Slashdot Mirror
Latest Eazel Screenshots
Soko writes: "Anybody want to see some screen shots of Nautilus, from Eazel? Cool." Check out the rest of the directory images -- the evolution of what's going on inside there is pretty cool to see.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Sounds like a good, easy hack session using Tcl/Tk scripts and named pipes. Snap to it, solja!
Ha ha ha! A loop! Good one!
I like my GUI. Writing a loop requires thinking, even if it doesn't require very much. I don't own a computer so that I can waste all my brain power telling it what to do in precise terms. I own a computer so that it can do some of my thinking for me.
Too much work in the open source community goes unappreciated ... and taken entirely for granted.
don't you realize that by listening to metallica mp3s you're doing EXACTLY what they're trying to stop? LISTEN ALL YOU WANT.
Hypertext links are more like the "soft" symbolic of a Unix filesystem. The inability to distinguish files and links is a real confusion that MS has perpetuated upon users.
Putting it another way, I can design a webpage to look exactly like a file browser, so that the IE user is fooled into thinking he is in filebrowsing mode. But, as soon as he tries to do something like rename a file, the reality of what he is doing manifests itself. Files and hypertext links have different properties, and should not be the same!
Checked out gentoo - hey - nice!
create | destroy | enjoy
Well, it's more to type, but I believe that the
/etc
original replier was irritated that this would
break unix filesystem expectations... That is
probably a legitimate point, but some OS's like
NeXTStep used symlinks so they could (sort of)
have both. OTOH, it is pretty ugly what they
did.
WRT config files, well, naturally apps should
just look in ~/.appname(rc?)
That is, look in the user's home directory for
a dotfile. The app choses the particular name for
the dotfile (sometimes dot-directory for apps with
many config things, like netscape), and that's
usually mentioned in the manpage of the app.
Global config stuff, if there is any, probably
belongs in
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Things like this have no room for negotiation in a UI. They're parts of Unix that'll never be rid of. When I compute in just about any Unix, I use Unix, not $WINDOW_MANAGER ... I'd get nowhere without fiendish programs like /bin/sh (be it bash or POSIX) and /bin/ksh, whereas the only thing from $WINDOW_MANAGER I may use, and it's not even a part of it, is {x,a,w,E,dt}term
I don't mind a UI trying to mask these things away, but depriving any of what CLI folks expect in the process is the Wrong Thing. lose lose
(all of this has been my diatribe... uh, I mean, my opinion)
--
--
Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.
No offense, but there was a browser that acted as a rudimentary file manager before IE. That being Netscape Navigator. Now, the file manager functionalit was really underdeveloped, and not very useful, but it was there.
I think Microsoft deserves a lot of credit for actually making the web browser / file manager concept work. But I still remember reading Marc Andreasson (sp?) talking about "the browser is the new os" while MS was still pushing MSN.
-rt-
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
why bother? pkunzip *.zip heh
None of this has anything to do with real "innovation" anyway. The resemblance between the UIs may make users feel warm and fuzzy, but it hardly represents any kind of technological advance. And Microsoft copied this particular feature from others anyway.
As an open source alternative to Windows, Eazel seems to be going in the right direction: make everything as familiar to Windows users as possible but try to enhance the usability incrementally. From a technological point of view, I have to admit to a certain disappointment, however: there are a lot of nifty things they could have done with a new UI.
One thing you mentioned is lack of drag & drop - not true. Motif, GTK+ (as of 1.2) and Qt (2.x for sure) all support drag and drop. In fact, Qt and GTK+ both support the Xdnd protocol, and are compatible with Motif's DnD protocol. (I just recently spent time tracking down why DnD wasn't working from non-GTK+ apps in XMMS.)
Just because the apps don't support it, doesn't mean the support in the widget sets isn't there - a lot of apps that probably should recognize DnD don't, but (at least in GTK+, and from the look of it, in Qt 2.x/KDE) it's not a huge undertaking to add DnD support in apps where it would be relevant. (Wish some coders would read the widget-set docs more... of course, it'd be nice if someone would finish the GTK+ API docs.)
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Enjoy! There will be more to some soon.
Anthony
> All it seems to be is a file browser/desktop
;) It has a "zoom" feature; zoom in and more details about each file appear, zoom out and the icons show less info. The icons for text files actually show a small snippet of the file's contents; rest the mouse pointer over a .wav file, and a sample of the file plays. It also has an MP3 directory view I am itching to try out... Just a few examples of what it'll do.
;)
:)
> shell along the lines of gmc on steriods.
Nautilus is actualy going to be pretty innovative (or at least will combine innovative features from other systems
> Take the new nVidia kernel driver.
Take my new nVidia kernel driver. Please.
Seriously. If nVidia makes it that hard to install their hardware, shame on them, and shame on you for buying their stuff. I don't think it's really fair to blame Linux as a platform for a vendor's packaging problems. Normally all it takes to load drivers is a "modprobe driverfile", right? Personally, if a vendor makes it hard for me to install their crap, I won't buy it.
As far as system configuration is concerned, Nautilus is going to have some sort of a GUI-driven interface for viewing (and editing?) a system's hardware configuration. It looks kinda like Windows' system device tree on steroids, but I haven't personally played with it, so I'll shut up know.
> They just don't get it.
PS: Some (many?) of them don't, but enough of them do. I think we'll learn not to underestimate these folks...
The fact that interests me is that this looks a lot like the Windows98/Internet Explorer view. Now, I'll admit I know almost nothing about this project, but it does seem like a copy of many of the ideas.
Is having a web browswer (or at least web-like functionality) apart of the operating system or user interface such a bad thing? Is it only bad when evil empires (i.e. Microsoft) do it? But, I'm assuming it's alright when freedom (i.e. open source) does it.
Is this a double standard? Just wondering.
Pete
Eazel's Nautilus looks like a lame, second-hand
rip-off of an already bad Windows Explorer.
You all know what the number one problem with
Linux is? X-Windows and its lame-ass inability
to anti-alias fonts. No matter what you build
in X, it will look like crap. And it will be
slower than it should be.
As much as Microsoft sucks, their fonts look
nice. And Apple's new display system for OS X
looks just plain awesome. Linux will only get
further and further behind until the burden of
X is lifted.
Yeah, I know, ditching X means re-writing all
of your programs. Too bad. It needs to be done.
And *some* kind of application UI standardization
must emerge or the masses will never be able
to make sense of things. Limited UI options
actually make Windows and MacOS easier to use!
All is not lost. Even though we open-source
folk are much better at copying than innovating,
maybe we'll copy Apple's OS X display system.
terms of design being proprietary has probably helped Mac OS maintain the system-wide consistency that makes it so easy to use and so pleasant.
You know... I heard about this same problem during the Microsoft thing. Something about Microsoft not being supposed to have 'system-wide consistency', and being able to let vendors mangle the system in any way they wish. Good thing the DOJ has shown that Mac and Linux users don't exist (so that Microsoft has a monopoly, of course).
OS X won't run X apps natively?
I think he meant X11 Apps.
I'm glad that someone here is telling it like it is. I don't like MS. I don't like their business practices and I don't like how buggy many of their products are. Not that any product doesn't have bugs. They all do and that is just the nature of the beast.
One area I don't fault MS in is how innovative many of their products are. People complain about them being a monopoly and then go on to imply it is soley because the people who head the company and determine corporate strategies are rat bastards. They may be bastards, but in many cases their dominance of a market segment is due to the lack of worthy competition. Years ago Wordperfect was the dominant word processor. Before that it was Wordstar. Wordstar is a fossil and Wordperfect an also ran. Lotus-123 used to be the dominant spreadsheet. But then IBM bought the company (for notes) and 123 is almost forgotten. Meanwhile MS was actively promoting its office products every step of the way while working to recruit and cultivate the best talent they could find to push the products forward technologically.
So what do you have? A computer software industry dominated by the rat bastards who run a company whose products are boldy concieved, if not always well executed.
But many members of the "Brotherhood of the Penguin" like to pretend that MS does none of these things. That MS's software sucks in every way blah, blah, blah. If it sucked that bad, they wouldn't have the market position they do. Their software is hardly the best around, but it is good enough to get by. Products with the most technical merit aren't the ones that necessarily win. Ask Sony, they'll tell you a hell of a story about something called Betamax.
If linux is to "win," it will have to be more than just better than other products. It will have to offer something that other products don't. Something that is important enough to potential customers that it alone would encourage them to buy. Being better in some obscure way that only matters to hackers like us won't cut it. Hackers don't define the market like we used to. Nowadays it is the mom and pop types that make up most of the users. Those are the people who we have to cater to if linux is to be more than another server room curiosity.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Have you ever actually used EFM? It is a lot less bloated than something like nautilus. It manages files. That's it. No toolbars. No dialog boxes. The only reason why it does menus and desktop backgrounds is because it will be merged with Enlightenment before it is released, so there is some duplicate functionality right now.
i have heard this same argument many times before. did you copy and paste from someone elses post?
maybe you should write your own graphical interface if you dont like the current ones. the source is there. and if you dont want a graphical interface dont use it. no one is forcing you to.
"The importance of using technology in the right way has never been more clear."
Also recommended, if you have a keyboard with winkeys (I don't anymore, but I used to) is WinKey, which allows you to map programs to winkey combinations. WinKey is here.
--
Yeah, but if MacOS displayed a black hole iff removable media were present, and you ejected such media by throwing them in the black hole, that would make a heck of a lot more sense then ejecting them by throwing them away.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Granted, it's very, very pretty. In fact, it's possibly one of the least threatening and/or intimidating interfaces ever.
But there are several problems with it.
1. It's not going to be a lot of fun for colourblind people, or people on monochrome displays (yes, they do still exist).
2. Just using colour for the window gadgets isn't intuitive - there are *no* visual cues to tell you what gadget does what.
3. It's very busy to look at - that slightly grooved appearance that the window background makes the overall thing look fussy, and therefore it's harder to pick out what it is you're actually supposed to be looking for.
That said, it's definitely a step forward. I'd be interested to see what J. Random User thinks of it once it gets out there into the land of The Public.
