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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.
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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."
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No more e-mail address game - see my user info. Time for revenge.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
>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.
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...
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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Peter
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.
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
There are many more shots here. They look pretty cool!
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Nautilus has many neat features, including:
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...
(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.
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.
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).
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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?