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Eazel's Nautilus Preview 1 Released
menthos writes: "Eazel released the first preview release of Nautilus, the new GNOME file manager in development, at the LinuxWorld Expo. You can Download Preview Release 1."
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> Thus if I have three JPG images in a directory named:
> FSMHSusNM131_N2.jpg
> FSMusNM131_G8.jpg
> FSMHSusNM132_N5.jpg
> (and I do,) then I can select any one of these
> using at most two keypresses and two arrowkeys.
> On Linux, If I were to do anything to the third file, I would have to type FSMH(tab)2(tab) while
> squinting to see what was different about the filenames.
Assuming those are the only files in the directory, to select the 3rd file, I would just
press alt-g (I have alt-g bound to menu-complete backwards in bash).
If there were other files just do FSM(alt-g), or FSM(alt-v)(alt-v) for the 2nd file, etc.
All the features are cool, but I really need a combination of functionaltiy and speed. There are definite advantages to the GNOME architecture and Bonobo, but if it takes a few minutes to load a directory, then I am going to be annoyed. I recognize that this is a preview release, but this is something I hope you guys will address.
A few questions:
1. I hate Eye of Gnome, I prefer GQview. I know that it is possible to map the mime types to GQview, but will I no longer be able to preview images without Eye of Gnome installed (as I understand it, Nautilus uses Eye of Gnome w/ Bonobo)?
2. Where can I find more information about programming for Nautilus? For example, I would like to map certain mime types to my application, so the user does not have to do it manually.
Keep up the good work.
It we are going to redesign that whole setup of icons and windows and stuff it should be something more effecient. Something that would make it more effecient for the user to use, access, and modify the data. :)
And of course, it should be effecient code
just my $.02 - wiremind
Of course you could simplify this even more by using:
[mark@pate mark]$ su -c "cp index.html /home/httpd/html"
Password:
cp: overwrite '/home/httpd/html/index.html'? y
[mark@pate mark]$
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Ok, ok.... it looks a bit pretty, but why can't anyone make a good NC clone for linux. I know, there is one million attempts, but most are not nearly finished, and those who are (MC) are not much to my liking.
I like wincmd, it's the best NC clone I've ever seen, but it could be better.
I already have come and been shown the grand tour, and may I say you have the best designed business cards at the whole expo as well ;)
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Sounds good - very good in fact.
I still want to be able to use the GUI itself to do root commands though. Some things, like moving files around just make more sense to me in a graphical context...
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
I have to point out that the nautilus FM/explorer interface looks as if it could translate well to webtops, consoles and even PDA's fairly well.
That can't be said for win explorer. I might even try adding some components if they aren't already present such as open file with program y (in new window)(in desktop x), etc as that would be very useful - intergrated command line with D&D/C&P would also rock a lot.
Aaron.
Perl & C Hacker
Okay, sounds good.
If I install this with Gnome, what functionality will I get? Will drag and drop work (not that I really use it apart from netscape) ? What do I need to do to install it alongside gnome?
Sorry if these are simple questions, but I've never really used KDE since it first came out and I switched to gnome..
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
Look at Jabber from the docs " The Jabber instant messaging architechture is modeled after the internet email system. There can exist any number of independent Jabber servers which accept connections from clients as well as communicate to other jabber servers. Each server functions independent of others, and maintains its own user list. Any Jabber server can talk to any other Jabber server that is accessable via the internet."
What's really needed of course is a distributed DNS service, although that would be
- a major security risk
- speed up net.balkanization
However at present DNS is the one part of the net still tangled in a hierarchySave the sarcasm please, and there's no need to shout. Of course I know what a bloody preview is. I use nightly builds of Mozilla, I'm fully aware of its preview status, but unlike Nautilus, Mozilla is actually something new (i.e. a full-featured HTML renderer for Unix).
Problem is, unless they rewrite Nautilus from the ground up, it's still going to be nothing new or innovative. It's eye-candy, form over functionality, and even if it were 5 times as fast (which it may well be in v1.0), it's still nothing special.
Yes, konqueror. 1. It can be started in super user mode. 2. It can open a view which is a terminal emulation.
Every other file manager in the world can be started in super-user mode. I don't think that's what the original poster wanted. Something more along the lines of:
Starting a file manager as root is not an acceptable solution.
Terminal emulation? Big deal. Nearly every worthy filemanager (mc, gentoo) includes some ort of mechanism for spawning a shell. Try again.
-Nathan
Well, in my experience of a couple of friends mobiles (I don't own one - no brain tumours for me!) they have to be rebooted from time to time. (I've also heard it from time to time on the train, switching the phone off and on again to make the funny mode go away) However, because mobiles boot in a couple of seconds people don't view this as a problem. Maybe it's a solution for microsoft - get the boot time of windows down to 2-3 seconds.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
man, your tone is sounding pretty hostile. I realize it's probably hard to maintain positivity in the face of /. talkback morons, but still, lighten up and stop with all the profanity.
~Jeff
You can do *all*, (and considerably more) with dired-mode in Emacs (which has been my default file manager since time immemorial). Who'd have thought Emacs would fit all the design criteria of a (supposedly) easy to use interface?
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I assume that the re-write of the file manager will eventually queue a re-write of most of the apps so we can have "real" drag and drop?
At the moment, we're still clicking [menu] file-save, then going through the laborious and completely counter-intuitive system of a "file browser" just to save a file in apps. Dragging a file out of [random application] and dropping into the file manager is the way to go. Dragging a file out of [random picture editor] into [random word processor] to insert a picture is the way to go.
I'm sure Linus would love to hear that the kernel is bloated and / or badly written.
It does not even work on glibc 2.0 even if you hand compile it. Trust me.
If you were following Mozilla development, you might have noticed this bug which tells you that glibc 2.0 is broken with regards to Mozilla. Don't do it. Upgrade to glibc 2.1.
And if you were really serious about compiling from source, you might have taken a look at the Mozilla Detailed Unix Build Instructions. This page even gives you a link to a patch that makes glibc 2.0.7 behave so that you can compile with Mozilla.
Somehow people have no problem with upgrading their system with security fixes, but ask them to upgrade system stuff that's broken to fix a bug and they go all to pieces.
-Nathan
PLEASE do not scream about the bloat (20MB download).
The only reason for this, is that most of the
libraries are alpha, and not present on ANY
production systems, hell.. some of the libraries
included could very well f* up your productionsystem good, if installed regularily. This means that the Nautilus-package (for it to be easy to install) has to include almost everything.
Of course this is going to mean a 20MB download.
Think about the size most apps would be if totally
statically linked. Nautilus-preview is not far from that.
In addition. It now downloads and installs
the FULL mozilla-app, while it when finished will
probably only use the mozembed-package.
All this means that the whole thing will move from
a 27MB download (with mozilla) to an about 9-10MB
download when it is all finished.
This is NOT too shabby for an application that is
graphical shell, web-browser etc.
Furthermore. A lot of people are bitching about it not being revolutionary.
What are you guys expecting?
This application will be able to embed about every
functionality on the desktop through Bonobo when
finished. Right now, there are not that many bonobo-components. But to get a glimpse of what
Nautilus will mean when finished, take a look
at the "music"-view when looking at a mp3-directory. This way of viewing directories is
just the beginning, and is TOTALLY different from
the way any graphical shell has operated on Linux,
and even on Windows earlier (I cannot speak for Macs).
Nautilus is not finished by far. But if you look
closely you may get a glimpse of what it may all
look like when finished.
The concept of different views for different kinds of people is excellent. And if you try to use
the "Novice"-view, you might understand how easy
Gnome may be to use come Gnome 2.0.
This is a Nerd site, buzz off !
- sigs are for wimps.
Anyone created/located these?
Helix have a muttering on their site about supporting FreeBSD in the future, but I wish they'd get on with it...
--
Peter
Go find someone with an Apple Newton...
This is one of my absolute favorite Apple products (can someone buy me a Cube, please?). It uses icons as applications but NOT as files. You tap the Notepad icon to go into that application and then select a tab to see all documents associated with that application.
I really liked this interface (I loved the newton, *true* handwriting recognition, cursive or print), it was simple, clean and compact. How often do you open a binary in netscape, an iso image in vi or a text file in a spreadsheet? Obviously this interface is not perfect but I definetly think its a start towards something new.
This is not flamebait, just an opinion: I am looking forward to KDE2 and have been playing with the beta releases, check it out.
Geoff
I found the idea that someone could completely review a product in ten minutes quite funny and at about the same quality as the average ZDNet review.
I guess HTML needs a tag to go along with the tag that Alan Cox has been calling for.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wagn'nagl dominos.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
Posting before the first cup of coffee is unwise! The last sentence should read:
I guess HTML needs a <JOKE> tag to go along with the <RANT> tag that Alan Cox has been calling for.
Now for more caffeine!
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wagn'nagl dominos.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
You can set in the preferences whether you'd like to open new windows or not... It's not in front of me right now, but I believe it's in the intermediate/expert settings panel.
Emre |=^)
I guess my discomfort with the whole thing is not so much about any inherent properties of the distribution method, but rather the presentation. Part of the reason a lot of people are pushing development of Gnome is to make Linux/Unix a more viable desktop OS for people without a strong computing background. People who don't know about 'tar -tz' and are mostly just trustingly following directions. I can't help but think of all the old BOFH jokes about naive users being told 'okay, to rename a file, type 'rm -rf /.*'
Your complaint is ridiculous because in a sense tarballs are the method that gives you the MOST security and control, and that's what we're distributing
I don't agree with you that tarballs give you more security and control than rpms or .debs... In all three cases, you can manually examine and extract the contents of the archives to a particular directory. rpms and .debs are also a lot easier to clean up if you decide to remove the package, and .debs (not sure about rpms) offer md5 package signing so you have some reassurance the package hasn't been tampered with). In all cases, performing any of these tasks involves understanding the tools involved. Giving step-by-step directions to be typed as root, without explanation, may in the long run be teaching people to shoot themselves in the foot.
Additionally our tarballs install into their own path (/nautilus-preview or something) so they'd be easily removable when you're done playing with it. So its neither sloppy nor insecure unless *YOU* are sloppy and insecure in how you deal with them.
And that's exactly my point. I have enough experience with tar to know it's not a smart idea to su to root, cd to '/', and untar a file containing a piece of beta software from someone I've never heard of before. But that's precisely what the install instructions on the Nautilus page recommends.
If you'd like to suggest a way to make the process not require root, but still be able to install to places like /usr/bin, we're open to suggestions.
If the preview installs into it's own path, why does it have to write to /usr/bin? Why not $HOME/bin? (I will refrain from opining on the virtues of /usr/local, and how dumping any old beta software into the system directories tends to lead to instability and cruft).
How about an installer script that gives an option between a 'safe' install in $HOME or /tmp, or a system install, which must be run as root? (and includes a brief message explaining exactly what this entails).
No, I'm not. Where does your particular brand of paranoia come from?
