Nautilus + Zeitgeist
OK this post is from Ian Cylkowski aka izo.
please please have a look!
http://www.design-by-izo.com/2010/02/27/deconstructing-nautilus-and-rebuilding-it-better/
It shoes some nice mockups
So if someone can link me with a tutorial how to extend the nautlius sidebar I will add the “commonly accessed” functionality within an hour or 2!
PROMISE
Thank you very much for the post! I sincerely hope my ideas can become reality.
/izo\
izo, this just looks great! good job…
That is fucking awesome, I want it now
What is that fugly Mac OS X ripoff theme?
What is that asinine comment?
augias:
Didn’t you get the memo? Any theme that looks good is a Mac OS X ripoff.
Markus:
I ordinarily don’t feed trolls. But I felt I had to say that that’s the first time I’ve heard somebody call Clearlooks an OS X clone.
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by seiflotfy: New blog post: Nautilus + Zeitgeist http://seilo.geekyogre.com/2010/02/nautilus-zeitgeist/...
I really don’t like how everyone thinks Nautilus should be Finder, but whatever.
The sidebar can be extended by writing a NautilusWhateverSidebarProvider which returns the instance of your NautilusWhateverSidebar, but none of that is in the extension interface currently, so right now it would only be available as a compile-time add-on to Nautilus. It seems to me like it should be in the extension lib, but I think it just never made it.
Sorry, that last comment should be “registers the type of NautilusWhateverSidebar”.
@DaElsta: thank you very much!
@Markus: LOL, brilliant. I like how even the slightest hint of the Aqua interface causes some to foam and spittle with rage. Fact is, as much as some people hate Apple/Mac, I’m not going to reject what is otherwise a good idea just because it’s Apple. I’m proposing a file manager that is BETTER than Finder.
@A.Walton: I’m not saying that Nautilus should be Finder, I’m saying it should and CAN be better. I may have borrowed design elements from Finder, but this wasn’t done JUST BECAUSE it was Mac, it was done because sometimes Apple just come up with damn good ideas.
/izo\
You may want to check your spelling in the final line of your blog post.
That theme is pretty awesome. Having the views accessible via small buttons makes sense, and I prefer windows to macosx.
WRT common accessed, definitely do it !
I don’t understand why people can’t just use the themes they like…. why criticize the others, it’s not like you have to use them, there are plenty of styles for everybody.
Do the nautilus-python bindings allow access
to the ui?
Looks exciting.
But where’s the Location Button (the button that toggles between the GUI representation of the path and the text representation) and the “Go to Parent” widget? Both are necessary. Nautilus originally lacked these and was eventually forced to add them.
It would require some new nautilus python bindings if we were going to use the code from journal. I was able to take advantage of nautilus.MenuProvider to grab a window but this is not how I would prefer to do this.
I guess it could be done with ctypes too. I will look into that approach.
http://i46.tinypic.com/p3bif.png
Dirty dirty hacks, but it can be done as a nautilus extension. I would rather approach it from the nautilus side, but I would hate to have to require a patched version of nautilus.
Why the search bar? What’s the purpose?
I’m in nautilus, I *perfectly know* where I am, it’s written! I don’t want to search! Search should not be *in* nautilus. It’s like… you’re in the right street, you only have to find the address number. You ask help and people stop you by showing a full fledged map!
I, for one, like that theme. What’s its name so that I can find it?
Nautilus is currently under active development, and there are various changes to the UI that will likely happen as Gnome moves towards version 3. If you want changes like these included, then you really should run them past the Nautilus developers.
Writing a patch and hoping for it to get included is likely to cause problems with work that’s currently underway.
Just my 2c.
please don’t turn nautilus into finder, improve it but come on, rounding everything up does not make the program better.
Those mockups are nice, some buttons are just duplications (like the parent button). But removing the stop button is stupid. I have used it plenty of time when I have had a slow connection on my laptop and have had to connect to my home server using sftp. If/when you click the wrong path, not being able to stop the directory listing is horrible.
However I believe as long as your directory is loading, then you do not need the refresh button, so why not have a stop button turn into a refresh button as soon as the loading is done? If you want to refresh before the directory is loaded it is somewhat logical to stop the previous listening before it is finished anyway.
