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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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>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.
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
There are many more shots here. They look pretty cool!
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Nautilus has many neat features, including:
I'm sorry, but I shall have to disagree with you: a file manager is NOT a HTML browser!
One thing that's remained absurdly constant over the last 12 years or so is that regular (l)users have real trouble understanding "Shared Drives" (as they call it in DOS-space) or mounted directories or network paths or whatever. The concept of a "hard drive" being somewhere "on the network" just eludes them.
On the other hand, most users take to webpages like water. Back on "Pearl Harbor Day" in 1995, when Microsoft announced that they were going to integrate IE into Windows, my third thought was that there was lots of potential in the idea. (My first thought was that it would be bloated and slow and crash a bunch, and my second was that this was going to put Netscape out of business, but that's another Slashdot story...)
Imagine a system, which instead of presenting a dull list of file attributes and creation dates, presented metadata about there in, or one which could provide instructions along with the files, to help the users share their information, or which allowed quick searching and sorting from a GUI interface, or one which could provide simple document managment and versioning.
Of course, Microsoft hardly implemented any of the application-level features to make web integration really anything more than slower, crashier, more illegal version of the same thing. Part of the reason is that they sell products like Exchange that do many of these tasks. On the other hand, a open source infrastructure which provides web integration would be more likely to be expanded to support some really useful applications that run above the filesystem.
Call me old fashioned, but I happen to think that for file management
You're not old fashioned, you're just a geek. Users don't manage 'files', they manage information.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
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.