The Future of Nautilus

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Hi all,

Garrett recently blogged about reworking parts of Nautilus's interface
[1]. These proposals are the result of a lot of work that him, Hylke, me
and others have been doing recently.

As Garrett made clear in his post, these proposals are not completely
finalised. The intention is to develop them in conjunction with
discussions with the wider community. Myself, Hylke and Garrett have
discussed the proposals on #nautilus and on Garrett's blog, and we are
actively developing the design based on the feedback we have got. That
said, the vast majority of the feedback we have got about the design
proposal has been positive. (There have also been a number of discrete
areas where there has been some objection: we're working on those.)

I've described the general design aims at the bottom of this message.

The question is: where do we go from here? I recently put the Nautilus
UI Roadmap [2] together as a plan of action. It was that initiative
which triggered this latest round of design activity, but now we're in a
tricky situation. The current roadmap conflicts in certain areas with
the more recent designs.

I personally think that the new designs are superior to the existing
ones and I'd like to get to the stage where the roadmap reflects the new
design vision. To do that, we need to agree on the design direction,
however. (In the short term, I'd like to rework the roadmap to
concentrate on areas of commonality between the two designs.)

So, what do people think of these proposals? Are they something you
could get behind?

Allan

[1] http://linuxart.com/log/archives/2010/06/20/the-future-of-nautilus/
[2] http://live.gnome.org/Nautilus/UIRoadmap

General design aims
-------------------
* Remove overlapping functionality in order to reduce the amount of
interface users have to process.
* Prioritise the display of content and make Nautilus well-suited to
small and widescreen displays.
* Utilise contemporary design paradigms to deliver a competitive user
experience.
* Make common contextual actions visible, thus making the interface more
usable (and also improving it for those who don't have secondary mouse
buttons etc).
* Provide a simple way to share files and folders using the full range
of sharing services/mechanisms.
* Slim down the interface in order to make Nautilus easier to maintain
(this is particularly the case for a number of old and little used
features).