--
Peter
though some of the linux thugs have been very elitist lately, i think this is great. more software is always good, and gives people a chance to choose. maybe that is something the thugs here dont understand. maybe they dont like choice. i suppose it makes life alot easier to be forced into using one concept that is 30 years old. ( i am referring to the redundant cowboy logic people have been using to justify the console. though the console is great, its not a three button mouse and shouldnt be hailed as something that awesome. )
i think GNOME is doing a kick ass job lately, especially with the 1.2 release. i used to be a KDE user but i converted to gnome shorty after 1.2 came out. though i am also a Window Maker user, i appreciate the differences between the two environments. however they were built for different uses and i dont think its fair to comapre the two.
in closing, its always nice to see the linux community ganging up and bashing upon a new project (not even in alpha stage). its so nice to have pride in the community when they act so impulsive and with out anything but a selfish opinion based on a few crummy screen shots. if this is a trend we are going to see more of then pre-install windows on my PC and drop me out of college.
"The importance of using technology in the right way has never been more clear."
Or, if you have winzip, you could select them all, right-click drag them to where you want to unzip them, and click extract
Or, just highlight and smack ye olde enter key.
-- --
Stay Tuned Next Week For...
The Adventures of Open Souce Man!
-- --
Stay Tuned Next Week For...
The Adventures of Open Souce Man!
(with Natalie Portman and her Aibo)
>> What other kinds of drivers are there besides hardware drivers?
You know, there are a lot of things besides hardware drivers. I use Linux for Real Work (TM) for years, and I never had to upgrade hardware driver. That's because I don't need it to play with latest nVidia card, I need it to do real work - write programs. For this, two years old ATI/Matrox/whatever is good enough, and Linux supposrt them like charm. If fact, I had much more problems with NT on drivers that with Linux. And definitley I'd give all latest 3D support for one good office app on Linux. Here is where we need real work to be done. 3D is for toys (or high-end CADing, which is another story) and office apps are for work.
So, if you want to use cutting-enge 3D-graphics toys, you'd have to compile. But if you are using computer as a tool for work, as opposed to playing with lastest-and-greatest gadgets, best chances are you'll never need to upgrade.
As for not knowing too to handle ipchains, I'll tell you about one for free - gfcc. There are at least five more I tried, this came out as a winner. Too bad linux.com people don't know about it, but that's not Linux's fault. That's their fault - they don't know their tools, shame on them.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
know, there are a lot of things besides hardware drivers. I use Linux for Real Work (TM) for
years, and I never had to upgrade hardware driver.
>>>>>
If you've never had to upgrade the hardware driver, then you are a dinosaur to say the least. Do you care at all for taking full advantage of your hardware?
That's because I don't need it to play with latest
nVidia card, I need it to do real work - write programs. For this, two years old ATI/Matrox/
whatever is good enough, and Linux supposrt them like charm. If fact, I had much more problems
with NT on drivers that with Linux. And definitley I'd give all latest 3D support for one good office
app on Linux.
>>>>>
Well, that's you isn't it? Being a student, I don't get paid for my work, but I do real work too. I develop OpenGL programs. I mess around with graphics programs. I write graphics libraries. Key work here, "graphics." There is more to life than database engines and POSIX code. Are you saying that 3D modeling isn't real work? The Pixar guys will have your ass on a stick! Coming from someone who is statisfied with a moldy old Matrox card, what does your opinion matter to what I'm talking about? Home users upgrade reletivly often, gamers play a very large role in that market, and people install new types of hardware quite often. As a programmer who obviously doesn't do any graphics work, your experience has no relation to any of this.
Here is where we need real work to be done. 3D is for toys (or high-end CADing,
which is another story) and office apps are for work.
>>>>>
Bull shit. Utter bullshit. Sit there happy with your database engines and your programs that calculate the amount of paper used in yearly tax forms. I can assure you that they guys who make these "toys" (ie. Carmack) have more programming knowledge than you ever had. I don't like being mean, but somebody with your attitude deserves it. No wonder everybody thinks that Linux users are hardcore sysadmins who wouldn't notice if somebody replaced their PC with an XT, long as the server was still up!
So, if you want to use cutting-enge 3D-graphics toys, you'd have to compile. But if you are using
computer as a tool for work, as opposed to playing with lastest-and-greatest gadgets, best chances
are you'll never need to upgrade.
>>>>>>>>>
A) I use computers for work. In fact, I am taking a graphics class which develops in OpenGL. Now let me tell you, running OpenGL on a Matrox is no fun.
B) 3D graphics is not a toy. The gaming market currently makes billions of dollars a year and it is games that made PCs powerful enough that you sysadmins would not have to use Suns for everything.
C) Okay, say you're a Photoshop guy. We've established that he does real work. (And gets paid quite well I might add.) You saying he can get by with an S3 graphics card?
As for not knowing too to handle ipchains, I'll tell you about one for free - gfcc. There are at least
five more I tried, this came out as a winner. Too bad linux.com people don't know about it, but that's
not Linux's fault. That's their fault - they don't know their tools, shame on them.
>>>>>>>>
Ah, but I can handle ipchains. Quite simple if you read the doc. However, I am not representative of an average user. For the average user, Linux.com IS the Linux help source. Them being wrong is like ZDNET being wrong. The entire PC industry gets heat when Windows is too hard, so why shouldn't the entire Linux community get heat for Linux being too hard?
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
1. A monkey with a big axe and a black hood :)
2. A monkey in an electric chair
3. A firing squad of monkeys
4. A monkey swinging from a gallows (That'd be Hartlepool Nautilus, then
5. A monkey on a guillotine
--
Peter
that would open up X number of winzip windows...one for every zip file you had.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
These screenshots are abolutely underwhelming! Almost any of the major GNU/Linux window managers already look as good. Have we really come to a dead end in user interfaces? I guess Apple is really the only one left who can really innovate in this area.
Ugh.. .gag...
...wait, the slashdot effect already took care of that.
The Third Reich shall DDOS their site for that misspelling...
Keeping
http://www.obsession.se/gentoo
Looks very nice. Too many buttons, but it looks like I can remove the ones I don't need (all of them). Can't tell if it can be set for one-pane mode, and one-pane-and-tree mode (you know, like that windows thing), but for 2 pane mode, I've been looking for a program this smooth since SID for the Amiga.
Much better than Nautilis.
Click here
..........sig...........
I have set up a mirror
So is this going to be the long awaited replacment for GNOME Midnight Commander?
How is this going to suceed where other projects have failed?
Sure, the screenshots look nice but they don't really tell me anything except that the developers like to add lots of early features, which is fine as long as they get properly debugged before a stable release (the features not the developers).
Devil Ducky
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
Turning IE into the windows file manager was not a technological innovation, it was a marketing innovation. This is so obvious I'm surprised someone else hasn't said this already.
While using a web browser as a file manager could be very useful, Microsoft didn't do anything useful with it. All they did was add file managing capabilities to IE, so when your browsing through files it works just like the old file manager, with prettier icons and image/html thumbnails on the left.
It would have been easier and wouldn't suck down so much resources to add those capabilities to the file manager, but that wouldn't have allowed them to integrate the browser with the OS.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
If you don't like discussion, why are you at a discussion site?
I am extremely impressed with the work Raster, Mandrake, and Co. have done on EFM. Features like the typebuffer and middle-clicking to access a recursive folder tree just rock. Not to mention it's beautiful!
Check out my EFM setup: http://justin.mecham.net/ images/screenshots/960875825.png
Justin
-- Jabber: Get the Message @ http://www.jabbercentral.com/
Yeah, but at least this is free.
What you really mean, is it won't be unix.
;-(
I miss group passwords
pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
/ k.d / earth trickle / Monkeys vs. Robots Films /
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
You say:
"All the great GUIs in the world will not
make Linux easy to use. "
Then you go on to list a number of GUI-advantages
that BeOS, Windows and Mac has.
All those wizards and the likes, are just GUI-frontends for more complex stuff, and Linux
can have them as well.
Eazel is adressing one concern (poor filemanager).
Helix is adressing others (poor mail/productivity
-clients).
Both gives the user an easy and good GUI-frontend
to something that can already be done.
The Gnome-project adresses even more concerns,
and if you've seen the wizard for Palm-connectivity, you'll se how far Gnome has
progressed.
Gnome 2.0 will be powerful, flexible and easy to use.
Will Easel support some of the recent hardware UI advances?
In specific, I have grown accustomed to my USB 5-button scrolling mouse. It took quite a while, but now any computing without it is akward and slow. It is also essential for proper Unreal Tournament play and web-browsing in a reclined position. Also, there is my graphics tablet for me to consider (also USB). This is essential for Photoshop (or the Gimp).
I know Easel and USB are seperate issues, but even if USB finally finds some solid Linux implementation, supporting my wonderful mouse will be beyond my meager coding skills and outside the scope of my schedule. Does anyone know of plans to support some of these more modern devices? Is there a particular distro to watch, for developments in this area?
:)Fudboy
:)Fudboy
I guess I'm only a Fudboy, looking for that real Transmeta
Apparently you are not old enough to remember Lotus Magellan the greatest file browsing tool ever made. To this day nothing even approaches it. Explorer/File-manager/ms-abomination is a poorly executed and inept attempt to clone this product.
If you get curious also look up Xtree and central point filemanagers although they were not as good as magellan they were pretty damned good.
One more thing all this was in the days of DOS so much for your innovation.
War is necrophilia.
So what is Nautilus?
These shots are much better than the ones referenced in the main article.
I especially like the zooming in and out on icons and displaying more or less information.
Funny, I own a computer so that it can do some of my work for me. Thinking, however, I prefer to leave to me, as I am much better at it than the computer.
When you let the machine do the thinking, suddenly you become the slave to the computer, rather than the other way around.
Um... why not?
GNOME Control Center - User Interface - Applications - uncheck "Toolbars have text labels"
Yes, I'm aware these ARE development shots. I'm just saying look out!
Translation: "I'm aware these ARE development shots, but I will make assumptions about the way the interface works from them, and use them as well as FUD-laden terms like 'look out' to get attention."
--
No more e-mail address game - see my user info. Time for revenge.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Ummm... select all the files to be unzipped, drop them on Stuffit Expander. Oh wait, I use a Mac.Silly me, Mac user and all making life way too easy so I can concentrate on Photoshop and Quark ;-) Don't mind me. It's late, and I've been tweaking postscript by hand.
----
----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
It's spelled: Millennium.
To within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury. -- Tom Duff
I don't see how this is 'revolutionary' or whatever. It dosn't seem any better then windows/mac. But it isn't surprizing from someone who actualy takes the time to download backstreetboys MP3's
Boring, played out, and the same as everything else... yay.