"Oh, he's not overly impressed with this particular piece of open source software. He MUST work for ZDNet".
Keep wearing that tin foil hat. It'll protect your head from those nasty rays.
Eazel's Nautilaus suffers from GNOME's achille heel. Have you seen the requirements to install this *file manager*? You must install:
Helix GNOME. Plain GNOME is not good enough. No sirree. And you can forget about GNOME 1.0. Fat chance of that working. So how do I install Helix GNOME? Why, just run this crazy script as root... Oops, my distributed is not supported. Go download every thing. Do people know what a pain to compile all this stuff is??
Mozilla. Oh dear god... Enough said here. I'll be penalized for saying this, but Mozilla on Linux is really looking sad these days. It does not even work on glibc 2.0 even if you hand compile it. Trust me. Very sad.
Finally, you can download the eazel file manager... Oops, another 20M download.
Folks, is this realistic?
Windows 95/98 lets you choose between single/multiple windows. After years of using the multiple windows setting I switched to single window a few months back. After all you can always open a second window when you need one (by double clicking on my computer). A menu option clone window would be usefull though. Also adding back/forward buttons makes life easier.
As nautilus is targeted to end users, it seems sensible they choose the single window approach. I hope this file browser is better than the current generation of file browsers on linux. I find myself using the commandline very often on linux. Not because I like working on the commandline so much but because linux filemanagers pretty much suck right now.
Example, I wanted to rename a few mp3 files the other day. As I'm a lazy bastard, I prefered not to use mv for that since that involves typing the filenames in full. So I launched gmc. Silly me, renaming a file! No can do. Of course there is a move function but I just wanted to change a few characters in the filename, not type the whole bloody thing.
Jilles
Wow this is bizarre, I was thinking about doing the same thing last night. Since I'm a pretty inexperienced coder I was going to take a look at the Gnutella source for ideas.
Let me know if you want some help; I'd be glad to do whatever I can.
Email me.
Don't trust anyone over 90000.
+++ATH0
Well, I gotta say, it looks pretty. I think it could have potential, but they need to make everything optional. This loading of icons based on file information is far too slow (I'll admit my system is slow, but come on, this is a file manager). It doesn't really seem revolutianary, except perhaps in architecture (looks pretty standad to me, though the virtual folders sound intriguing). Unfortunately this preview doesn't seem to show much of that, as all the viewers didn't work. Also, it wouldn't load a web page, maybe thats because I'm using a nightly build though. I'll be playing with it more after finals, but right now 20 seconds to load a directory is way too much time. Pretty good for a preview though. For now, I'll stick with ROX Filer. Tim
No, he's not joking, he's referring to some Qualcomm phones' OSes (yes, they DO have some sort of OS) which are prone to crashing. I believe the QCP-860 has this problem, among others.
Email me.
Don't trust anyone over 90000.
+++ATH0
After I saw the demo at the SVLUG meeting I was initially underwhelmed. The features did look cool and everything but seemed a diminishing returns type of refinement, especially on the 15" monitor I normally use.
Then it hit me, if I had an immersive interface, say like Neal Stevenson Snow Crash style glasses (Sony and others make them), the zooming and some of the other features are TERRIFIC !
So my question, were the Easel designers thinking of this when they invented the features, or is this just coincidence ?
> Well, in my experience of a couple of friends mobiles
;)
> (I don't own one - no brain tumours for me!)
Dude, you are *much* more likely to die from getting in car accident while chatting on your cell phone, than from a brain tumor!
It still amazes me how paranoid people are about this, especially tech-savvy types who should know better.
- mfnickster
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Thanks for pointing this out. I missed the original story and this has to be one of the coolest things going...
Seth,
This may be a bit off topic but I just wanted to take the time to thank you and all of the other Nautilus developers for all of the time and effort you've put into the project. You've worked hard and it shows. It's unfortunate that you won't hear the praise you deserve on here on Slashdot, but please try to keep in mind there are many Linux users like myself who want to see the platform move forward and like the work that has been done. But since we have day jobs and cannot sit on our asses all day to complain and find faults with other's work, we cannot submit posts to tell you this.
I agree that GUI design is one area that is lagging behind everything else. Yes, its nice, but how many real changes have there been since Win3.1? Or even the original MacOS? For me, having spent most of my computer time previously in Win/Dos, the power of pipes and I/O redirection, especially in C/C++ and other programming languages, was amazing. We need something like that for the GUI... Unfortunately, I have no ideas as to what it could be... :-(
Any suggestions? Comments? Criticisms?
-RickHunter
I am no Linux guru, but I love it. Although it can make you mad and make you drink too much coffe ;)>/P>
Why? Why do people download beta & alpha releases. Probably something basic. Like watching prretty girls, I like watching pretty screenshots. And there's this feeling of accomplishment when I see a half-baked, much hyped thing really work in MY computer. It's not "Where do I want to go today", it's "Where will I be tomorrow" delivered today. Nevermind the crashes.
And the much hyped sense of community around Linux. It does exist.
Besides, do you think that the file manager in Windows is any smaller, if you add upp all the components/com objects/whatever it probably requires.
That's the crappiest justification I've heard in quite some time.
--
Okay, I got Linux installed. So where's the free beer everyone keeps talking about??
Considering that they're offering a source tarball as well, I would think you should be able to build it on any system.
I've been following the news on Nautilus and it looks pretty exciting to me. However, I only use FreeBSD and Solaris. It doesn't make much sense to me to limit Nautilus to Linux only, when Gnome holds so much promise for any system that runs X.
Hoping it's just a semantic error...
--
For those of you running debian, a much more convenient way to check out nautilus is to use the (aptable) debian archive provided by Takuo Kitame.
See the README at http://www.debian.org/~kitame/gnome/. for the exact lines to put in your /etc/apt/sources.list file. Then you can just do `apt-get install nautilus'.
I tried them out, they seem to work fine, and are much smaller in terms of both disk space and download size than the mega tar file provided by eazel.
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Sorry, man. I don't know what I'm talking about. I really should put a lock on my account so I can't post after midnight.
/. Someone earlier mentioned that it existed indepentently of X (and I presumed, of GNOME).
That and I shouldn't believe everything I read on
Have a greay day!
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
While I support the ideals of this company, namely, to create a user friendly, almost 'mac-like' interface for Linux, wouldn't it have been better to refine a pre-existing one?
I suppose though, I'm biased.
[ maur_at_technologist.com ] "For a sufficiently powerful message,
[ http://maur.litestep.com ] the medium is irrelevant."
It's one of those days when all the Trolls get to be moderators :-(
Alexandre Leduc
> In explorer: Click the first file, hold down
.tgz and .tar.gz files too).. like directories (MC does this too).. great abstraction!
:)
> Ctrl, click the second file, click the third
> file. Right-Click one of them -> SendTo ->
> Floppy.
Argh, okay.. so they thought about the floppy drive.. could have been something else (in wincmd: whatever is in the other window)..
Another good example: The way wincmd handles compressed files (yes,
> BUT how do you print a directory listing from
> within Explorer? How about wincmd?
I never needed that, but I would do (in wincmd):
dir > lpt1:
or maybe "dir >x" and then edit the "x" file to make it nice, and print it out.. I dunno.. don't need that..
I often need to convert graphics files.. I use Image Alchemy for that (renamed the ALCHEMY.EXE to "al" for speed).. so I would be on top of a TGA file in wincmd and type "al -t -Xd720 -Yd576 -8 -z4" or something to convert.. it's very fast and a good example of the power you get when combining the prompt with a (usable) principle like the Commander.
-- jaf
He must be browsing through his file manager again...
(Why it's not a good idea to have a web server and a robust GUI on the same machine)
(Then again, I bet Quartz and Aqua is no light-weight combination either. I should just go back to full-screen bash.)
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
is it the urge to keep up that makes people use the latest linux tools or is it the fear of becoming stale?
"While I support the ideals of this company, namely, to create a user friendly, almost 'mac-like' interface for Linux, wouldn't it have been better to refine a pre-existing one?" Such as...? I hope you don't say Konqueror, because I'll point out that that was a rewrite too (and a good one too!). Would you like to propose a pre-existing one that had a strong enough architecture that it would have been worth rewriting? In fact, adding necessary GNOME support (bonobo, gnome-vfs, etc etc) would have probably been more difficult than writing from scratch - almost all the original code would have had to have been nixed.
Code is only re-usable if it was written right. Period. And the architecture is part of what makes Nautilus great... You'll hear Miguel rave about bonobo but its true, Nautilus components are really reusable in other applications. And bonobo means that Nautilus *isn't* a total rewrite. There are some great bonobo components like EOG that we were able to just use off the shelf. What we're building is an architecture that means the next file manager revision, even if its by somebody else or a different architecture won't have to be a rewrite. (and yes, I am a Nautilus developer)
-seth (seth@eazel.com)
20 megs for a file manager? Get real dude.
But it's okay, because you can cache it in RAM!
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
It is truly the interface to the computer. Desktops may organize it as shortcuts, ect, but it is the main responsibility of the UI side of the OS, the interface to the filesystem, to the programs installed. The OS is more, but this is its primary task and everyone that uses the CL knows it. If not, even the notion of a working directory would be meaningless.
GUI filers need a lot of work to be useful over the CLI for sure. One I am using right now, ROX-Filer is based on the RiscOS filer (I think thats right). Anyway, it is leaps ahead of all GUI filemanagers I've seen. I used to be a huge member of the CLI is more efficient crowd but now Im not so sure. rox mixes the GUI and CL so well and it is so efficient and configurable, I now think GUI's are the future of file managers ect. If anything, this is a good example of what could be done if advance users were kept in mind while still keeping it simple.
Great. So I can't navigate my filesystem in comfort and have a shell command line at the same time.
Of course you can. Konqueror just has the additional ability to embed a terminal window... (please read before you post, I said it can contain a view that is Terminal window).
-- KDE programmer and computer science student in Klagenfurt, Austria.
eazel-preview-1.tar.gz
mozilla-M17-2.i386.rpm
--
Kiro
The real thing is: gmc sucks so bad, but sucks SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO bad that Nautilus, even in PR1, is better than it.
Please, GNOME guys! Halt development on gmc, it sucks big time. Concentrate all efforts on Nautilus. And let gmc rest in peace.
Cesar Cardoso can be found at cesar at zyakannazio dot eti dot br (or at least I believe so)
Personally I can't see why they don't allow you to right-click and choose "open in a new window." I mean IE is built into the file browser and this is doable in IE, why not when browsing files?
> tar zxf' are all commands...
.c file.
> tar ztf your tarballs...
tar xzf, tar tzf. Oh, all those linux users I've seen completely lost when they are put to use posix tar. "Where's the z flag? Why can't I use the obscure parameter order my gnu tar accepts?".
Things like this are baaaaad, mmmkay? Just like putting an "#include " in the beginning of you
Somehow, it seems that this disease mostly applies to linux users.
