thankfully, our File Open dialog stays completely in scope, but this did get me pondering something. Any program that manipulates a file has a Save As button which often works very much like Copy would in a file manager. Why such a different movement? Why are there two different operations doing the same thing? Why does one feel rather direct (as in Copy & Paste or DnD), whereas the other is more like punching a command into a terminal (save to /home/me/documents/thisthing/draftb)? In other words, I disagree with the notion of continually poking about in the classic "file manager" concept; it is a very central part of the desktop environment, yet file managers seem to have never changed in their design. Have we advanced this little? Talk for another day, though. Right now, there's 2.24 to worry about :) Bye, -Dylan
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