Almost every GUI out there sucks ass, Apple's included. Is this supposed to be great just beacuse its made by a guy who helped make MacOS's interface?
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I've got to say, in terms of pure eye candy, it's got nothing on Aqua. Some of the GNOME appearances/skins I've seen have been pretty nice, but usability suffered. Without using Eazel's GUI, I can't comment on it's usability... Aqua, on the other hand, is quite well done, considering the developmental stage it's at (yes, the dock still sucks, but it sucks less--and Apple still has time).
:-)
I'm starting to think good GUI is the only thing Open Source can't do better than commercial software. You really do need the coherence and focus of a commercial software team to design and implement a consistent, mature, efficient GUI. I am trying to change this, in my small way
>I really thought once upon a time Linux advocates >(such as myself) were more into promoting Linux >for it's merits rather than continually seeking >to make it a cheap clone of another OS.
See those broken pencil and eyeglasses modifiers to the file manager icons? Rest assured, those are just bugs in the development release; the final Nautilus will run as root and give everyone insecure access to the entire system, just like Windows. It will refuse to run on remote X servers, limiting you to the local display just like on a Windows desktop. It will delete apache, gcc, and all those "server" programs which just confuse users and which should really only be run on the $500 Linux 2000 Server anyway. It will carefully check your CPU, and refuse to run on non-Intel Linux versions. The source code will be wrapped in a big #ifdef __linux__ to make it non-portable in the short run to all the other operating systems out there, and in the long run they're going to ditch glibc and Posix and reinvent the wheel like Win16 (and Win32, and in another 4 years Win64) did. It will stick itself in one spot on the screen and refuse to be launched in or dragged to any of those weird "virtual desktops". It will cost $100 for the single user upgrade, with license fees for each additional user. It will save all your settings in undocumented binary format in an enormous hierarchical registry file, then it will orphan a random number of registry settings each time you upgrade or uninstall. And, of course, it will uninstall any previous user interfaces that you might be upgrading from, like that threatening KDE or that archaic bash. It will be released under the Grossly Proprietary License, will be sold for whatever the market will bear, and will generate fake error messages and invalidate your OEM's pricing discounts if it detects any competing software installed. Rumor says that the developers originally intended to create an easy to use, familiar GUI for new users moving from other operating systems to Unix, but scrapped that idea when they realized that cloning Windows was much more profitable.
>Sad.
Idiot.
Big Corporation: We want to ship Gnome on our computers
Gnome: Okay, but if you put another web browser on the machines we won't give it to you.
Big Corporation: Oh, well I guess even though we don't want to we will have to use your brower because we can't survive without Gnome
Yeah ... right. You can't very well abuse market power if you don't have it. Even if Nautilus comes with a web browser it's designers don't have the clout to force the removal of all others.
That said integrating the web browser with the OS was a stupid move and it made the OS even more bloated and less stable than it already was. It was done solely to push the browser on the market with product tying and would be highly disadvantageous for anyone without MS's market share to do. Nautilus may well choose to integrate a web browser, but if it does it will most likely be modular so that one could remove it and free the extensive memory segment a modern browser occupies.
At least it's better than the P.C. recycle bin (bleh) and the 'twilight zone'-ish black hole.
(Let the wars begin...) ;)
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I know this will be *taken* as being a flame but it isn't.
I know that gnome (and KDE) are still very early in there life but I don't see them heading in the correct direction. It's as if the all gnome people use 21inch monitors at 1600x1200, file browser windows are ridiculously bloated (in appearance), icon sizes are very large and widget white-space padding seems unnecessary. I'm still a fan of MacOS's finder GUI. Give me a title bar (close box on one side, window ops on the other please) and maybe another bar with directory stats (number of files/folders and current size of the directory in K). I wish the gnome people would stop going for appearance and start heading towards interface ergonomics, ease of use, fuctionality and intuitiveness. Right now, gnome feels more like a toy to me and less like a real GUI. I would be more than willing to help out on the project as far as human factors go if someone would contact me..
Moderators: Be rational please, this is intended as a comment, not a flame..
Huh? I integrated them into my OS well before MS even though to clone the product. I bought magellan and installed it into DOS. Voila I integrated a file manager. You think MS deserves credit for doing what I did 10 years before?
War is necrophilia.
In the pre-GUI days (1982), the Lisp machine allowed you to do
this. Emacs allows you to treat ftp addresses and files in the same
way, and has for donkeys years. But Iguess some folk think if it
isn't GUI, then it doesn't `count'.
Exactly how is Natulis going to make Linux easier to use? All it seems to be is a file browser/desktop shell along the lines of gmc on steriods. Sure it may make navigating around the system easier, but what about the inherent difficulty present in doing anything non-trival in Linux? Take a good hard look at the Mac community for a clue. Mac users aren't brain-dead neophytes who can't tell a close button from a minimize button. A great many are people who know their way around the system well enough, and can get basic things done. Rare is the Mac user who doesn't know what extensions are or who can't get basic services working on their Mac. There is a reason for this. The Mac is easy to use. Linux is not. All the great GUIs in the world will not make Linux easy to use. Take something like installing an extension. Under MacOS, this is trivial. Under Windows, installing a driver is similarly simple. But under Linux it often requires a kernel recompile! Take the new nVidia kernel driver. I've have run quite a few beta drivers in Windows, but none have required me to manually remove OpenGL files from the path! Installing basic services on Linux is similarly hard. Internet connection sharing is becoming a big thing, and it is easy on everything except Linux. In Windows you go through the wizard to set it up. It asks basic questions and it works. In BeOS it is even more trivial. You go to the graphical NAT config, give it the IP of your internet interface and your LAN interface, click "NAT On" and restart the net server. In Linux, it requires learning ipchains and its complex syntax. Sure it ends up to be three simple lines of script, but A) It takes hours to get those three lines, and B) How is the user supposed to know where to put the script? Even simple things like changing host names or IP addresses, or adding new hardware become a chore in Linux. This need not be the case. A GUI CAN do something about this. Take a look at BeOS. It has most of the features of BSD networking, yet its configuration panel has something like 3 address fields and a checkbox. Telnet and ftp servers can literally be set up with a click and a password entry. It might not be as powerful, but it sure is easy. Yet, the power is still there. Navigate up to "/etc" and behold! Network settings! A lot of stuff in BeOS works this way, and it is pretty cool to behold. I have no doubt that Eazel will be a cool shell. It will make it easier to navigate around the system, and will lower the learning curve, which is always good. However, stuff like that is trivial. Ease of use should permeate the system, allowing the user to do more as their skills increase. It takes a very well designed system to allow some one with no skill to easily learn the system, yet not constrain those who have mastered those skills. Linux has a lot of cool stuff in it and has the potential to become an OS that is powerful for the hackers, yet easy for the newbie. The beauty of Linux is its multi-faceted-ness and malleability. Yet, the very people who are working on making Linux easier to use don't seem to have the right vision. They just don't get it.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
BTW you can do for loops in DOS:
"for %a in (*.zip) do pkunzip %a" is the right sort of thing.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Pipelines should be incorporated into the UI. Have "droplet" apps (like those common on the Mac) that you can not only drop files onto to have them processed, you can drag a little piece off the droplet's icon and "chain" it to another droplet (it could even draw a line onscreen indicating this connection!) - and when done, you simply drop your files onto the frontmost droplet in the chain and watch your processed goodies fall out the other end.
This already exists for MacOS, and it's called FilterTop. It's been around for quite a while, but has never taken off. Development looks to be pretty dead too. Oh, well...
---
Felix qui potest rerum cognoscere causas
....it would be round.
....it would make things go faster more efficiently.
It would be great!!
What...someone else invented it already?
But My wheel is different...its rounder...its made of different colors...and....
Yeah I know I know, its just another wheel.
I'm still working on a clever footer.
Look at the top left corner of the first image (the dialog box). Can we stop slinging around nifty beveled edges and engraved effects just because we can? Just give the user a grey slab w/some indication (minimal or not, user-adjustable) of what's clickable and what's just a label.
Yeah real "easy", now tell me... is it going to extract with full path? with overwrite confirm? is it going to add to an archive with the same name? Move to an archive with a user defined name?
Wait I thought this was an easy Mac thing! You mean there are people out there who actually like to have control over their computers?$# Excuse me while I go hide behind my mac.
- Toby
I was pleased to see my favorite browser buttons sitting there in the Eazel browser concept shot: Back, Forward, Up, Reload, Home, Stop. This is almost ideal (my opinion) except that Home and Stop positions should be reversed. Why? Because Home should just be one of a number of user-defineable "goto location" buttons. Yet we want the stop button to be always in the same position so we don't have to hunt for it.
The counter argument is that the "stop" button is in some sense a "final" kind of action, therefore should be on the right like a period at the end of a sentence. That is where it is in Netscape, and I find that a pain.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
I found that windows explorer is very convenient up until you have more than 200 files in a directory, at which point it becomes too slow and cumbersome to use. Managing 800+ files in one directly under a CLI is no walk in the park, but it is possible, thanks to shells with great built in scripting, globbing, and tab completion. Obviously, the real "solution" for me is to organize those files (a task which a file manager will really help with, if I ever decide to do it), however for now the CLI will have to do.
...thanks for the info. So who did John Socha get his ideas from?
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Rock on, man! I really don't {understand|like} this web browser integration into the file browser. When I want to browse the web, I'll do that. When I want to work with local files, I'll do that. Browsing the web does not equal "working with remote files" - as others have attempted to classify it. We don't "work with remote files" except those on remote file servers, for which a file browser is of course relevant.
I just don't understand why more people don't get it.
I haven't posted in a while; but I'm pissed now. I can't believe this comment was moderated to a 5-informative.
What the hell was I informed about this post? That this amateur thinks that these pre-alpha screenshots that are not really for public consumption are not worthy of GNOME or Linux? Nautilaus will be part of GNOME. Thus the GNOME icon guy will do the finished icons; duh.
I've proven myself right. I knew that when Slashdot was purchased by Andover, which subsequently went public, that the overall quality of the site would deteriorate. It has.
Posts are inferior; as are the stories. Now, total idiots are given moderator status. Moderate me down all you want. The publishers of this site (i.e., Mr. Malda) should crawl out of their hole and emerge into the real world where things move fast and smart people are paying close attention.