Continuing the posts likely to be moderated down to -1 (If we keep this up, they'll find a way to mod it down to -3), this is, unfortunately, one of the traditional failings of Open Source software. Adding the little nit-picky details to actually finish the software just isn't sexy enough for anybody to actually do it. First off, it isn't impressive to say "I'm the one who added support for Ctrl-DownArrow" and secondly, nobody will hold off a release when its "good enough" to use. After that's done, all the work goes into more big features and the details get left out again.
> Just like putting an "#include "...
It was supposed to be "#include linux/soundcard.h". Stoopid posting system killed the greater than- and lesser than-chars.
One thing that's good from some of the shots I've seen of Nautilus is the representation of file permissions as little overlaid icons. Perhaps taking this further to represent other sorts of properties would be a good idea.
/dev icons for all sorts of fun. And then use those components with other ones in different orders etc etc. to different effect.
I'm really waiting for a scriptable GUI/file manager for Linux. There's so much potential with pipes/redirections in the shell, which isn't taken advantage of in Linux GUIs. How cool would it be to string together a series of icons - drop your file on a Gimp filter icon, which in turn sends it through to a pngcrush icon, which sends it to an ftp upload icon, which uploads it to your website. Or even link these up with your
I'd like to see graphical power, intuitiveness and flexibility - the Unix way!
Major releases calculated to coincide with big trade shows. That has always been a sign of hype over substance.
At least this time it's not a 1.0 "stable" release that comes in the middle of a storm of new bug reports and latter had people excusing it with comments like:
"Of course it's ready. The developers have been in insane bugfix mode for the past week"
Yes,. This actually happened with Gnome itself. Linux, SaMBa, Apache, KDE, XFree. These are serious free projects that release code "when it's ready" and issue betas "when the software is complete enough to be called beta and normal people can help with bug tracking". Nothing but technical considerations are relevant.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Although Nautilus seems like an impressive file browser/opener/whatever, it reinforced the fact that I prefer the command line to a browser any day.
Some of the features that I didn't care for in Nautilus include:
It quits playing MP3s if you leave the directory while they are playing.
It displays all my pr0n pix that I try to hide by giving unrelated names (e.g. tmp_proc_img.jpg shows a thumbnail of Silvia Saint).
It doesn't provide a 'killer-ap' reason for me to use it instead of a command line. It's Mozilla inclusion may eventually change my mind, but for now, Galeon or Netscape work fine.
It doesn't view any of the 'files' in my /proc directory. Viewing the proc 'files' would be a nice feature.
There are some good points to Nautilus:
Contrary to what many people said on Slashdot today, it wasn't slow at all. It was rather large (20+ MB) but I thought that it was just as fast as any other file browser.
Since it uses the GTK widgets, it fits in nicely with all of my other Gnome apps.
It installed easily and ran immediately (more of a necessity than a feature). I'm not sure why all of the files need to be located or linked to the root directory, but that's hopefully only for the preview release.
Keeping
nautilus it self is only a 3 meg download, i havent checked the preview release yet so it must be includeing all the depends it needs.
On my system, Nautilus eats half the CPU even when it's idle and hid behind another window or minimized.
I completely understand about needing to do algorithmic optimization for active operations, but when I'm not frobbing the window, the algorithms running should be O(zero), which does not seem to be happening.
As you say, I look forward to seeing what happens with optimizations.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Yeah, it's icon view is way too slow, even on a PIII 533mhz (work box).
Plus, it needs to have an Icon made for all image type of files (jpg,png,etc) instead of the sheet of paper Icon! Ick! It's hard to see which files I had were images, I had to keep looking at the extensions.
They need to add a sort facility to sort by mime-type or file-type! I could sort all my images (gifs,jpgs, etc) seperate from my ascii files and compressed archives.
I am using the theme : Vector.
I like how it does show a snapshot of my scripts in the browser window.
The MP3 player module needs a 'volume' control.
It's a start.
-- to code or not to code
> Thus if I have three JPG images in a directory named:
> FSMHSusNM131_N2.jpg
> FSMusNM131_G8.jpg
> FSMHSusNM132_N5.jpg
> (and I do,) then I can select any one of these using
> at most two keypresses and two arrowkeys.
Select any *one* of them, yes, but how do you select multiple files on Mac using just the keyboard?
Oh yes, you write a (verbose) Applescript!
What's more, how do you copy files without using the mouse? Applescript again. There might be another way, but I don't have the time to wait for the Macintosh Guide to walk me through it. It would be nice if I could access the Apple menu via keyboard as well.
BTW, I love the Mac and own one, but it is not the be-all end-all of efficient interfaces. It is extremely usable and consistent, but there is always room for improvement.
- mfnickster
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
But there are also advantages to a file manager. It's a matter of using the appropriate tool rather than becoming so stuck on a single tool that you can't learn anything different.
--
Ben Kosse
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
I'll never use Mac because there is no method for switching between apps from the keyboard.
I had an INIT that did this in 1989. It's been in the System since 8.0. 1997, baby. Come on, keep up.
Having to reach for the mouse slows you down.
Actually, this isn't so. Using the mouse feels slower than the keyboard -- because pointing with your arm is a muscle memory task, while remembering a keystroke and locating the key is a cognitive task. While your brain is occupied, your time sense is suspended.
You know that "Holy fuck, it's 6:30 AM, how the fuckin' hell could I have been playing Civ II for ten hours straight when it feels like fifteen minutes or so" feeling? This is the same effect on a micro level.
The upshot is, that although people swear up down right left that hotkeys are faster than mousing through menus and so forth, actual objective timings prove the exact opposite. People of course refuse to admit that the timings could possibly be right, because they "know" that it was faster when they were using the keys.
Apple did a lot of research on this in the eighties; they eventually had to start making videotapes for proof because the test subjects simply would not accept that the recorded times could possibly be correct.
It saddens me to see a bunch of linux users clammering over top of each other to be the first to download a preview release of a *file* *manager*. File managers are *horrible*. Doesn't anyone use Linux because they like the Linux / Unix way of doing things anymore? Can you redirect the output of a cat in a file manager? Can you substitute a long chain of piped commands with their output and then input that output into another chain of commands to perform an action? How would you, in nautilus, copy every text file under your home directory that contains the phrase "file managers suck" into another directory with one action? Bash, and the various other shells available, are infinitely more powerful tools for managing files than any point and drool interface. Its a shame that all the useless chrome on these new X programs and environments will keep an entire new generation of Linux users from ever learning that. I fully except to see a schism in knowledge in the Linux community due to these new tools. I have found that x86 users who started before Windows was available are almost always more knowledgable about computers than those that started when Windows was the standard. I expect to see the same thing happening in the Linux user community.
a) Konqueror can be started as root from the Panel.
This is still a bad idea. And not at all what the original poster meant.
b) it can contain a view that is a Terminal window, i.e. the content pane is replaced by an embedded terminal.
Great. So I can't navigate my filesystem in comfort and have a shell command line at the same time.
-Nathan
In explorer: Click the first file, hold down Ctrl, click the second file, click the third file. Press Ctrl-C. Scroll the bar up to find the "A:" icon. Click on it. Press Ctrl-V. Might be an easier way, but I had the work done in wincmd probably before the winslows user pressed Ctrl-C!!! Bleh...
Click, Shift+Click CtrlC, CtrlV
Took me about 2 seconds to copy three files.. So uhm.. is that slow?
It turns out that the initial run of nautilus that I did (the one that took me to Eazel's site to view their system config stuff) had not completely died in the face of a crasher, and I had a completely invisible nautilus process spinning in the background.
Obviously nautilus shouldn't ever get into a spin like that, but I've seen various versions of Netscape on Solaris do the same thing when they lose their connection to the X server.. something down in X lib perhaps, or else just convergent buggage.
Anyway, Nautilus under normal operation does not seem to eat the processor when idle, as it appeared to do for me.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
For Galeon: mv or rm your ~/.mozilla and then run galeon. I suspect nautilus may have a similar need. For some reason, galeon and Mozilla do not want to share that directory, even though they both try to use it.
Well, there was HP's NewWave, which was so disassociated from the filesystem it required special tools to copy to a floppy or other media---it is one of the four best UIs I've ever used though (the other three were/are PenPoint, Newton and NeXT/OPENstep).
Not bad for a shell on top of Windows.
It's unfortunate that Bill Gates found it so threatening.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I think this is a great step towards linux getting on the desktop, but a lot more has to be done to get everything together so someone could sit down at a linux box do email, cruise the web and then do something useful with the system...
Oy, I just wish Be had some hardware and software...It's just so smooth, so easy and quite nimble.
I know that everyone has said this already, but someone has to remind.
"I love California. I practically grew up in Phoenix." -Former Vice President Dan Quayle
Heya,
Why are we all complaining that Nautilus doesn't look "revolutionar" enough? What had we expected? HAL2000?
What we must get used to, is that this is the first time that a company is making something _good_ for all the "grandmothers" out there, and make some _publication_ around it. Look at M$. They call everything "technologies". When something is new in Windows, it is "revolutionar". And people listen to that crap.
We could use some of that rumour. And we could use a superb component integration system, and a shell that fully utilizes it. (If you feel too nerdy to use it, then let it be just for granny.) And we're gonna get it!
Sidenote: I know people that would DIE for BeOS. But I won't. You know why? Not because of the shell. Not because of the OO layer underneath. But because file browsing is quite a pain in the ass (*all* navigation via a menu, desktop icons are unreachable, etc.). Now I like GMC because navigation becomes more useful (I use the shell most often, BTW). With Nautilus, navigation becomes an adventure through your Linux system. Call it a tour.
Just think of how easy this will be for first-timers, when they get this superb visual representation of the system. They will be, unknowingly, touring themselves through the odds and ends of the system, and will probably learn some very useful things underway (such as the "hard" file permission system, by seeing the permissions visualized on the icons, and stuff like that).
Finally some program that could bring us some more users that don't like to read thick books just to learn something.
It's... It's...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Its interesting that you bring this up. I don't want to go into a lengthy response, but the Nautilus architecture is in place to totally remove the necessity of a conventional filesystem for users who don't want to manipulate it. We won't drive that to the interface for 1.0, but post-1.0 almost all the underlying stuff is in place and will be tied in.
:-) The index files are pretty small (10 megs or so) and of course optional if you don't want this feature.
Medusa, which was developed at Eazel and will be part of GNOME 1.4 is a disk cataloger and search tool similar to slocate - except that it indexes far more than just filename. It takes about 30 minutes to scan a normal to large disk, and of course isn't going to be doing this while you're working
So what does this all mean? This means that arbitrary, complex searches take a couple seconds to run. Medusa is *also* interfaced in through our virtual filesystem. So, the term I like to use for it is remarkably similar to what you quote... Medusa *is* a multi-key semantically queried virtual filessytem. And yes, post-1.0 this will be tied into virtual folders that are actually "searches" that will live update as you change the disk, etc etc. And it will be *fast*. That's only one example of all the things Nautilus architecture is letting us do...