One thing that worries is (judging by the gnome planet) there aren’t any core developers working on fixing Nautilus for the Gnome 3.0 release. All the cool mockups I’ve seen are by people who don’t necessarily have the skills to implement their designs. I’m worried that they are going to stay mockups for the foreseeable future and Gnome 3.0 will ship with the same crappy file browser as ever.
@Nico: You can create the Metacity theme using my Homosapien Customizer – http://www.zacbarton.com/homosapien/customizer/
The stop button is a big fat sign that the code in Nautilus sucks. If you cannot interrupt an action with Back or switching to another view then it is Nautilus’ bad design. Don’t provide UI for buggy implementations, just fix them.
“But where’s the Location Button (the button that toggles between the GUI representation of the path and the text representation) and the “Go to Parent” widget? Both are necessary. Nautilus originally lacked these and was eventually forced to add them.”
I use this functionality by shortkey Ctrl + L, instead of using that button. I discovered by your remark that this button does also this toggling. So at least this button should be more clear…
@Nico: You can create the Metacity part of this theme using my Homosapien Customizer.
I cant seem to post a link here but you will find it on Google easy enough.
@Zac : Thanks, found it. Now the GTK stuff….
me doesn’t like your mockups cos me always uses the same view and never changes the icon’s sizes. me wants tagging features and virtual folders. me wants a searchbox instead of a button. The only way to fit all needs and wills would be to let the users the ability to customize their own nautilus toolbar a la eog/evince/epiphany.
/me thinks is the way to go!
anyway, nice mockups, I’m already using nautilus-elementary and it is a huge step forward.
to xake’s comment.
I agree, in the mockup the refresh button in the location bar can be an X when the directory is loading, then turn into the refresh symbol (as currently seen in the mockup) when the directory is done loading.
That would be some nice functionality in keeping with the cleanliness and utility the mockup provides.
(obviously we are unable to know if the mockup artist intended this as it is just a static image, he may very well already have this idea.)
Implementing the journal in the nautlius sidebar , makes the need for a “Desktop” unnecessary.
Which works perfectly with gnome-shell’s and nautilus’ plan to not draw the desktop.
@izo , neat idea.. kudos
@Luke this is what I determined. I would like to implement some of the features using libnautilus-extensions if possible. I already made journal embeddable but I am not sure the original bloggers approach is the best.
I am also not interested in cloning finder, but I do want to take advantage of zeitgeist by adding history and day navigation. Using IconViews perhaps and not the embeddable journal.
How would this look like with a much deeper directory structure? Like 20-30 directories deep?
I like this – I like zeitgeist and the gnome-activity-journal but I think this is a winner.
My biggest problem with gnome-activity-journal is that its a separate program, having it automatically integrated into nautilus by default is such a great idea and pretty much solves that problem of having to fire up a separate program. I really hope the zeitgeist team can work with the nautilus developers into getting this included to the default nautilus for GNOME 3!
I love it,
but the sad thing i’ve noticed in mockups is that the end result never ever looks even close to the mockups. this is sad…
Can’t wait to see this implemented
I am forced to use the abomination that is the OS X Finder every day, it’s a really bad UI for a file manager.
Nautilus already has some of the same pitfalls, hopefully it will have less in the future, not more.
This is pretty. I really think that Nautilus should provide Zeitgeist functionality.
I really would like the “Open…” dialog to show Zeitgeist stuff. Imagine: you have an application running, you click Open, the file selector dialog appears and it shows you recent documents opened with that application, with the last time they were used.
Or the documents most frequently opened with that application, sorted by frequency. Or the documents most opened, sorted by number of times opened.
Or documents that are contextually relevant. Let’s say, you always copy and paste data from a certain website to a certain spreadsheet. So you open the website in your browser; then you launch the spreadsheet program; you click “open”; you select some option as “Context relevant” or something; and Zeitgeist provides files that are often used together with whatever is open at the moment; so it shows you the spreadsheet where you always paste data from the website you have.
I really, really, really think that this Zeitgeist thing could be great.
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