I've had a habit of checking this site daily for about three years; but I'm starting to get peeved. This site has begun to smell of fat, slow, sloppy, arrogance. Linuxtoday, is more current.
Anyone else seen screenshots of EFM ?
I downloaded the developer tree and built it a while back. The combination of antialiased fonts and alpha blending in the file manager puts all other file managers to shame in the looks department. Unfortunately, the Eazel stuff is not going to match EFM in that department.
http://www.enlightenment.org
What you see there are mostly vector icons. They can be drawn with anti-aliasing using the GNOME canvas, so they should look fine at any size - unlike scaled bitmaps.
It would really be nice to see one of these desktop efforts push ahead to a 3rd generation rendering technology (vector graphics) ala Aqua, instead of seeing all these Windows clones.
But isn't the purpose of the Doomsday machine lost if you keep it a secret!
hmmm, what about the rest of Eazel? There is more to the world then an obselete file manager.
Why is it everyone seems to think Windows is somehow what every other GUI wants to be when it grows up? I mean, I can understand when Mac people try to "blue sky" future OSes and they look Maclike, or when Amiga people try to "blue sky" things that only look like the Amiga. But why are there so many UNIX GUIs that look like Windows? I thought we didn't like Windows.
It's as if everyone thinks there is absolutely no middle ground between total interface chaos (the X Window m.o. so far) and Microsoft Knows Best. How dare anyone try to think of something new, or even to emulate much else besides Windows and its half-baked design principles.
What does the Windows style guide get right? Which features of its UI work better than their counterparts on other platforms? Which elements of the system are absolutely perfect and could not stand any improvements? Ain't much in there that's great, some elements are good but not great, nothing strikes me as perfect. The Windows paradigm is one of confusing layered toolbars with nondescript icons (and tooltips to bail you out), 1001 uses for a folder icon, file dialogs that are not well thought out, unnecessarily complex dialogs (with layered tabs and "More..." buttons), things shoehorned into a Web metaphor without actually adding anything useful, and interface elements like combo boxes that "fit all" but never fit any task they're assigned to do. And this is what we're supposed to WANT TO EMULATE? And from what I read on here, we're supposed to emulate these things for the same damn reasons these misfeatures exist in the first place: market forces.
Go right ahead and moderate away my measly karma, if you think I'm not right about this sorry state of affairs. UNIX got where it is BECAUSE of its spectacularly sane, beautiful, consistent and flexible UI - the one you access from the command line. But as soon as it moved into the second dimension, into the land of graphics, it all went to hell. X Window bears no resemblance to the UNIX underneath it, which many of you seem to think is because CLI is the only way to go and GUIs are a flawed concept anyway, but I think is because no one ever thinks about it from a UNIX perspective. It's never about actually designing an interface, it's always a matter of borrowing the most obvious ideas from whichever OS's market share we covet.
UNIX has a lot of concepts that don't translate well to the metaphors used by other OSes. File permissions, for example, I have NEVER seen "done right" in any file manager - it's always bolted-on functionality, since most file managers are borrowed more or less from OSes where permissions are bolted-on functionality. Why not put checkboxes in the "view by list" mode in file managers, one checkbox for each protection bit, and have it so you can click and hold on one checkbox and then drag down the list and set or unset that bit on a whole bunch of files at once? If you can rename files without a dialog, why not set permissions without a dialog?
Similarly, consider how you use your home account: THAT IS YOUR DESKTOP when you run from the command line. You arrange the dirs in your home dir such that they make sense when you hop into it first thing in the morning, and your fingers are maybe hardwired to type out paths to a couple of other dirs (/home/www for example). Why not simply have the desktop actually reflect the contents of your home dir, instead of a bunch of symlinks and loose files in some subfolder buried deep within the file system as most file managers (on every OS) seem to do?
Devices under UNIX work like they do in pretty much no other OS on the planet. It will NEVER be possible to shoehorn floppy mounting procedures into the model used on the Mac for instance - so let's try to think of a new metaphor for removable media under UNIX. After all, UNIX already treats removable media as directories - a metaphor. Not that the Mounter in BeOS has been a great success, but there MUST be some metaphor that will make the attaching and detaching of pieces of file system make sense visually. Has anyone even attempted this? (Most of my ideas in this department are vehicle metaphors: ships docking, the moving van pulling up out front, the ice cream truck parks out front, the flying Chinese restaurant in Fifth Element.)
I think we can simplify and clarify the role of the superuser in the OS by calling it the Janitor (at least for the consumer-end UI). System functions the average user has no business messing with would be presented by the interface as "in the utility room" or such; I think most consumers would feel quite comfortable with such a metaphor, and would understand WHY there are things they shouldn't mess with (and why UNIX handles this so differently from other OSes). The janitor user "has the keys" (and the interface would incorporate su in the context of "borrowing the keys" in order to perform janitorial duties).
Pipelines should be incorporated into the UI. Have "droplet" apps (like those common on the Mac) that you can not only drop files onto to have them processed, you can drag a little piece off the droplet's icon and "chain" it to another droplet (it could even draw a line onscreen indicating this connection!) - and when done, you simply drop your files onto the frontmost droplet in the chain and watch your processed goodies fall out the other end. These "droplets" would, I suppose, be 'snapshots' of a command and some parameters; use a GUI to set the parameters once and create the droplet. Most of us would have zillions of droplets neatly organized in folders, something like shell aliases on steroids. I can also see droplets that function as loops, droplets that pop up and ask for parameters, droplets that are mere file viewers, droplets that tee the output, and droplets that are just good old-fashioned shell scripts. I can even see droplets that accept multiple chains, for, say, combining text files. Essentially a visual scripting system. Then - as if that isn't sweet enough - file dialogs will let you select droplets as filenames you can save files to, thus letting you save through the pipeline.
These are just blue-sky ideas I coughed up in an afternoon. Why is it I have to come up with this stuff? Why instead does every new GUI toolkit or file manager showcased on Slashdot look exactly like some other OS? Is there ANYTHING to Linux except emulating other people's design flaws? Or is it just that programmers are never UI-inclined, and thus those of us who talk about improving things are forever cursed to be unable to do anything about it?
Note: I'm not saying there's NO research going on, just that it seems like there's NOT MUCH research going on. But then, maybe Slashdot should run features on the TRULY innovative stuff (wherever it's hiding) instead of the Explorer clone of the week club.
Also note I do think there's some merit to having a Windows UI on Linux, I just worry when I see so many people basically attempting the same project (cloning Windows under Linux) when there's so much more to be done. Assuming we need any MS Windows, we only need two: the official one, and an open source version. We don't need five, not when the "perfect" UNIX GUI remains unattempted.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
I think as long as these people still think that the computer is a "thinking machine", we'll have to have dumbed-down UIs, to accomodate the users who don't want to think.
You are completely, utterly incorrect.
A computer is a thinking machine. It computes. The sole reason we build computers is to do some of our thinking for us. If your computers don't think, what do they do?
As for user interfaces, you have your priorities backwards. The goal of a perfect user interface is to allow the user to instruct the computer to accomplish the task the user has in mind with the list interaction. That is, a perfect user interface would know what the user wanted done - and do it - without the user having to instruct it. A good user interface should make it very easy for a stupid user to do simple things, but also relatively easy for a more advanced user to do complex things. Those of us who think of computers as machines to assist us in thinking don't want dumber interfaces; we want smarter interfaces so that we don't have to spend as much time telling them what to do or trying to figure out what they mean when they report back to us.
I am currently contributing to Nautilus, but am not an Eazel employee. I thought I'd just speak out about some of the claims against Nautilus and address some of the concerns that people have been bringing up.
First of all - the screenshots are 75% JPEG format. i.e. they't not the best of quality - so it may not look as good as in reality. A better choice would have been 100% JPEG or PNG format
Secondly - please take into account that this isn't even alpha-level software. Eazel Inc. is still experimenting with icons and stuff. They decided to give SVG icons a shot. They are playing around with different UI concepts. Nothing is final yet. Let them 'explore' different icons and stuff. Please do not say 'oh these screenshots suck, therefore Nautilus sucks, therefore Eazel sucks'. Also note, that the you can change the 'icons' to anything you want, I think that also includes the toolbar icons.
Third - Nautilus is a 'graphical shell' much like Konqueror for KDE is a 'graphical shell' much like 'EFM' is a 'graphical shell'. Although Nautilus is more like Konqueror than EFM. Nautilus is not exaztly like Konqueror, but it is very similiar.
Fourth - The thing that Eazel is marketing to make things easier for the user are the SERVICES that its going to provide. These are not found in any screenshots and have largely not been talked about. These services will be able to be accessed through Nautilus (I think this is how Eazel plans to make revenue). This is what is touted to make Linux so much easier for new people. I think some of these services will include remote file storage, backups, an apt-like system for RPM. These will all be tied into Nautilus I believe (if you're not subscribed to Eazel's services you should be able to easily switch them off). The services are of course not 100% certain, and I may be wrong since I do not work for Eazel.
Finally, I would just like to say please don't judge Nautilus from a few meazley screenshots. These hackers are GENUINELY trying to make a contribution to the open source community. They are experimenting with new ideas and new concepts. Nothing is definate at this point. I mean there hasn't even been a 0.0 or 0.1 release yet. Nautilus is VERY buggy, VERY unstable at this point in time. Please do not expect so much from it. Eventually Eazel and the Nautilus crew will be a stage or point to be able to release snapshots and releases to illicit user feedback. In fact, feedback is encouraged even now if you wish. But please make it USEFUL feedback not things like 'this sUxs, it l00ks like winbl0ws'.
I would like to thank all the people who have provided constructive feedback. I am sure that the people at Eazel have been reviewing it and taking it into account. (for example, others have previously complained about the SVG icons looking bad - and it is still under consideration wether they will be used in Nautilus 1.0 or not)
Sincerely,
Ali Abdin
P.S. Nautilus will not really embed the entire mozilla. It will embed the the 'gtkmozembed' widget. It is basically the HTML component that mozilla uses for rendering. Also there is a 'gtkhtml' widget for light-weight HTML rendering (the help stuff in Nautilus will be using this I believe) - but for a general web-browsing experience I think people will be using mozilla
So, how'd you get this amazing ability to tell from a screenshot how stable and fast a program is?