-seth (seth@eazel.com)
*rofl*
:(
;-)
How do you get your trolls to get to score 5 like that?
> The pioneers of Apple, NeXT etc. throw away the
> rulebook and decide to revolutionise the way we
> use computers using Linux and X as the base.
> And we get... a file browser. Can I even bring
> myself to say it? Yes: Explorer, guys. It looks
> like windows explorer. Immeasurably
> dissapointing.
Huh? Internet explorer looks like this?
I mustn't have noticed that last time I looked at windoze. Truth be known Nautilus' UI is based around a two-pane aproach. Big deal. So is Mozilla's, as well as a lot of apps. Even Slashdot uses a sidebar (or two) as part of its UI. Microsoft didn't invent that. If your range of experience isn't wide enough to recognise that then you should stay quiet before posting.
> I tell you, mobile phones, PDA's, they *own* the
> future. People don't even think of mobile phones
> as computers (mostly because they don't go
> wrong).
Wow - You really believe the dot-com marketing weenies. Hey, I've got some great technology stock to sell you. Its boo.com - this great e-commerce company with great potential. Convergence is a long way of in the palmtop market, but I just played with Jim Gettys' iPaq, and it runs GNOME, so Nautilus will be in your hand in not too long.
> *sigh* Glad I stayed away from client side.
Me too.
> Dave
Ian
Linux is great. I like it. X is pretty fscked and makes it hard to do some things. X is great because its so networkable, etc, but X is definitely showing its age. This sometimes limits what we can do. There are things we'd like to do but couldn't because of Linux too, but all in all Linux (do to its draw on Unix) is a pretty good architecture, and at least its really stable :-)
I strongly doubt that you've actually used Nautilus, because it doesn't work like explorer. In fact, I thought we'd be flamed to death for it working so much like the Macintosh, but a bunch of lam3rz saw the sidebar and rather than actually looking at Nautilus decided that it looked like Windows Explorer. Guess what? We aren't exactly running explorer next to our development stations. And I'm not hearing people bitch about other free software products like Evolution, KWord, AbiWord, and KDevelop (not to dis them, they're great products - if somethings good by all means copy the good stuff!) that rip off Microsoft products interfaces DIRECTLY - to the menu organization level in some cases.
So guess what? Its not windows explorer. People don't think of mobile phones as computers, and hopefully Nautilus will be intuitive and physically consistent too. Explorer does a lot of things right, and has some good underlying architecture, but they just don't get the final result right. Its really missing in the "feels right" department. And Nautilus isn't. Even this really preliminary release, slow as it is, should give you a feeling for how cool Nautilus is going to be.
And its not a simple file browser. File browser is stupid and limiting. I'm too tired to really go into why its not, but basically Bonobo means that Nautilus can do a lot more to interface you with your documents, data, code, etc etc.
Besides all this, when you actually use Nautilus it looks nothing like Windows explorer. Nautilus has a lot of great eyecandy. Our sidebar is actually fucking useful too, not just wasted space (though I often prefer to turn my sidebar off, all that being possible and configurable of course). The sidebar allows you to access meta-view components like a tree browser, a drag board, annotations, man/info browser, etc etc (all componentized, so its easy for anyone to add new ones, we just have some sample ones).
Try Nautilus. Those who have just looked at screenshots...Fuck off. Come by the booth at LWE and I'll talk about the architecture. It rocks.
-seth (seth@eazel.com)
Let the paranoid and psychotic (not to mention entertaining) speculation about Eazel's true future plans for Linux begin!
I should note that all those Es look awfully suspicious too. Could be a sign that they are funded by a large number of venture capitalists bent on expanding the use of the letter E and then copyrighting that letter.
Is the Gnome crew going for a full "suite" based around Gnome? I know that this is obvious... but hear me out.
Emacs, as you may know is a powerful (some say bloated, but then these people actually like vi...) tool. You can stay in it all day and get numerous things done. As useful as it is, it is textonly (x version not withstanding).
It seems to me that this "simple" file browser is doing for Gnome what Emacs does. It looks to do everything. This is something that MS has been going for (with the internet/desktop browser integration into windows.) The problem with this idea has been that, in the past no one has gotten it right because there are too many propritary standards to get in the way (like quicktime vs realaudio vs windowsmedia...) and you must launch a separate application to view each.
If it pans out, this certanly looks like the first good shot at providing a "do all" program for Linux (or any OS that I know of for that matter) that is GUI based. I still have this feeling that this is exactly what MS has been chasing - total integration.
I think that the GPL version will win out however.
Why? Nothing propritary to get in the way. If its propritary, you can be sure it won't be easially integrated with the GPL ideals/software. (Nvidia drivers not withstanding either.)
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Actually, Eazel's logo is the oval with eazel in it shown here
Gnome provides all of the look, none of the feel
This is why we need experienced people like Andy Hertzfeld in the loop. Cool by itself is not enough.
Gnome moderation radicals: please don't mistake this for an attack.
--
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
That's a user preference setting. Set your user level to Intermediate or Expert, and go to Edit Hacker Settings. The first option lets you open each item in a new window.
..do two things
/etc) I have to load up an entirely new GUI from the command line.
.' command. Now I'm in Linux I find I can't swap backwards and forwards easily, and end up doing everything from the command prompt - but I shouldn't be forced to do this.
1) Run occasional 'commands' as root. I tend know the root password (and therefore should be able to do what I want when I want,) but for obvious reasons I don't want to be running as root all the time. At them momement if I want to use my GUI to perform an action as root (e.g. copy a file into
2) Switch between GUI and command line easier. Back when I used to use Windows I did this with the 'DOS Prompt Here' Power Tool and the 'Start
Can anyone tell me of a GUI File Manager that has these facilities?
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
I would like to see somthing new as well. However it will have to be VERY intuitive. The current metaphor seems so instinctive to many in part because it IS so heavily used. And it may take more than mere genuis to overcome this sort of inertia.
A big part of the dificulty lies in the limits current phyisical interfaces, namely the keyboard,mouse, and monitor.
As far as what to do about the montitor we are rapidly closing in on the tech for holographic displays from several angles. (the plastic lasers, the millions of mirrors on a microchip, the grey spinning spiral thing the us military is working on for air traffic controll displays, high speed lcd shutter arrays, etc.)
I've been thinking keyboards need someway of re-defining the keys of keyboards apearance visually on the fly, possibly even the shape and placement of the keys themselves as well as adding feedback. This may actually be possible soon. if some sort of flexible, visualy variable, material (are the plastic lasers flexable enough?) where attatched to the top 'surface' of one of the million metal pin things or somthing simular (forget what thier called, they used in the xmen movie to plan with) , and put the whole thing under computer controll with the comp able to both read the pressure on the 'button' and push back you would have a much more usefull device. At the very least just being able to display small images on/under/over some of the keys would be usefull. An additional possibly is having graphic tablets that could also display imagery as well.
And for replacing mouse with somthing better, the Spaceball with it's 6dof, several function buttons and no moving parts (other than the buttons) is long step that way (if only i could afford one:( ).
Not 100% on topic I know, but I do think re-hashing the same old gui's over and over again( though this is a nice looking re-make with some interesting features) Is gonna dead end soon if it hasn't already.
just my $.02
Mycroft
Can you get rid of one of my mouse buttons? Having all of those choices is just too confusing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Well, I've spent a half hour or so playing with Nautilus now, and I have to say I'm impressed. There's a lot left to be done with optimizations and bug fixes, but as nullity said, it does just feel right to a surprising extent.
I like the Novice/Intermediate/Hacker menu.. it feels surprisingly intuitive. I'm not used to working with software on Linux in which you look at something and immediately feel a ghostly sense of the perfect metaphor perfectly drawn and shaded hanging on, but I get that sense in several places with Nautilus.. the hacker menu, the way the drag select is rendered, icon stretching, the fact that if you drag an icon to the description panel on the left, you focus on the item you dragged, color and image dropping, and more. Much like with the Macintosh, oddly enough, but with some of the really nice touches of the OS/2 Workplace Shell thrown in. And browsing with Mozilla in Nautilus feels good too (although a progress/loading bar, right-click menus and keyboard page up/page down support wouldn't kill me).
I agree with nullity that Nautilus isn't going to truly 100% come into its own until Bonobo gets moving, but I can imagine living in Nautilus, and that's the first Linux environment I've felt that way about other than the command line.
Congratulations to all involved! Now, when will we get the ability to use the Nautilus shell as the default desktop background, a la gmc?
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Things have roughly been there for quite a while now. I'd agree with you in the sense that Linux is still not ready for my 94 year old grandmother.
The problems she would have with it are that Netscape is a little buggy and some web pages don't render correctly, and some fonts are still a little off too. Also setting up the video card drivers for Quake3 is a little too much for her, and she doesn't want to learn unix system administration so she can install stuff that didn't come with her distribution.
The thing with Easel/Helix Gnome so far is that it doesn't go far enough. What she really needs them to do is to give her a complete distribution, just take the idea of Mandrake, go alot further, and make everything internally consistent, and make that command line optional like it is in BeOS. Once that happens I'm sure she'll be a happy Linux user, although at that time she may be even happier to be alive !
I think that adding a CLI to Nautilus is subversive to the end goal here. The point is - you shouldn't HAVE to know "cat" or ">>" to do this operation. It should be obvious how to do it, through a GUI.
I could see a way this, and other like it, could be done. I haven't tried Nautilus, but at least in Windows Explorer, I could see a system where you drag a file to another file - you could have several options at that point from a pop-up menu: Replace, Append, Prepend...
And how is that *ANY* different then grabbing an RPM, su-ing to root and typing 'rpm -i foo.rpm'?
:P
The fact of the matter is that 'make install' and 'dpkg -i' and 'tar zxf' are all commands that are potentially dangerous as root. But so is 'rm' for that matter. So what is there to do?
Easy.. You just CHECK first. You want to know what 'make' is gonna do? Put a -n on the damn thing. Query your RPM's. Query your Deb's. tar ztf your tarballs. Be a RESPONSIBLE sysadmin. Decide to trust some software vendors, because you are volunteering to install their software.
As long as you're complaining about things like this, you may as well complain that you have to be root to install Redhat 7.0
I've had my Mac zealot friends explain to me how keyboard-centric MacOS really is, and how efficient it is to get around. They mention all the shortcuts that you do. Great, someone at Apple thought their interface through.
They thought it through, but not enough. Switching apps is a vital and common activity for anyone who actually uses their multitasking operating system to multitask. Having to reach for the mouse slows you down. This is a massive hole in the "Mac is good for keyboard users" argument that I keep hearing.
As for the state of Linux file browsers, I have to agree that it is grim. I prefer the old Win95 Explorer to any file browser for Linux that I have ever tried -- and I've gone down the page at Freshmeat. Good thing I don't mind using BASH for all my browsing needs. Read up on the Berlin project, and keep your fingers crossed. There are people working on replacing X, but it's no easy task. Dude, up your font size. Many term's have hotkeys to do it. I'm really sick of people on Slashdot talking about people geting it. Atleast you didn't say "XYZ company just doesn't get it...." Did Jon Katz start this?
Hmmph. You thought your post sounded like flamebait...
--Lenny
Remember "Everything in UNIX is a file". So, in truth it is just a file manager.
But I get your point
The revolution I think is that since hardware is now a commodity, we are moving away from a hardware-bound system to a system where the bottleneck is merely *the ability of a user to retrieve and process information*. The user is now the bottle neck. Filesystems, etc., weren't created for the *user*. They were created for the *system*. Well now we are bound by the vast amount of information possible, and we have to find ways of using it effectively. I think we will move away from linear "file" systems, and move more into multi-associative "resource" systems. The web itself is basically a "resource" system that is catalogued. Well the same needs to be done for actual file systems, and other aspects of operating systems. What matters to the user is not where a file is located in *physical* space, but where it is located in *conceptual* space - how related in this aspect is it to this other resource? How related in some other aspect is it to that other resource? What is its types and attributes? I think we'll move to something like a object-relational database of information, and likewise human interfaces will have to change to accomodate that.
You are already seeing it in Evolution, where a "folder" is not just a physical location, but more aptly, an aggregation of information based on a set of criteria. My "friends and family" folder shouldn't just be a physical location, it should be a conceptual location, containing all messages by, from, to, and about "friends and family". Which may also overlap with a "Recent" folder, etc.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
That's what they want you to think.
That is their patsy logo to distract you from their true plans for Linux.
Ok, so the time that it takes you me to hit ctrl-shift-x is really the same as to move over to the mouse, bring it to the left lower corner, hit the button, go up to the applications menu, then move over to the xemacs entry, and click. Right.
I'm not sure what you, or these test subjects were smoking, but the mouse is not as fast as the keyboard for doing quite a large number of tasks, application launching included.
Maybe it's faster for starting up stuff when you don't have keyboard shortcuts, but even that is questionable. I can do xemacs *.pl *.pm, then hit ctrl-x 0, then ctrl-x b addac.pl much faster than you can load it up and drag-and-drop all of those programs over, I guarantee it.
Besides, reaching for the mouse does slow you down. If your hand is already on the mouse, then maybe the times may get similar, maybe. But having to switch input devices and thus contexts is slower than not having to switch.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
Yes...Nautilus will be able to do things like that. Its not in the preview release (I think...? #1 might be). But our views are totally pluggable using Bonobo and we're writing a "shell" view that will be in whatever directory you're currently browsing. Additionally shell commands will be executable just by typing them (yes, in icon and list views). You can also select files just by typing shell globs. And hopefully when you type a command it will actually contextually be executed on whatever you have selected (optionally, of course).
:-) irc.gnome.org #nautilus...
As for running as root, that's dealt with through PAM and an already written gnome interface that prompts you for a password. We're adding that before the final release, its easy but undone. Have no fear...
If you're really interested you can help us today...Neither would be particularly difficult
-seth (seth@eazel.com)
Element 1) Pipes
Appearance) A collection of "nodes" (icons, boxes, what-have-you) which are connected by a simple line through drag-and-drop.
Okay, pipes are taken care of, now we just have redirection left, and we're done. I've only used redirection a few times, and since it's not an ingrained part of my vocabulary, I can never remember the syntax for the bloody things. However, again, if the user is only re-directing one stream, we can simply use the pipe UI. But, since it's possible to redirect more than one stream (isn't it?), we need the capability to add connection points to a "node..." which is where my ideas stop, I'm afraid. ;) Surely someone has a brilliant insight into how we can easily and intuitively add connector points. Clicking on a node and selecting a menu item is an option, yes, and should definitely be one method included. But there needs to be something more; possibly including several standard connectors for stderr, stdin, and stdout? Hmmm... I guess only one for stderr would be needed, since the others can be taken care of via pipes... assuming 'tee' is available, anyway. But, I'm ranting now, so I'll just end this here.
Methinks ANONYMOUS EMILY DICKINSON has been taking lessons from OOG OPEN SOURCE CAVEMAN.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Hi all I don't look at Slashdot that much, mainly because I get so annoyed at the largely negative postings. I mean, if you guys can't put up positive constructive comments up or contribute to projects, why don't you just say nothing? I mean, more than half of the posts here are moaning at the efforts of extremely talented coders & designers. Given the history of the people involved in this, it's very likely that these people Know What They're Doing. And what is this macho obsession with using the CLI? I'm not sure what a good definition of 'machisimo' is but I'm fairly sure that it isn't someone sitting at a computer using a CLI... Grow up guys - are you all 14 years old, or something? I mean the CLI is v. powerful & fantastic, but what's wrong with computers being made easier for the rest of the world to use? Er, weren't computers invented to make handling data easier? Some people here act like Guardians of arcane knowledge - only those who pass the initiation tests can join them. The phrase 'sad elitists' springs to mind. Some people are not interested in technology for it's own sake - they just want to use it to get things done - is there anything wrong with that? I guess I'm doing exactly the thing that I'm complaining about i.e. being negative. But I mean - grrr! Don't complain - write better software! Beta test! Document! DO something instead of moaning! I love free (GNU def of 'free')software - this movement will be a landmark event in history! Bye...
Title. Weee.
--Lenny
I'm sure everyone is tired of reading my posts...but since it doesn't feel like people who have actually tried Nautilus are posting and most Nautilus developers are asleep (for once) at 5am, here goes again.
Nautilus isn't just a fscking file manager. If it was, it wouldn't need all that dependency crap. In fact, most of those dependencies are libraries that we wrote to support Nautilus. And its not bloated. Darin Adler, our chief software architect really is the shit, you should hear the stories about him walking into companies on tours and like rewriting their code during his visit, and stuff like that. Its not bloated. This *is* the underlying architecture for GNOME 1.4. So you want your environment to be uber small? Gee...guess that 2 gig disk (maybe you actually have smaller..? but my home machine is 2 gigs) doesn't have a spare 100megs for your OPERATING ENVIRONMENT. The depencies are totally reasonable for a desktop. When you use Nautilus it *is* a big download because what you are essentially doing is downloading a preview of GNOME 1.4 on top of your old GNOME 1.2. DUH we need new libraries to be installed, if we didn't...well that would mean we hadn't written anything!
And BTW, its all componentized so you don't need to download Mozilla. That's the whole point of Nautilus... So maybe our first fscking tarball release doesn't baby you enough to tell you that, sorry...maybe it should. But this isn't release software, so its going to be a little rougher, yes!
-seth (seth@eazel.com)
Its not the Eazel logo. I work at eazel, I haven't seen that graphic except on the homepage. whatever...
-seth (seth@eazel.com)
It's on LinuxApps and freshmeat, and it's called verInfo. It lets you store all kinds of information in Linux executables (not data files), similar to what Windows version resources do, but better.
Sorry to keep re-iterating that title. I want to help inject information into the slashdot discussion so it doesn't go in circles like previous mentions of Eazel and Nautilus have. I hope that'll change now that people can actually see how Nautilus really works. (I wrote an informative response to this comment as well titled "we have fscked the filesystem" or something like that.
-seth (seth@eazel.com)
I only need one shortcut to work quickly in linux: ctrl+alt+backspace
- Everything that you like, sucks.
It's called binary, which is the only true non-metaphoric way of presenting computer data. Ascii letters are dumbed down version of binary. Hex is a dumbed down version of binary. Anything that is not displayed as 10101010101010101 is inherently a dumbed down version of binary. Unless you have 1010101010010101 flashing across your screen at all times, you've got no right to complain about metaphors, human.
In a lot of ways, I don't really think that that stuff works on the unix filesystem. Its mostly a ton of programs in the 'bin' directory, stuff in the usr and etc directories... I don't know its just not the same
Folders and docs work for your actual user files and stuff (although, most computer users don't actualy use that stuff, they throw everything on the desktop, or in a few folders)
I honestly don't see anything new this eazel stuff, It looks like the 'web-view' mode of windows 98/2000's explorer.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I agree. The benefits of Open Source software will never be realised while we have programmers with hungry egos. Sure - we _could_ just take a perfectly good file manager and devote all our time to improving it out of sight, but hey - lets start from scatch and make OUR file manager. Of course, everyone is free to do what they damn well want, but it's a bit hypocritical of Linux programmers to go around preaching about Open Source & sharing, and then go and do their own thing just like every commercial app.
The good ol' DOS program "Norton Commander" used to assist me for years.. then I was forced to use windows and looked for something similar.. The "My computer" thing and the "Explorer" was good for nothing speed-wise compared with NC. I found some NC clones for windows but they all lacked the features, the speed, and THE KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS. Then finally (after years) I found Windows Commander (at the time version 3.5 I think).. it _ruled_.. finally, I could navigate, copy, rename, view, edit, hex-dump, basically everything file-related as quick as I wanted and as quick as I could think again.. first time since the DOS-days.
:( Try hitting ENTER on a JPG file and quickly viewing it, then hitting ESC to go back, get the focus back and everything.. hitting shift-F6 to rename the file.. hmmm.. a lot faster in wincmd with acdsee32. Better example: Copying three files to the floppy disk:
For me, it comes down to NOT HAVING TO USE THE MOUSE. The mouse is **SLOW**. A filemanager correctly made (like Windows Commander) will _always_ be faster for the experienced user.
Now I have a job where I use Solaris and Linux. The Midnight Commander goes a long way, but it's not as efficient as WinCmd.
In wincmd: select them with Insert, press F5, write "A:", press ENTER.
In explorer: Click the first file, hold down Ctrl, click the second file, click the third file. Press Ctrl-C. Scroll the bar up to find the "A:" icon. Click on it. Press Ctrl-V. Might be an easier way, but I had the work done in wincmd probably before the winslows user pressed Ctrl-C!!!
Under Solaris/Linux I use bash/tcsh ALL the time for everything.. which is good and nice.. A GUI interface like Nautilus is good for the newbie user coming from windows. Look-wise, it's obviously a rip-off from explorer. If they don't put in some nice keyboard-shortcuts - in other words: if it can't be operated 100% without the mouse - it's worth next to nothing for an experienced user.
Then again, with Linux we have the choice.. if you don't like it, don't install it, don't use it.. or code what you need yourself! With Windows, you can't just say "don't install explorer - I don't want it!"
-- jaf
Just letting people know i've mirrored this for
users in Australia currently trying to get the
20M+ file (and the mozilla m17rpm). Unfortunately its only accessible within Australia and New Zealand
http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/eazel/
ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/eazel/
-jason
build from the browser(eg. mozilla) not build another filemanager which again needs browser components.
Do the browser thing yes. I agree to sun's concept; the network is the computer. but it can also be applied the other way around; the computer is the network.
My point is that we have to reckon with that it will be more common to have data distributed over networks. data at several levels of trust. some data you keep closer to heart than others.
So what I could use would be a mozilla browser which cares not whether the files are local or not. where files are presented as you see them fit.