--
No more e-mail address game - see my user info. Time for revenge.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
You're absolutely right. Maybe it's just because I'm so used to the unified design and smooth, universal interface of MacOS, but those screenshots look awful. The interface looks disproportioned and distracting, with no evidence of design unity. Maybe it isn't as bad as it looks, but it looks to me like it would be annoying to the point of being almost unusable.
I think I'll just lie down here in this field of poppies poppies poppies 'till it all blows over...
Shift happens. Fire it up.
Anyhow, stop reading this right now and go check out EFM from CVS. It's awesome. Be sure to check it out of CVS, the tar ball is oldish.
Chris
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
Pres, SVLUG
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
here's a mirror
enjoy...
"d00d! is there a way to unzip like 30 zip files all at once? without having to double click on each one of them?"
Upon re-reading the comment, he did say unzip, and not _open_. My bad.
And what is the HTML for underline? I forget off the top of my head.
Visit http://freeboxen.com to get rid of your old computer hardware & software!
-- --
Stay Tuned Next Week For...
The Adventures of Open Souce Man!
-- --
Stay Tuned Next Week For...
The Adventures of Open Souce Man!
(with Natalie Portman and her Aibo)
Check out EFM. I've been running it for a month and it has some amazing innovations, like the typebuffer. In fact, it is already quite usable and easy to compile and install. If you think Nautilus is just another MS wannabe, EFM is for you.
Idiot. If you want that kind of control you open up the stuffit application and set your prefrences then open them all up. But wait, you're a CLI user... you like to do things the hard way.
Don't mistake automation for thought - they aren't the same. Not by a long shot.
Do you think you think? How do you know? Thought is just a very very complex algorythm. There isn't some secret magic box at the center of your brain that houses your conciousness. Your brain is just a computer. A mathematical, information processing computer.
Computers don't exactly think (at least not in the sense in which you use it) yet, but they should. Someday, they will. Even if my computer doesn't actually think about how to execute the loop to open the batch of files, it sure can save me the trouble of thinking about it. Which in terms of my time and trouble, amounts to the same thing.
I am tired of nested directories!
With the advent of cheap, open-source X, I would think that someone smarter than me would develop this. All we get are Motif, Windows & MacOS knock-offs.Later...
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
Just how does giving directories names that mean something to the average user entail breaking the functionality of the CLI? Wouldn't you just have to define your path to include things like $user/preferences, /applications, /documentation... as opposed to /opt, /usr/bin, /man...?
Or do all the apps expect a standard directory structure, looking for /etc/me.cfg as opposed to something like sys.prefs_path/me.cfg?
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
looks like a ripoff of Oberon...
Don
My Mom cant find stuff on her own 2G hard drive, let alone on a huge network FULL of stuff!!!
Later...
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
Most developed applications go for functionality first. They put place holders for where the artist(s) will come in later and make the appropriate changes.
All movies, games etc do this, it's part of development.
The interface should be intuitive, but doesn't have to be purty :) while in development.
-- to code or not to code
Eh heh. Not that I want to try and compete with stuff made by Rob Pike, but if X is okay, and you want a file manager with at least some focus on textual information display, you might want to check out the program linked to in my URL above.
</PLUG>
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
There seems to be two major movements, in terms of windowing agents, for linux. Down one path is the usability managers, window maker, blackbox, and possibly gnome. Down the other, enlightenment, and other such projects. With the current surge of money into such open source ventures, by companies such as VA linux systems and RedHat, there is a drive to take linux from its current niche market, and move it into the mainstream. And with this..comes much confusion and debate.
Many smaller projects are being integrated into far larger ones, and bloatware is not too hard to come by, even in our stability/usability driven unix world. The end user may not always want something which is usable, and want something pretty. The whole idea of theming, along with general extensibility, is pretty active in the open source community. Well, we _do_ have access to the source, and can change the feel of our applications, along with the feel of our desktops in general. Bad thing, or good thing? WinAmp and Mozilla are both very popular theming items, read: http://www.salon.com/tech/fea ture/1999/05/19/desktop/
But in this theme and customization driven market place, where a few vendors have taken hold of many consumerization-tactics that drive many of America's other industries, where do we find our usability? Surely, gnome and KDE are both very usable desktop environments, but neither addresses some of the major easy of use problems in linux.
Nautilus is a bitch to compile, and is NO where near being finished right now, as to why this article was posted, I know not--It only reflects poorly on the work which the gnome-team and Eazel have done....It just often seems that the level of easy we need, ends up being a more limited system in general. I'm not really sure of linux's future as a true desktop Operating System, but as long as there's companies like Eazel out there, trying and trying, I'm sure we'll get somewhere...
However, I like the idea of using a computer, I would be using computers even if they werem't as exciting or popular. So because of this, and because I am willing to take charge of my own experience, I don't like to run a complete Desktop-Experience, such as gnome or KDE. Whatever gets the job done, boys.
-- mihai
i need it to be small on the screen, it needs to be able to display all file formats and show file info as detailed as i want it at the moment i request it /etc/profiles
and i found it, its caled windowmaker, *term, (yes i like nice pictures) and a few line's in
99% of the file managers outhere have a way to big(visualy) GUI
and 99% of the things ppl do with them i do faster in a term anyway
I might be paranoid but I just live in fear for the day the first 'window manager specific' apps hit the net and this kind of application brings this day closer and closer
42
This is such a total myth.
Windows doesn't antialias fonts; never has, never will. It only smooths them. And then only at point sizes where it doesn't need to do it anyway. You don't need to smooth 18 point text.
Antialiasing = the removing of aliasing artifacts; i.e. fooling the eye into thinking there's more resolution available than there really is.
Antialiasing, done correctly, is required at *small* point sizes - i.e. 10 and below. Also you have to do something substantially more clever than the edge smoothing that Windows does.
The only reason font smoothing is in Windows is to make PowerPoint presentations look pretty.
The only OS that has ever had proper, complete font antialiasing was RISCOS on the Acorn platform. And it did it with only 8 shades of grey.
That did real-deal, subpixel antialiasing at *all* sizes. And the results were way better than anything Windows has ever offered.
That said, I know BeOS does something like this but IANABU.
And never mind what Nautilus *looks* like. Have you checked a copy out of CVS and built it? Used it?
Nah, didn't think so.
--
Peter
But seriously, I am a little disappointed. Sure, it looks clunky, but Eazel isn't just about appearance, it's about making system maintenance easier. Unfortunately, either the screenshots can't show that, or there's no work to show yet.
Paragraphs, perhaps you've heard of them.
If you can't organize your thoughts then I'm not interested in reading them.
Well said. You seem to understand exactly how much benefit will come from having an awesome and intuitive GUI, evolved from a combination of the world's most popular GUI's and an awesome core OS.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
I wish there were more screenshots of the support for WebDAV; I'm very happy to see something like this built into Nautilus..!
Here's some Microsoft PR (Yes, I know, sorry), on the PUBLIC STANDARD, WebDAV. It's relevance to Free Software developers should be immediately apparent.
You don't need to use a for loop, I use Info-ZIP's portable unzip/zip (comes with most Linux distributions, and/or are available as packages) in both Linux and Windows and you can just as easily do unzip *.zip.
http://www.ifrance.com/a rdantz/linux/nautilus/nautilus.htm
I'm wit that. I could never figure out the point of a GUI file manager. The text is the important part! The stupid little icons are useless noise. If you want to see an intelligently designed UI where you you can actually do powerful things with mouse and text, see Rob Pike's Acme UI from Plan 9. Other Plan 9 papers here.
I'm sorry but if you misspell "first" in the body of your message you're automatically disqualified.
Please try again.
I'm sorry, but I shall have to disagree with you: a file manager is NOT a HTML browser! HTML only allows 1 action per click, file browsers require many actions (open/activate, show properties, rename, etc.)
The only reason MS replaced the file viewer with a browser was to have a reason to embed the browser into the "OS" (actually, the operating environment or OE, but MS has always blurred that line).
Now, integrating an FTP client into the file manager is a GOOD idea, since the operations of the two are very similar. But the differences between a browser and a file manager are too large to make them one and the same ("It's a desert topping! It's a floor wax!")
Now, merging an HTML browser with the help system is great!
.
Great, so that when some @$$h013 sends me a file with an embedded link to a cookie, or a web bug, and I save it to disk in order to dissect it, it will *still* be invoked!
Call me old fashioned, but I happen to think that for file management, the old GEM desktop on my TT030 was almost perfect (just needed a right button context menu...)
Notice to lamers: I didn't imply this individual was on crack, or gay, or lame, or a stinkin' 'Softie. I responded politely and cogently. Try it yourselves sometime....
www.eFax.com are spammers
Heh..You ever try getting Nautilus working? I spent two days. I was able to compile it but it never worked...
Well, I just answered you on Gnotices, but for the benefit of /. readers: According to http://developer.gnome.org/status/roadmap.html the release date for Nautilus is "Late summer" - August or September. At that point it will become the desktop shell for Gnome. Hmm, August is two months away, and there haven't been any preview or development releases of Nautilus yet... We can always hope, right?
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
I have to disagree, and here's why:
I view web browsers, and content over the net, as a separate application than other OS functions. I suppose some people would get confused, but for me local and remote operations are just inherently different. When I boot up into Win98SE, I use the classic desktop, without Active Desktop controls, and yes, I double click to navigate. I do it because One, it is vastly more stable than Win98SE with Active Desktop enabled, and Two, it doesn't use any unnecessary system resources.
Sure, you might be saying, well, it's just split seconds used when IE previews a file you didn't want to or when Active Desktop crashes and I have restore it. But those split seconds are still annoying, and if software ergonomics tell us one thing, it's that noticeable user action-reaction delay is one of more tormenting things on this planet. I view local-remote integration akin to that dancing paper clip - sure, it's extra functionality, but it's something I have no need of, and it's taking up resources.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
The CLI might be sufficient for advanced users. That's probably not Nautilus' core target audience. See, money's to be made here, but only if and when Joe User can figure out how to run Linux (or at least the GUI that keeps Joe User from having to deal with the innards!)
That said, I think the icons are purdy. If only they had the GUI equivalent of command-line completion... ;)
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
think both GNOME and KDE feel "heavy"
:)
try increasing your mouse speed
Religion is the opium of the people. Evolution is the opium of scientists.
>> Everything is modular using Bonobo, so bloat is not an issue. Don't use your file manager as a web browser? The HTML component (Mozilla) won't be loaded into memory.
Well, the back side of this is that if I do want all of the thigs, the start to take 3 times more space than monolitic application because of all plugin-layers out there.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
X is an amazing protocol.
No other windowing system that I have seen allows you to run graphical applications as flexibly as X. Run your application remotely and display it on your local machine (I always used the vacationing co-workers' Ultra 2's and Ultra 30's to do netscape and compilations rather than my U1). Run applications on your local machine, display them remotely. They have very good response. Even using a slowish connection.
Why is this? Because X is WELL DESIGNED. The model of the way X works is very cool. Not just for network applications, either. Many people say that X sucks because it slows down stuff done on the local machine. It is true that XFree86 can't display full-screen quake very well at high refresh rates, and part of that reason is due to going through the X protocol. It incurrs some amount of overhead. But for most applications, X is fine. And for those other applications, X can be extended in a legal and compatable way to bypass a lot of the network model for the local machine... which is what GLX is doing.
You also say that X doesn't have any support for AA fonts (or smoothed fonts). XFree86 doesn't. This is true. However, it is possible within the framework and architecture of X to have AA/smoothed fonts. And Dipsplay P(S|DF). And anything else that a display environment needs to do. And it can do it fast.
X IS NOT THE PROBLEM!!!
And, as we see processor speeds improve greatly over the next few years, both on the main board and on the graphics card, and we see busses not speed up at nearly the same rate, watch. You'll see that because of the modular, networked architecure of X, it will become lots more efficient when most of the X display code is running on your graphics card and your main processor doesn't need to send nearly so much information back and forth over the bus, because of the elegant architecture at its core.
If you want AA fonts, look into how to do it within X. Then do it. But don't whine about how Linux should adopt the Win or MacOS ways of doing things. Those ways suck. Fonts may look bad on my crappy monitor now under Linux, but it's stupid to drop an elegant architecture which can support nice fonts for one that sucks but has nice fonts.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Hey, you are looking at CVS development screenshots! They are not supposed to be pretty! They are supposed to hint you what could be direction of what you could expect, that's all. Now turn on your imagination. Or wait for the release.
And remember - GTK is themeable. That means in my themed environment that will look entirely different. Nothing like what you saw in screenshots.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Because, hell, KDE 1.x's file manager does this shit already!!! And Konqueror in KDE 2 (which I can TRY now, not just see poor pictures of) is already a generation ahead of this shit!
KDE is already stable. KDE is already easy-to-use. KDE already has a high level of intuitive functionality. KDE is already proven. Until these people can actully prove they have SOMETHING, they deserve all the bashing they get!
This may be a rant, but it also contains the truth, KDE is, and probably always will be, ahead of GNOME by a generation. Sure, they can rush their release number to 1.2 so they are 'ahead' of KDE's 1.1.2, but the truth is KDE is superior in almost every aspect. And with KDE 2.0 due out within the next 4-6 months, Nautilus is already obsolete.
And as much as you people say that KDE isn't truly 'open', with the use of Qt, remember this. I can get the source of both KDE 2 and Qt 2. Show me the source of Nautilus, NOW! You can't can you? Hypocrites.
Nautilus is vaporware. Nothing more.
/me puts on the flame jacket
Otherwise I don't really see what you're talking about. The images are all fairly clean, and for the most part they leave behind the faux-3D, which I think has gotten rather old and makes for funny shapes, where rectangular shapes are more usable. Screens are all 2D, why should the icons deny it? Also, 2D icons are easier to modify programatically, adding text, changing colors, etc.
I actually like the button proportions -- I still find icon/text buttons to be very bulky, but these screenshots show a more compact proportion than usual.
--
has horrible fucking taste in music??
Shania Twain, Britney Spears, the Backside Boys!!??
Jesus, this doesn't say much for the average Linux user's taste\sophistication....
I am probably repeating some information here but here is a url to a news article on Eazel. It isn't exactly the most recent but it will give some of the people here an idea of who is working on this project.
http://www.upside.com/Ebiz/393844ba0_yahoo.html
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
AIEEEE
call in the lawyers!
Usability guru Jacob Nielson makes the point is his new book on Web Usability that the Macintosh desktop metaphor is completely outdated. The Mac designers produced folders and files as icons in the understanding that everyone would have a cognitively finite number of files. They were also designing for ultra-limited real-estate (128 pixels squared) and had no room for other context... Nowadays the number of files/items we use is cognitively infinite, particulalry on large shared drives. (I tried for find files of a certain type at work and discovered that search on Windows Explorer wigs out at 10,000 found items.) What we need is a 'file manager' like a search engine that finds groups of things. Looking for an executable? - find the binaries, documentation, copyright docs, etc, etc, display them in a coherent way based on rules. Store the user decisions based on the head-up and exchange them with an anonymous server so that my file manager's learns from everyone's usage exactly what things mean and how contexts should be constructed (ie learn the display rules and use the internet to create a massively parallel learnging engine). That would be a new UI...
http://scottish.politicaldiscussion.org
So let me get this straight...MS spends thousands of man hours and millions of dollars studying and designing functional & asthetic GUI's and the Linux developers spend thousand of man hours putting down MS and basically biting the hand that feeds them.
If you're going to all the troubles of getting a proprietary and dedicated hardware/software combination, why don't you just get a PC with BeOS ?
Hey, you're right! Geez, why didn't I think of that when I bought my Mac? Everyone who is using a Mac now - or any OS, for that matter - should immediately switch to BeOS! And we should all live in identical houses and do the same job every day! Oh, wait, there could be a problem with that.
Don't be an idiot. The fact that I like to use Mac OS doesn't mean that I want a proprietary operating system, and it certainly doesn't mean I would settle for any (inferior) operating system just because it's proprietary. As it happens I think that in terms of design being proprietary has probably helped Mac OS maintain the system-wide consistency that makes it so easy to use and so pleasant.
I think it's really sad that you place an admittedly better operating system "off limits" solely because "it's proprietary". The whole goal of software not being proprietary is about getting better software in the end right? So if it turns out that the proprietary software that's being developed is actually better, shouldn't you abandon the whole idea and go with what works?
And what do you mean OS X won't run X apps natively?
GNOME Control Center - User Interface - Applications - uncheck "Toolbars have text labels"
Two nits:
Compared to MacOS X, and even Win2K/MacOS 9, This GUI is, to my eye, quite clunky and downright ugly.
Granted, its in the early stages of development, but it looks no better than any of the other projects like KDE 2, Helix Gnome, EFM etc.
Seriously, i think its time to do away with X for a single-user desktop. Its obviously going to require too much work to make it support drag n drop/antialiased fonts at the lower levels, so thats being implemented in GNOME/KDE etc.
I just hope GNOME is not totally dependent on X, so that the lower layers of the GUI could conceivably be replaced by something better. Unlikely, i guess.
X might be very useful for remote windowing apps, but i don't run any of those, and i doubt that more than 20% of the linux community need to either.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
I haven't posted in a while; but I'm pissed now. I can't believe this comment was moderated to a 5-informative.
I think you've hit the meta-nail on the head. The problem is that on Slashdot, moderators tend to mark up based on agreeing with a point rather than on the merits of arguement being made. And fortunately (i think) there is no "good point, badly made" or "I wanted to say that" meta-moderation option.
Uhh. Sendmail attacks? Bind holes? A user install of Linux does not need such things. Why you'd install all that for an end-user setup... well, I would have to hear an explanation of it. Also, portscans are an issue no matter what the OS, it's just a lot easier to use tools that will detect them on Unix and Unix-ish OSes.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Until you run it with a larger than average setting for your X server's DPI setting: I run 1600x1200 on a 21" monitor, with my X server's DPI setting set to 120 dpi (via the --dpi setting in my startx file). The result is that the fonts get scaled up to a reasonable size (and look quite smooth without antialiasing). However, most Gnome apps seem to think that all fonts will the the same height (in pixels), thus all Gnome apps have most of the text cut off in the window layouts. Wish I could paste a picture into this to show you. Then again, with some of the trolls around here, maybe pasting pictures would be a bad thing....
www.eFax.com are spammers
People like to bitch, and Slashdot is no exception...so let's see, What's Wrong With Easel/Nautilus:
1. Icons are too 'generic':
I could be wrong, and correct me if I am, but isn't this the point? Isn't GNOME/Easel supposed to give Linux the same desktop ease of use as Windows does right now? I mean, there are only so many ways you can easily and intuitively represent 'places where you store information files'. Replacing lame yellow folders with cutesy penguins or something might be more flashy, but I think 95% of the populace would rather have something more functional.
2. Not revolutionary/Overhyped.
In the sense that the programmers are trying to create a truly GPL-compliant environment that has all the functionality and ease-of-use of Windows, while maintaining the bedrock stability of Linux, it looks like they're taking steps in the right direction. Buzz and hype are mostly a creation of the audience - I doubt any of the programmers got up on a pedestal and said, "Nautilus is going to change your world!" I don't know what you were expecting from Nautilus, but it sounds like you have some great ideas to share. Maybe you should start your own OSS project?
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
When Microsoft moved to integrate IE with Windows, people scoffed, including me. Clearly there could be no benefit to blurring the boundary between the internet and the desktop, so we maligned it as a political move, a business move, a marketing move, everything but a sound technical decision. I distinctly remember one commentator on Usenet suggesting that the speed difference between accessing a local file and a hosted one was so immense that users would protest Microsoft's attempt to conflate the two. Of course that was in the days of ubiquitous 28.8 connections...
:-)
Now, you cannot find a window manager that doesn't imitate the principle of web integration. It's simply too *intelligent* to treat resources all in the same manner. And as bandwidth increases among the general population, the glitch of time between accessing files on my hard drive and on, say, infidel.org, will diminish to amounts humans find negligeable.
So my question is, when will Microsoft get the credit due to it for this groundbeaking innovation? Or are we going to resort to that old game, exhuming some dusty old prototypes from Xerox PARC and Digital in an effort to discredit MS?
Yeah, it's a rant!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Take a look at some screenshots of (a) Windows and (b)Mac OS 8.5/6 (Yes, there's finally a proper CLI in OS X, but they've made such a hash of everything else). You would think you might be looking at some marvellous, instructive examples of what (a) to avoid and (b) to imitate in human computer interaction, interface design, etc.