The browser is a platform for our interface to be reckoned with, can't be news to anyone anymore. mozilla at the same time, can seriously use more improvement, so we covers multiple needs in one shot. Lets make it good. easy to use. simple. but flexible for the individualists!
Should anyone involved in userinterface design and functionality with gnome, eazel, sun be interested in more indepth ideas, mail me at: caspera@sophistic.com (no spam, thanks for understanding).
Would be if windows just dissapeared after a few minutes of dissuse. You could set something so that it would stay if you wanted it, but I always end up with tons of windows that I'm not using still open, cluttering up the taskbar.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Dave
Instead of squinting, use a large font, e.g. xterm -fn r24 Also, don't use stupid file names. No, you really don't need too.
So everybody here seem to complain without even trying the product...
> it looks as though Eazel, like many other interfaces, makes use of a single-window file browser.
[...]
There is a configuration options which permit you to use multiple windows.
I just downloaded the preview release, and Nautilus seems to be pretty slick. Eazel and the other contributors have done a lot of work in a pretty short amount of time. It even seems to be fairly stable for such an early release, though it did crash after about fifteen minutes. That said, I can't really see this replacing either emelFM or the console, which are my primary file managers.
.30 days, and I sincerely hope that Nautilus will be a worthwhile addition to the desktop. I feel, though, that without some serious consideration of the issues I wrote about above, Nautilus will just be a fancy version of Windows Explorer, when it could be something much better. Perhaps other /. readers have better ideas than my own, and we can discuss them here...
Sure, Nautilus looks really professional, and has plenty of eye- and ear-candy, but when considering functionality, how does Nautilus really benefit the user? For example, how is being able to play an mp3 right in the file manager using a bonobo component any better than just having xmms pop-up to play it? Other than just being a cool technological feat, I can't see how a component architecture is really advantageous in a file manager.
Another concern I have is speed. This release is dog-slow on my Athlon system with 160 MB of RAM. I know its not fair to reach conclusions about the finished product based on such an early release, but can we realistically expect this app to ever be blazingly fast? I'm curious about how long I will have to sit and wait while Nautilus draws the contents of a directory with a few hundred or even a few thousand files, especially with all of the content preview functionality enabled.
I guess what I want is something where I can turn off all of the extraneous stuff made to help newbies and still have a file manager with ground-breaking (dare I say innovative) features for helping me do what file managers are meant to do: manage files. With the pervasive networking, high bandwidth and gigantic hard drives that are becoming commonplace today, it's getting progressively harder to sort through the data that is available on my computer. The file manager paradigms we have now were designed for a much smaller amount of data (on both the local system and over the network). Even my $HOME directory is starting to become a tangled maze of information that is taking more and more time for me to try and keep organized. And this is on a system with a relatively sane *nix style file system structure. I shudder even to think about some large windows drives that I've seen.
Anyway, a while back on Gnotices , in another discussion on Nautilus, I brought up my thoughts on this subject, and mentioned that I thought having a filtering and querying mechanism somewhat like SQL (of course with a good GUI) would be great to help sort through large amounts of files. Someone said that there were at least tentative plans to include something like this in Nautilus eventually. I hope this comes to pass. Also, someone else said that the Linux file system was not well suited to doing this sort of database-like operation. Perhaps there are some gurus out there who can elaborate on this.
I've rambled enough here, so I'd like to end by pointing out that I don't mean this to sound too harsh towards Nautilus. I've been using GNOME off and on since the
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
--Henry David Thoreau
It cores with me. Prolly because I don't have Mozilla installed? On one reaload, I thought I was able to see "View as Core" as an option :-)
It's... It's...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Perhaps because your idea of usability and mine differ. For me, the command line *is* the usability.
Doesn't mean I as a programmer should force my version of usability on the poor users that try to grapple with my program...
(I also lament the total lack of keyboard accelerators in most of these graphical programs.)
--
--
Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.
It's a kind of despair that hits with the increasing speed of the information age.
... [i]f you want it bad enough, you'll do it.
:)
In the 1970s a fellow named Alvin Toffler predicted that, at some point, technology would advance beyond people's ability to integrate it into their day to day lives. This phenomenon was called future shock (after the name of Toffler's book) or technoshock (the name I prefer).
My parents don't suffer from technoshock, which I used to find interesting--until I realized that they know technology has left them by the wayside, they don't have a whelk's chance in a supernova of catching up, and they don't care. It's that last bit which keeps them from suffering.
Geeks and hackers don't have this luxury. If we gave up caring, we'd stop being what we are. So all we can do is grab the future by the throat and hang on for dear life.
It's hard, yeah. But take what consolation you can from the fact that everyone is in the same boat you are. I don't know a single person in the industry who doesn't find themselves overwhelmed by the rapid change of pace. Your situation is not unique.
I hope that I convey the kind of feelings that depress those of us in the early stages of learning
I've been programming in C++ for ten years, C for almost as long, UNIX for seven years. Trust me, friend; those feelings plague people no matter what their level of learning is. There isn't a single day that I come to work, look over my code and find some stupid bug, and kick myself for errors which, I tell myself, a college freshman would be bright enough to avoid.
[W]hat do you do to catch up?
... First, stop trying so hard. That's the best advice I can give anyone who's trying their best to get current with the technology curve.
You shouldn't have to try in order to get good skills. The more you try, the more you'll fail; the more you fail, the more desperate you'll become; and once you get desperate, you're not going to be much use to anyone.
Stop trying and start playing. Little kids pick up computer science faster'n you can blink, mostly because they haven't yet been brainwashed into thinking that learning has to be drudgery. Grab some code which you think is interesting; go through it to study how it works. Sooner or later you'll find something that makes you say "you know, this could be changed..."
Maybe the code is unclear; maybe there's a fencepost (off-by-one) error; maybe there's a more optimal way to solve the problem. For whatever reason, you'll find something which could be just a little better if it were changed just a little... and then change it.
One of two things will happen. Your changes will either improve the program, or it won't. If your changes improve the program, then sit back and bask in the warm glow of "I just solved a programming problem and damn I feel good". If your changes don't improve the program, don't get frustrated. This just shows that there's some subtlety here you don't understand yet.
[M]aybe it comes down to straight motivation and drive
That, too. But don't forget to have fun.
I'll get it, eventually.
I've said this more times than I can count.
Every single time--every single time--I've managed to get it. (Admittedly, getting Motif programming took me years, but I got it.) I'm certain that Linus, Miguel de Icaza, Matthias Dallheimer and Alan Cox all say "I'll get it, eventually" a lot more often than you think they do.
Good luck. And if you need help, ask for it.
This isn't the Free Software Band-Of-Thugs. This is the Free Software Community. Communities exist for mutual help and support. So don't be afraid to ask questions, even stupid ones. But the flip side is that if someone asks you questions--even stupid ones--answer them patiently, honestly and as clearly as you can.
Good luck!
Yeah, I know you can come up with some drag and popup system to handle appends. But that's not the point. You can't handle every possible command, so it would be nice to have something there for people who know what they're doing. It *IS* possible to get the benefits of a GUI and the efficiency of a CLI in one if they had this.
What if I want to remove all mp3's in the current directory? Watch me do it faster with "rm *.mp3" than you can with the mouse. And like I said, you always have the option to open up an xterm and do it, but that's an unnecessary step in my opinion.
And of course, in the "Beginner" mode of Nautilus they wouldn't have to see the shell -- perhaps Expert mode only.
Nautilus could probably be 3x faster or more when its optimized (before release). We have major algorthimic slow-downs like n^2 algorithms still in the code, but they'll all go away (and its fairly easy). We're almost to the "Feature complete" milestone, and then we'll be in hardcore performance and bugfixing mode before release. Pavel Cisler, who wrote a lot of the file stuff on BeOS (which is *FAST*, like faster than ls!) is working on Nautilus and intends to give it serious speed boosts.
-seth (seth@eazel.com)
id3 tags are in MP3 file because they're part of the MP3 file format spec. Ditto .xcf files. In order to attach similar metadata to other filetypes that don't already have metadata blocks, you need a scheme at the filesystem access level that manages and accesses a "shadow" filesystem or a database containing this data. In other words, something like the MacOS's resource forks, which have been around for over 15 years.
The problem, of course, is that the internet's file-transfer protocols like HTTP, FTP, NFS, SMB and, heck, DCC transfers over IRC, have no notion of multi-"fork" files, designed as they are around the Unix/DOS/CPM/etc. file model. This is why Mac users often user Binhex or MacBinary formats to Base64 encode files they transfer over the 'net. What's actually happening is the file itself and its resource fork (where the icons, metadata and so forth are stored) are being packaged together so that the two parts can be reconsitituted when they're received on another Mac. As the Mac world has gradually strived to interoperate better with the rest of the computing world, less and less of a file is being stored in resource forks. Where once all the bitmaps and dialogs and audio samples used by a Mac database or multimedia file might have been in the resource fork, now cross-platform compatibility has cut that back to little more than a file's icon and its mimetype.
The problem with doing this on Linux--or any Unix or on DOS and Windows, for that matter--is that the tools that read, write and move files around aren't built to accomodate multipart files, apart from limited support for things like versioning in some of the more advanced OSes.
If you want to do something like this without changing the file formats themselves, you need to start by getting down to the filesystem level so that all read and write operations also read and write the metadata, whether to a database or to parallel invisible files, transparently.
I still can't believe that they killed that thing. I was trying to buy a MessagePad 2100 on ebay the other day, and they still go for $800 or so. Can you imagine anyone buying a used Palm Pilot 3 years from now for more than $40?
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
That's nonsense. GUIs are not about simplifying common operations. There's NO RULE that says you have to sacrifice power when writing GUI applications. It is this very attitude that keeps me working in a CLI most of the time.
Seth, thanks for the response. Believe it or not, I have no particular interest in being "right" on the issue of whether or not Nautilus is revolutionary :) I'd much prefer to hear that
I'm wrong, and that the world is changing.
I don't want to go into a lengthy response, either, mainly as I'm trying desperately to get offline and onto the road, but, here are a few highlights:
Medusa sounds like a very strong direction. At the same time, I caution you to not make the same mistakes BeOS did, which is to say ignoring the work of the RDBMS industry (though I'm not a fan of RDBMSes) and, more importantly, the scads of academic work put into semantic networks. I'm not quite sure what you mean by the phrase "multi-key, semantically queried virtual filesystem". Okay, I get "virtual filesystem", and I can stab at what multi-key and semantically queried mean, but I'm not sure what precise synthesis you folks have in mind.
To clarify, since I haven't seen any good, introductory material on semantic networks for anything other than linguistic applications, I'll "drop a little science" (note, Seth, I'm not presuming that you do or do not know anything about semnets. I'm posting this for general edification.)
Semantic networks, roughly speaking, are large graph structures with bidirectional semantics applied to edges. Nodes themselves, in a "true" semnet, contain no content. Content is implied by traversing edges and "reading" the semantics in the direction of your traversal. Nodes themselves are just the connectors. However, in the "modified" semnets which most people actually use to get "real" work done, the nodes do store data, and the semantics of the edges imply metadata and (gasp!) information about the nodes and their relationship to one another.
This phrase "bidirectional semantics" has a simple meaning: meaning! An edge has a phrase describing it in one direction, and the converse of that phrase describing it in the other direction. Example "seth (is-friend-of / has-friend) tripp". Read from left to right, "seth is a friend of tripp." Read from right to left, "tripp has friend seth". Not that this does not imply anything about how seth feels about the friendship :) My offering
friendship to seth only says I'm extending a hand and
consider him a friend. If he "accepts", then we'd add
another edge between the same two nodes, with the same
semantics, but reversed direction: tripp (is-friend-of /
has-friend) seth.
This, of course, brings up the issue that there can be a plurality of edges between nodes. Thus, you can arbitrarily add lots of meaning to basic data by interrelating it with other data. Also wickedly cool is the fact that an edge itself can be treated as a node. So you can now take the edge "is-friend-of / has-friend" between seth and tripp, and mark it with edges relating it to, say, a start date (ie: the date of my peace offering :) ). Because of this,
that means it's also meaningful to have multiple edges
between the same two nodes with those edges having the same
semantics and the same direction. If you did
construct such a graph, it would presumably be because those
edges themselves were further modified by other edges
pointing out somewheres, lending the two similar edges
uniqueness by how they are modified.
The fundamental offering of a semnet is to separate content (ie: data) from position and relationship. In a semnet, position is how a node is determined to be unique in the world. There is no implicit requirement for unique data, as it will become unique by virtue of how you relate it to other data. (Of course, as implementations go, there are unique IDs generated, etc., etc., but all of this is abstracted away by the semnet engine itself, and not something you worry about when manipulating the network.)
So, to bring things back to Eazel, Nautilus, and Medusa, my argument is primarily that we need to be looking at technologies such as this (which, incidentally, is older than I am :) ) to
revolutionize the way we conceptualize the manipulation
of information. Thus the pointer to Framer-D in my original
post :)
However, I do want to point out (as if anyone's still reading) that I understand the necessary schism between revolutionary and evolutionary. Been there, done that, etc. :) My rant was written in a moment of
weakness, and I forgot my compassion for the trials of the
implementor. I believe in and have experienced the necessity of
evolutionary progress toward revolutionary goals. I, myself, am
engaged in such progress with my own projects, so I don't
begrudge you the "preview releases" and "1.0s" and so forth that
are a part of the process.
At the same time, I humbly propose that it might do Nautilus well to provide periodic "capsule overviews" (brain screenshots, if you will) of what's going on in your heads, architecturally. I realize there are mailing lists, CVS repos, etc., but (pardon my lazy ass :) ), that's an awful lot of
investment for someone who's not yet sure of where you're going,
and whether his/her energies would be best spent diving into
Nautilus or forging ahead with something else.
What I mean by this is that you should give more webshare to "open architectural process". Not that you should open up to random flaming, etc., etc., but posting summaries of what you're thinking in the loooong term, how it all fits together, etc. Documents that can be easily digested, reflected upon, and so forth. An example that springs to mind is the old XPFE / XUI stuff that the Mozilla folk wrote. Those were pretty straightforward docs that said "here's where we want to go, ultimately." As I am a critic by trade (well, consultant), I took perverse delight in printing those out and marking the hell out of them! :) Though I disagreed with things, I at least knew
what, precisely, I was disagreeing with :)
I'm bringing this up because of my aforementioned experience with the BeBox. I bought a BeBox at a time when my consultancy really couldn't afford it :) I dove into being a developer,
learning the tools, reading huge volumes of mail and newsgroup
flak, and so forth. Ultimately, I dropped my BeOS project(s)
because of a number of reasons. The one I remember most vividly,
though, was my disappointment at what they weren't
revolutionizing (see bedevtalk and comp.sys.be archives for
specifics). A lot of us poured a lot of energy and effort into
discussions about what we'd like to see, and what revolutions
were possible. To Be's credit, they listened and responded as
much as they were able, but there were some fundamental
decisions that had long since been made, and were unchangeable.
As open source projects, GNOME, HelixCode (GNOME++?), and Eazel's offerings (Nautilus and whatever else is under the covers) promise a relief from that frustration. Ultimately, if we have the source, we can go in whatever direction we like. However, we all know that, practically, that's a lot harder if the architecture is cast, and our direction(s) diverge from assumptions made by the architects. Encouraging early feedback, even if only at the 50,000 foot level, on the architecture is a good thing for a project of this magnitude and potential impact :)
I do want to set aside this paragraph to clarify what I'm saying above. There already exist mailing lists, CVS repositories, and feedback mechanisms for giving our two cents' worth to the developers. No worries there :) What does not exist (or at
least, not obviously from a casual traverse of the website) is a
low-overhead architectural primer. A tool that a person can use
to decide, fundamentally, if it's worth going any further for
them down this path. Some of us old farts feel burned by past
experiences, and don't want to slog, gung-ho and
head-first, into another mailing list and development project
without some vague idea that what's going on under the hood is
powerful mojo, and that them what runs things will listen to
carefully considered flames :)
Thanks for listening... and don't take things personally, I'm just prematurely bitter and jaded :)
Being participant of the open-source projects, I confirm this - thorough QA and attention to the "small details" is not the strongest part of Open Source (in general, there are very "polished" products too). The problem is that making all the tiny bits working 100% straight is damn boring, and the last 1% of is order of magnitude more boring. Like, you have dozens of great features waiting for you to implement them and you will spend three days trying to figure out why this Ctrl-Up-Arrow won't work with files of specific type? Not many defelopers are perfectionsts enough to do that.
But projects that have company behind them (like Eazel) should invest many effort in polishing and QA, because otherwise it will backfire monthes later and create impression of a product "nice, but not quite there". And thing thing gonna kill you - you cannot do nicer, because people already agreed you are nice, but not working with you because it's "not quite there", and movefrom there to "quite there" requires lot of effort.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
What you're describing *is* what the Nautilus architecture was designed to do! Bonobo means that we don't have to write into Nautilus the ability to handle all the myriad file types, but another goal of Nautilus is to display useful extended information about files before you open it. That means that anyone (and we might) could write a bonobo control that would plug into Nautilus and would extend the file-info about MP3s to show the id3 tags. We currently do that for images (an easy no-brainer using a pre-existing bonobo component), but the point is that all this stuff is easy for others to do, and we'll be polishing a lot more of this in before release.
:-)
BTW, what you're saying about images is pretty useless. I can see probing the ID3 tags being good...and dimensions of an image. But why do you want to see the layer numbers before opening? I mean, you could write this in, but as you said before...just launch the freaking app
-seth (seth@eazel.com)
Except when they:
And what's great about Nautilus is that it adds things that even *I* use (I've never really found much use for a graphical file manager before). In some ways, like Medusa, it adds power that the shell doesn't have...that'll put hair on your chest :-)
I'm not sure what you're trying to drive at for Nautilus. We certainly *do* use GNOME and Linux in a hardcore way. There's no way that Nautilus would port well to another non-Unix OS atm (it runs on Solaris and other Unices, and some unices like FreeBSD ports are currently in progress). Bonobo, GNOME's component architecture, means that we're totally tying into the existing GNOME components...Nautilus will be part of GNOME 1.4 (upcoming GNOME release), after all.
You have it:) It comes with Mozilla. It's called XMLTerm. It rux0rs. You can sort of swap in and out of a command-line interface. Go grab it now.
signature smigmature
- James
Try the "file" command in a shell sometime. It knows lots of stuff, including most of your examples, and a whole lot more. Put the same database into Eazel (which you can do, it's open source) and there you go. If you further allow it to choose plugins/applications based on what it figures out, it'll be exactly what you're thinking of.
If forgot about the wonderful prompt in wincmd that you can use all the time and press Ctrl-Enter to transfer the current filename to it, etc.. A brilliant idea.. Midnight Commander has it, nothing else does.. why the h*** not??? (and I'm not talking about some function you can invoke that pops up a dialog where you can enter a command line!)
-- jaf
Why don't you just rip-off apt and adjust it for slackware? I'm sure it couldn't be too difficult :)
There are also several screenshots and some nice blurbs that should make things a lot clearer. Something you can't see from the static shots is a simple yet elegant animation - as information flows between filters, the little connector lines fill up. I personally think this is an excellent GUI representation of the entire "pipe" concept, and would probably make a good starting point for someone who wanted to make a similar utility for Linix/*nix
In Windows, CTRL-Doubleclick on a folder in single-window mode to open it up in a new window.
The whole spirit of linux and unix are tools that are more powerful because they can easily be used by and with other programs.
The problem when big companies step in with major 'solutions' is that the solution could just as well be layered over any OS. If Nautilus isn't based in X, and is another layer, then there doesn't seem to be a compelling reason why it couldn't have been done on MacOS, Windows, or BeOS, except that only open source solutions provide a platform they wouldn't have to pay exhorbitant license fees to augment.
I haven't seen enough to say for sure, but so far it looks like 'bringing Linux to the masses' is just a marketing spin to make sense of creating an experimental interface system on top of a minority OS.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
But then, males would download more nuts from the Internet to claim that they have more and bigger nuts than anyone else. Hmm, have to think about that one...
--
--
The early bird catches the worm. The worm that sleeps late lives to see another day.
Thanks, I wish these undocumented features were properly documented.
Jilles
No. Because they use component.
That mean that *if* you have Mozilla,
you'll be able to browse the web using it
(in fact you're using a mozilla component using the mozilla rendering library to render web pages), as a component.
If you do not have it, it'll probably revert to gtkhtml which is a library used by a nautilus component.
For god sake, they are trying to do thing completly modular and that's nice...
For exemple, they avoid to directly link nautilus to gtkhtml but make a gtkhtml component :
this way you aren't dependant on it.
Nautilus is just dependant on standard gnome library...
It's pretty, but that's about it. Definitely a case of form over function.
The "preview your files while you're browsing them" sounds like a cool idea, but when you actually get to use it, it really doesn't do anything except slow the whole experience right down. And on this 300MHz laptop, it's SLOW.
I assume it has a built-in web browser, since it requires Mozilla (which is not in itself a bad idea), but since it doesn't appear to support proxies yet, I can't use that. Ho hum. Hey, Eazel: if you want to impress people, get your software working well, THEN work on the eye candy.
Tried it out, deleted it 10 minutes later.
I just had a go at Nautilus, and surprise, typing-the-first-few-letters-to-select works. Selecting using arrow keys works, but strangely only for up-down arrows. But scrolling to the selection doesn't work yet, which is annoying, but I'm sure it will get fixed.
yeah, or I just build my own Ultimate Commander (TM) (UC for short) from scratch...