But you wouldn't. You'd be looking at some pretty dull, uninformative pictures. The only noticeable difference would be that the Windows menus are attached to the windows, the Mac ones to the top of the screen. And I'm not about to get into which is superior, it'd be a flame war.
UI is about things like customizability, consistency, scriptability, informative names, consistency, elegant scaling, abstractions that don't get in your way, efficient placement of controls, and did I mention consistency?
So while the Mac OS has way better HCI than Windows, but you won't be able to tell that by looking at screenshots. You can tell by reading tech documents, interface design guidelines, scripting dictionaries (is there even such a thing in Windows?), etc. And of course by using the system in question.
And this means, I'm afraid, that giving Linux decent UI is going to take a lot more than Yet Another Desktop Environment. It'll take getting rid of directories called /etc, /usr/bin, /var... It'll take instituting some real user interface guidelines and standards, both in command line apps (so what does ^S mean in this context, I wonder?) and in graphical ones. Cause all YADE means is you get pretty screenshots.
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
Just because something's been done before doesn't mean it's a bad idea. One of the fundamental principals of the Open Source philosophy is "don't reinvent the wheel." Why should Eazel make a completely new and unfamiliar interface when an existing one has been successful?
For a moment, put aside your anti-MS feelings. Sure, Windows/Mac file browsing has some definate problems, but the basic idea behind it is sound. If we can take the underlying concepts that should have made these systems successful, remove/fix problematic areas, and add whatever makes us say "Whoa... cool.", why shouldn't we?
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
One thing that I can't get over as I read through all of the Nautilus bashing:
It's only screenshots!
Can you tell how stable it is from a screenshot?
Can you tell it's ease-of-use?
Can you tell it's level of intuitive functionality?
As far as I can tell, all we can really do is make judgements on how pretty it is, something that is customizable to personal preference anyways.
Why don't we take a deep breath, holster our guns, and wait for release.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Oh hush. This interface isn't going to destroy linux, it's just going to put a nicer face on it. Everything that you like about linux you will be able to continue doing... this project is just going to make it friendly for newbies like me.
Work is for people who lack the imagination to play.
Wow. Thats anti-climactic. Maybe I'm just being picky, but I think the color-scheme for these shots could have been better, and I understand that they are working on user-friendly design - But I was hoping for a bit more flash. These look very flat, and unfortunately very "Windows"..
-
air and light and time and space
Based on what I've seen on the Nautilus mailing list, this is going to be a *very* fun piece of software to use. There are more great screenshots at this site. ;)
I just asked on the Gnome news site, and I'll ask here, too; does anyone have a ETA on an official Nautilus preview release?
I'd love to try out Nautilus and give some feedback to the developers, but I tried building all the required packages from CVS and just don't have the time or perserverance to work out all the macro build problems.
Heck, I'd settle some tarballs or RPMs that someone could throw together for us unwashed, CVS-impaired masses.
I noticed Favorites in one of the shots, it makes me cringe and think of internet explorer. Looks like they are committed to winning over brain dead people who won't understand a feature if its not named the same as the Microsoft software they currently use.
no sig.
I'm not using any software from someone who listens to Backstreet Boys 2000_0 6_04_005318_shot.jpg... especially when they can't spell millennium.
I agree that the broken pencil is inconsistent when compared to the eyeglasses with and X. Definitely a pencil with an X is more quickly recognizable as 'no write' than a broken pencil. This was good constuctive critism by ortholattice.
These ideas ARE just what we need. Please consider posting your ideas on the KDE or Gnome mailing lists. Better still e-mail the relevant authors direct!
I love the idea of building pipelines and perhaps saving them as an icon somewhere!
This one had me thinking about an idea I've been playing with for a while - a completely configurable UI.
Oh, that's brilliant. A user interface that you have to spend hours and hours customizing before it becomes usable. Everyone will want that.
While I think Nautilus is a good step in the right direction, the points you made are incredibly good. The idea of 'droplets' has got to be one of the best things I've heard in years. I love the flexibility of MacOS (for example) dropping image files on Photoshop, and then onto an FTP alias to upload them. With the power of piping etc. in unix, this would be absolutely unreal.
I get sick of people bashing GUIs because they don't have the power of the command line. But the problem is not in using a GUI, the problem is in the implementation of it. If we could have a way to do this properly, we could construct extremely powerful and useful script-like sequences, without having to worry about knowing the right commands etc.
Instead of plain copying other interfaces, we should be taking the best bits from them (eg. I for one think an integrated file manager/ftp client/web browser is a good idea), but we should also be proud of unix and proud to use the full potential of its power. Don't try and bring Windows Explorer, or MacOS Finder to unix, lets find out what makes them useful, and APPLY that to unix.
You hit the nail smack-bang on the head.
In this screen shot here , which is a screen shot of an mp3 directory, it is plainly shown that you have one Metallica mp3. Now I think you might be in big legal trouble from Altern^H^H^H^H^H^H Metallica pretty soon. Probally shut down the whole project. And Slashdot too, for linking to screen shots implying the pirating of copyrighted music. Shit.
Double J. Strictly for the . . .
"However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation."
I can't help but I ask myself, what's the big deal? With all the hype Easel generated... they would make it sound like they were creating some revolutionary windows-killer desktop. All I've seen so far from this link and their web site is what looks like a (not-to-glorified) file manager with OLE-like embedding capability. Doesn't KDE2 already have that base covered... not to mention you can divide theirs (Konqueror) up into as many windows as you like. And I don't like the icon's either, you'd think they could come up with SOMETHING better than lame yellow folders... heck I'll use windows if I want them lame yellow folders. Yech.
Blender And Linux Fan
BH
Fools! They laughed at me at the Sorbonne...!
A simple script is a good way to save time and energy (not to mention boredom).
You missed the point. I have a graphical interface so that I don't need a script. Instead of wasting time deciding what scripting language to use and thinking through the logic of a loop, I just select the icons I want opened and double-click one of them. This way the computer has to waste its time figuring out how to do it instead of me having to waste my time.
I can see part of this. For the "read" monkey, there's a monkey sitting at a desk with reading glasses staring at a piece of paper. For the "write" monkey, you have a monkey with a pencil in his hand. But just what exactly are we supposed to use for the "execute" monkey!?
"Mommy, why is George W. Bush killing that monkey?"
But then again, I could be wrong.
Perhaps they could replace it with three monkeys. Instead of "see no evil" "hear no evil" and "speak no evil", they could have one monkey for "read the file" one for "write the file" and another for "execute the file".
Then again, simple RWX letters along the side might be sufficient for advanced users.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
I'm sorry, but I shall have to disagree with you: a file manager is NOT a HTML browser! HTML only allows 1 action per click, file browsers require many actions (open/activate, show properties, rename, etc.)
Now, integrating an FTP client into the file manager is a GOOD idea, since the operations of the two are very similar. But the differences between a browser and a file manager are too large to make them one and the same
What you don't remember is that at its roots a browser is not a means to display HTML files. It's a means to navigate remote directories, which happen to contain HTML files most of the time. Remember that the original web browsers displayed nothing more than text, and HTML was only sparsely used for decorative formatting.
A file manager is a generalized browser - when positioned as a superset of the web and FTP, it makes a great deal of sense.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
There are many more shots here. They look pretty cool!
---
One of my pet hates about gmc is that you can't make the tool-bar icons at the top small. It drives me silly to the point where I'm much more cumfortable with cli than I am with an ugly file manager which forces me to waste screen real-estate! Nautilus better get rid of that evil side-bar thingy and make the toolbar smaller or they can just dream on and think that people want to use such a cumbersome program. All I need is a small toolbar at the top and nothing else. The title-bar at the top should tell me which directory I'm in - who needs a huge "Location/URL" text box for that? Yes, I'm aware these ARE development shots. I'm just saying look out!
I own a computer so that it can do some of my thinking for me.
Of course, one could argue that part of the usefulness (and therefore purpose) of computers is to automate mundane tasks. A simple script is a good way to save time and energy (not to mention boredom).
-rt-
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
With talk about cracking and the like, my question is: since a GUI is supposed to eliminate or cover up various features of Linux to simplify its operation, what sort of implications does this have for security issues.
In its default configuration, for instance, most distributions of Linux try not to have any holes -- yet if one were to throw a GUI over this and one could not see what was going on in the background, the average user would probably not venture beyond its comforts.
Imagine what would happen if, after attracting more of the Windows crowd with this new GUI, whether it be tools from Eazel or whatever, a new security hole was discovered in a particular part of it. These people can't figure out the Windows Update, much less how to recompile a kernel or set user permissions. My grandfather, who has a cable modem, would be having to deal with things like sendmail attacks, port scanning, BIND holes, etc.
Perhaps I might be taking this too seriously. I mean, the risks involved in "bringing Linux to the consumer masses" were overlooked in the pipedream hype of the late 90's -- which was when the negotiations for Eazel's venture capital financing began.
There already is a one-handed input device called the Twiddler by Handykey. Haven't tried it myself but I hear its great once you get used to it and its especially popular among people that build wearable computers
God Fucking Damnit
There's enough misinformation posted here that I feel some factual information is in order. I am doing work for Eazel on a consulting basis on graphics and rendering. Librsvg (the renderer for the reduced SVG subset) is my baby.
Yes, Nautilus has the capabilities to do fairly advanced antialiased rendering. The current development snapshot has the option to use the antialiased renderer in the Gnome Canvas (joint work between Federico Mena-Quintero and myself). This does full alpha-blending and enables the use of icons with semitransparency. The Xlib renderer will probably remain an option for those with slower computers. Icons can be provided in both SVG for full scalability, or in PNG in a graded series of sizes.
My current project is integrating Freetype 2 text with librsvg, adding antialiased text capabilities with both TrueType and Adobe Type1 font support.
The current architecture of X makes it relatively straightforward to implement antialiasing and alpha compositing within a window, but impossible to composite across windows. Thus, Aqua effects such as having windows cast soft shadows, or having drag'n'drop icons antialias correctly, are currently beyond the scope of what X can do.
There is active work ongoing to add true alpha to X, led by Keith Packard of SuSE. I'm following this work closely, and am eager to see it come to fruition so that we can start to apply a rich imaging model across the entire screen.
Raster is doing some very cool work with EFM. Some people seem to think there's a kind of war going on between the Gnome and E camps. I don't see it this way at all - to me, it's a friendly competition in the best sense of the word. Raster is at the cutting edge of graphics capabilities, while Gnome is doing more work on integration and making sure everything works well on a broad range of systems and configurations. Both approaches have their merits, and if nothing else Raster's work serves as excellent protypes for Gnome development. I had lunch with Raster and Andy last week, and we had a really nice discussion about extending X, getting access to hardware acceleration for antialiasing and compositing, and so on. We also talked about some of the requirements for making sure all this stuff is useful from the Gnome Canvas, and I'm hopeful good stuff will come of it.
I also want to talk a little about antialiased text. The best of all possible worlds is an unhinted, antialiased display at 140 dpi or higher. Since those displays aren't widespread yet, we have to make do with some tradeoffs. The most fundamental tradeoff is between edge sharpness on one hand, and smoothness on the other. Also hanging in the balance is the faithful reproduction of the glyph shape. Whenever you antialias, the edges become softer. However, you can sometimes get a slightly better tradeoff by aligning vertical and horizontal stems to the pixel grid, thus ensuring sharp edges for these, while diagonal and curved segments get smoothly antialiased. However, this process does distort the font somewhat.
In order to take advantage of 140+ dpi displays, you have to write your apps to be resolution independent. Fortunately, with the Gnome Canvas (which is what Nautilus uses for its icon view), it's pretty straightforward - in fact, there's a zoom control that scales the whole canvas uniformly. I was surprised and a bit disappointed to see that Aqua is not resolution independent, and in fact has many of the dimensions hardcoded. Thus, down the road I think it's not unreasonable to expect free software to have the best rendering, bar none.
It's a lot of fun to be developing this stuff, and I'm looking forward to getting a desktop with advanced graphical rendering into the hands of lots of people.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
I can just see the look on my sysadmin's face when I tell him he's just a glorified janitor!
just my blog and pix
Innovative? They all stole it from Xerox PARC so lets not even go through that one again.
You dont have to reinvent the wheel, just build a better wheel. (Or just build a better marketing department it as a better wheel and abuse your )
Innovative? They all stole it from Xerox PARC so lets not even go through that again.
More choice is good, and being able do everything through the GUI is essential to a Desktop user (nay Plebain such as myself), but that does not mean the power tools should not be there to let you do everything down to the last detail and leverage your knowledge.
High level programming languages do not make assembly languages any less useful when you need speed and have the know how.
For all their ability, its nice to know that they still cant spell
OK. {Shuffles through old software boxes} Thanks Peter Norton!
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I find it incredible that people accuse Microsoft of not innovating and just stealing other people's ideas. take a look at the second screen-shot in the directory. For some reason, the file brower looks hideosly familier. Oh, wait. Its IE in a GTK+ dress! It even has the little thing on the side that gives a summery of the file. If the Eazel developers are worth their salt, it will also use Bonobo to do realtime previews in that box, cementing its similarity to IE. KDE does this too, Knoqueror is both a web browser and file browser. The integration between the browser and the file viewer is cool (and very useful) tech, and MS is the one that poineered it. They might make crappy products, but give credit where credit is due.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
If this is answered on the site, just mod me down to (-1, Australian) - I'm your regular "ask questions first, read site later" sorta guy.
BH
Fools! They laughed at me at the Sorbonne...!
I don't think so. I don't believe that you need for example HTML component (Mozilla) and Word Processor component (KOffice or something like that) and Photoshop component (GIMP, if it will ever make as a component) in the same time. With monolitic application all of those would be in the memory all the time.
Of course if all you want is HTML component with file manager component it could be smaller with one monilitic app. If it ever seems to be an issue I'm pretty sure someone can create such a monolitic monster from sources (shouldn't be that hard to convert that layer static?). And have you tried IE lately? I'm pretty pleased with the speed of it no matter how much components it uses - and no, I'm not pleased with netscape with all its monolitic scrap.
_________________________
_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
I don't like the icons. Sure, they look fine, but they're too big. Yes, I know Nautilus can stretch icons, but they're not likely to look good at anything other than they're natural size. This is one thing that every Unix file manager I've seen has got wrong, and MS (for all their other faults) has got right. Sigh.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
what the hell, this just got me to thinking about an amusing anecdote related to how shitty some GUI's are (in my opinion).
I had a friend message me via licq (he uses winders)..."d00d! is there a way to unzip like 30 zip files all at once? without having to double click on each one of them?"
me: "yeah, do a for loop!"
I laughed my ass off for about 5 minutes...long enough for him to message me back, "a what??"
some people just don't even have a CLUE how productive a CLI can really be...
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
As far as I know the whole project is not just to create a File Manager. Probably the file manager is their main concern now so almost all screenshots are showing off what it can or can't do. The most impressive screenshot for me is the one that shows desktop. You can see there completely new user interface and that is what I'm looking forward to. Although I'm KDE user and can't wait KDE2 I will definetely wait to see how this project develops in the coming months and if they deliver what they promised I would be a happy man
Mac users: just another arm of the apple marketing machine.
Are you trying to imply that there's something wrong with selecting an operating system you enjoy using? Are you trying to say that we should seek out clumsy, impractical systems that we hate? I knew there must be a reason all those people were using Windows and Linux!
you could use TurboZip Express available at download.com. Search for "zip multiple" and yer in like Errol. Or you could be a luddite and insist on a command line solution! =)
Windows Explorer is the most massively useful file manager you can get. Especially the NT version. But only people who have to work with a lot of files all the time appreciate it. Having said that, I still use the DOS window sometimes when it is more convenient.
how you say... imcriminating evidence? :)
ZEN is a prime number in base-36
[ From the official Nautilus home page ]
Nautilus is an open-source file manager and graphical shell being developed by Eazel, Inc. and others. It is part of the GNOME project, and its source code can be found in the GNOME CVS repository. Nautilus is still in the early stages of development. It will become an integral part of the GNOME desktop environment when it is finished.
Did anyone else notice "Enter Sandman" on the MP3 playlist? :-)
Perhaps off topic, but ICQ (99 and above) has a keyboard quick list to access most of the important functions. Actually, the "simulate system tray double click" is probably all you'll ever need. I always used tab+space to send messages.
1) As has been pointed out, these are really early shots from a really early non-release. So go shut up for a while.
2) To those who are boo-hoo'ing the lack of total innovation, have you put no thought into this or what? If I'm going to design an 'easy-to-use' interface (to anything, computer or no), I'm going to go with whatever requires the least amount of extra learning, if any. By combining MacOS and Win elements, both of which are well known by Joe Q. Public, the Eazel folks are doing just that.
Really, I mean, give the folks some credit, ok? It's not exactly fun to sit here and read whine, bitch, moan. There are times when /.ers can really lay down some great ideas. You don't like what's there? Then what should be?
(While the latter may make the average user happy, the image of broken glasses is likely to make many fellow geeks cringe. ;-)
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
i don't use other filedamagers than terminal.
do i have to die now?
but there is a need for a graphical filemanager as many people from like windows platform converts to unix/linux.
i don't think there's nobody to blame if ppl want to copy windows explorer as filemanager. you don't have to use it. as most of us really know, many of these applications aren't required to run linux/unix efficiently. you can do a lot of work with just xterm and emacs (or vi or pico) or if not using x, the plain console too.
ound the message used repetitively over and over still nothing grows silen
These screenshots started quite a battle over at Gnotices, which has been raging for days. So before it starts anew here, I would like to point out several things:
1) These are DEVELOPMENT screenshots, there has been no official release, not even a development release, it's all from their CVS.
2) Everything is / will be customizable. Don't like the icons? The icons can be changed. Don't like a particular way of viewing files? It can be changed. Think the sidebar takes up too much space? (Hopefullly) it can be hidden.
3) Everything is modular using Bonobo, so bloat is not an issue. Don't use your file manager as a web browser? The HTML component (Mozilla) won't be loaded into memory.
I'm sure this will do nothing to prevent the inevitable bitchings, but oh well.
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
The proof is in the *using*, so there's really no point in arguing back and forth about the "usability" or "innovation" of something that NONE of us have used!
. . . until we can actually use the code, there's nothing to be said. Anything we DO say will be purely speculative and will reflect nothing other than our own biases.
I have no
The only metaphor I was initially baffled by was the broken pencil. My first reaction was something like "disk file unreadable or corrupted" (i.e. broken), and call me dumb but it took a couple of screens and looking at directory names like /bin in context to realize it means "write protected". Once you get it maybe it's kind of cute, but wouldn't something like a pencil with an X (like the eyeglasses with an X) be more immediately understood?
I see mostly flames, moderated up, at the top level. There are two things that are wrong with this: first, people should not be flaming a new, open-source project, they should be providing constructive criticism or encouragement. Second, moderators are moderating according to how strongly they agree with an article instead of how well-written and credible the article is.
I'll weigh in with my opinion here: I think, that with the track record of the people involved in Eazel, we should give them all the support we can, regardless of whether we see their work as a threat to our pet project (it isn't - remember, it's all open-source and any of the good ideas from Eazel can be incorporated into our other projects).
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
It's ugly.
All the comments about how it looks like Macintosh or Windows, how it's not innovative (I agree, BTW, it looks like the bastard child of Windows 95 and MacOS), it's just ugly. Recently in Time or Newsweek, there was an article about the increasing awareness of design in the American consciousness (sue me, I'm American). When I look at the Eazel screenshots, I see something very kludgy, very awkward, like icons are the wrong size, the wrong proportion. Line weights are too thick or too thin. Colors are too garish. Buttons are too small or too big or have too much blank space (why do the close buttons have to be even smaller when they're surrounded by so much space?). The one thing I like about GNOME (and don't get me wrong, I think both GNOME and KDE feel "heavy") is the professional elegance of it's imagery. Icons feel well designed (I think tigert designed quite a few of them; they appear to be his style). Default buttons feel about the right size and proportion (proportion is ever more important than size). Here, the Eazel developers have started to throw all that out in an effort to look just different enough that people can call it 'different'.
I don't know what's causing it. The early screenshots looked promising, but these just don't fulfill expectations. They look almost like they're being underdesigned, and given the real lack of innovations these screenshots are displaying, it's really going to take a user interface that enlivens the Linux desktop to sell this thing. Yes, I know you can customize it, but frankly, I don't want to download something ugly to make it look beautiful. I want the best with minimal effort.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, though, and I have a critical eye. Do other people feel the same way? That this is kludgy? Or does this have the potential to be the new aesthetic?