Hasn't anyone here used Directory Opus 4.x for the Amiga? That must surely be the most popular file manager ever, and certainly the most usable. I have never found another file manager that has ever come close to it, and frankly, that surprises me. I for one am far from thrilled with these one-window icon based browsers. Or icon based anything, for that matter. In my experience, almost without exception productivity decreases as eye candy is added and bloat increases. Why does everyone imitate MS and try to make their tools impressive instead of usable? Simplicity combined with aesthetics is the way to go, IMHO. Nautilus just doesn't do anything for me. It saddens me to see so much programming effort go into tools that have a flawed premise -- and I'm not just talking Nautilus here, just look at the number of completely unusable file managers out there. Please, let's see a good, flexible multiple pane file manager with text based views soon. I just wish I had the time to do it myself.
If you ask me, I'm not sure I want to have huge icons, inline rendering of images, crazy mp3 player integration, and all that stuff. Now, something really cool, would be some sort of xml based info reporting scheme that let something like a file browser ask the program that handles the mime type of a file to give it some info about the file. Something like, mpeginfo filename.mp3 returning bitrate, length, id3 tags, etc. Or imageInfo image.xcf returning the number of layers, colour (rgb/indexed/etc), dimensions, compression ratio, etc. Then integrating that info with the file browser. I'd be into that :)
:) But I hope that people get the idea. It would amount to adding a new field for mime types - something like 'info program' or something. Then, for each mime type, a simple info gathering program could be written based on available libs. Should be fairly easy to do. I wouldnt mind seeing the rendered image, etc, if I click 'more info' or something, but the varying dimensions of images could make viewing look 'unbalanced'.
I doubt that I explained myself too well
Just look at the X/Motif popup menu handling.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
I haven't had a chance to install and look at Nautilus yet, but looking at the Nautilus web page struck me as an example of trend I really don't like. The installation instructions at http://download.eazel.com/download.html tell you to download the tarball, su to root, cd to /, and type 'tar -zxf (tarball). Not only is this a sloppy way to install software, it's also *dangerous*. One of the first things I learned as a Unix admin is "never do anything as root that you don't fully understand", and while nobody is ever 100% scrupulous about this (we've all typed 'make install' without reading the sources), there should still be an effort made for 'safe computing' - an option to run a new program safely from the user's home directory, for instance.
I spotted an even more unsettling example of this phenomenon on the Helix Gnome website the other day. The recommended install process consists of su-ing to root, then typing 'lynx -source http://url.com/ | sh'. Umm, sure, what better way to make the install process user friendly than by having you download a shell script from the net and run it as root, sight unseen.
What the hell is wrong with these people?
I agree that if Linux is going to gain popularity as a desktop platform, it needs to be made easier to use for non-technical people. But real thought needs to be given to those things that make Unix a better desktop than Windows -- mainly security and stability. Unix/Linux has held out remarkably well against the plagues of viruses, trojans, and so forth which cause problems in the Windows world. Encouraging practices like installers that unnecessarily require root access are a huge step backwards.
they tried using old tech (midnight commander), but it hasn't been a flexible code base.
I think it's something akin to the people who don't read the articles but have something to post. Sometimes this is caused by the slashdotting of the articles. Other times, and I think this is the majority of times, it's simply due to lack of time. Slashdot has so many contributors that, if someone did take the time to review the product in question (or, for that matter, read the article), they would be hard-pressed to be noticed underneath the hundreds of other posts.
That's one of the reasons I miss K5 - a smaller userbase generally meant more, and better, discussion. I still like it here, but it's hard to get a word in edgewise.
-Denor
NO! This claim is completely wrong. Please don't go around spreading such misinformation.
A brief glance at even the id3 site's own history page shows that id3 tags were created by a freelance programmer independently of the MPEG audio standard.
I hate id3 tags and do everything possible to strip them out of my own mp3 files. Yes, metadata is a thorny problem, but violating the MPEG audio standard and pretending the result is still an mp3 file is a cure worse than the disease.
I also have practical reasons for avoiding the id3 tag: most of the music I listen to is not of Western origin, and does not fit well into the Title/Artist/Genre classification system of the id3 one-trick-pony. And I'm not even getting into the problems that id3 and support programs have dealing with multi-byte charsets.
To keep this post vaguely on topic, I should point out that Eazel is working on ways to handle and present metadata without the need to break standard file format specifications. For example, take a look at the album screenshot with metadata consisting of the CD cover picture. I guarantee you that the CD cover picture is not embedded into the individual mp3 files.
Mozilla isn't going to be in the code-base or anything. Its a freaking component. And you can trivially use the GtkHTML component instead (you don't even need to download Mozilla, actually), or any other component. Or you can install *no* components (which will be shared GNOME and application wide) and browse from a standalone browser only. Bonobo (our component model) means flexibility and choice.
If you've actually tried the preview and you have any kind of feedback about Nautilus, whether bug reports, feature requests, wishlist items, etc, let us know!
You can reach the Nautilus developers on or #nautilus on irc.gnome.org. Or you can post bug reports or feature requests directly into bugzilla.eazel.com.
This is our first preview release so it is our first change to get feedback from the community. We want to know about everything you guys think can be done better.
I'm also goint to look over these comments and see if I can bring problems that users are having to the team's attention.
- Maciej Stachowiak
P.S. I wonder if this will get moderated up - actually being a developer of a product doesn't seem to count as very Informative these days!
So, let me get this straight...
:(
The pioneers of Apple, NeXT etc. throw away the rulebook and decide to revolutionise the way we use computers using Linux and X as the base.
And we get... a file browser. Can I even bring myself to say it? Yes: Explorer, guys. It looks like windows explorer. Immeasurably dissapointing.
I tell you, mobile phones, PDA's, they *own* the future. People don't even think of mobile phones as computers (mostly because they don't go wrong).
*sigh* Glad I stayed away from client side.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
I had heard that gtk was a step toward replacing X Window with ???. Don't really remember the source, and it was on Slashdot, so don't invest heavily. But it does cause me to wonder if there actually is a program (or movement) to replace X Window, and whether or not it is likely to surface more visibly in the next year or so.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You're probably aware that many of the original MacOS authors helped write Nautilus. So it should come as no surprise that all those toolbars and menus and sidebars can be globally turned off, and "always open in new window" turned on. That'll make it work almost exactly like a Mac in terms of opening new windows in a really light browsing mode. We also have a tree view like mac (with files and folders integrated).
Disclaimer: I haven't tested out the software yet.
I've recently had some discussions about the direction this stuff is going. There are different opinions on whether all the ideas are good or bad, but they all share at least one thing: They add many layers of complexity to greatly improve the *functionality* in the interface. That's really the only way apps can talk to each other the way it's promised.
I can't help but wonder, though, how is this going to run on my 133 MHz pentium? Mozilla milestones are awfully slow on my machine, and I've got a fast hard drive, lots of ram, and a T1 to the internet. Just upgrade you say. That's fine, I am getting a new machine soon anyway, but what will happen with Crusoe-based laptops or anything else which trades performance for battery-life? Will those technologies be prevented from using the new applications? Will the advancements promised in Gnome 2.0/Eazel/Nautilus and forward be confined to 1GHz Athlons or other devices conforming to Moore's Law, or can they be made to work on lower power and smaller machines?
Enjoy!
It'll be released with GNOME 1.4...since GNOME 1.4 *is* Nautilus + bugfixes. Evolution team is working hard to try and make the date, and we hope they do! ...but tenatively that'll just be sugar. Nautilus and all the new libraries (which it depends on, but are general GNOME libraries developed by HelixCode, Eazel, and Redhat) are driving the actual release date.
I see nothing here that hasn't already been done or is only unique in a minor way. If this is where Linux is going, then it will quickly become as huge and bloated as Windows. X and everything that is dependent on it needs to be dumped. I'm not advocating returning to a CLI-only interface either.
Speaking of CLI, ever notice that many Linux users feel that they have to add the "I use the CLI most of the time" disclaimer before they feel they are qualified to talk about a GUI. It's like what some people say when they talk about gay people or religion. It's one of the reasons why the Linux GUI(s) are horrid compared to commercial quality OSes. For many in the Linux community, it's shameful to use one!
"I use the CLI about 99% of the time but..."
"I'm not gay or anything but..."
"I'm not religious or anything but..."
... nothing in particular stopping you from doing all this yourself, with Easel, is there?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
It *is* all optional. Some of the options may have been missed atm, but they'll be dealt with before final release. We're all about customization :-)
Performance should be DRAMATICALLY improved in the next milestone too.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to posting before trying out the software. If you had to try out the software before posting, those of us with 56k modems or less would never get to participate - since by the time you downloaded a 20+ meg file the discussion has pretty much already happened...
ANd that's assuming it works out of the box, which Linux apps seldom do...
If it's using all the nice GNOME Bonobo stuff, then I'm sure there's a lot of nice stuff under there. However, looking at the Nautilus web page, it tells me next to nothing about what Nautilus can do. Care to enlighten me? I couldn't find anything that really made me sit back and think "wow".
As for being a hacker or not... I'm not a hardcore hacker, but I do program & administrate Unix boxes for a living. I'm not about to peruse 4MB of source code to find out what this sparsely documented file manager can actually do, though.
Maybe I'm being too harsh on it. Maybe I'm just having a bad day. Finding that I required Mozilla to get a web browser that has no proxy support probably coloured my opinion of it. I'll probably try it out again in the near future, but I'm just a bit underwhelmed at the moment.
The eyecandy is incidental...you can't see the architecture. But maybe you aren't a hacker so you won't be able to appreciate that...? There's a serious amount of really cool and flexible architecture under Nautilus. Performance will dramatically increase in the next milestone. You missed a lot of great stuff, sorry you didn't take the time to look closer...its a lot more than just eyecandy.
Its a little driven by LWE, but it coincided with a real milestone by about a week, so it made sense to do a preview release now. We'd planned to do a release in a week anyway at the end of the milestone, and we wanted to give people something to look at. Things like performance are going to see dramatic (like more than 3/4x) improvements in the next milestone.
Nautilus looked nice but when I tried to press the web search button, I got a failed assertion for mozilla. I installed galeon on two other machines and got the same error with M17. I hear all this great praise for gecko but I've yet to see anything stable from any program that uses it. To me, nautilus is just another file manager! I liked the way it renders images in the window. But if they're gonna use gecko, I suggest getting just the rendering code and throw out all the useless garbage that is mozilla!
what? this sounds like a microsoft product? sounds too bad for me. but anyway, i think the whole idea to bring linux for the masses is doomed. we only get super big apps that dumps core like ms products... like staroffice. but wait. these tools are optional! yes! let's throw a party for that! party on dudes!
ound the message used repetitively over and over still nothing grows silen
I'm following in the footsteps of an earlier poster in saying that I'm disappointed to see Apple and NeXT's best and brightest come up with... a file browser. I'm just as disappointed as I was five years ago when I signed up to be one of the first fifteen-hundred BeBox developers, after I discovered what their idea of "revolutionizing" the operating system was.
To quote Alan Cooper, from About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design:
Fundamentally, I'm a bit tired of hearing about how everyone's "revolutionizing" everything, when they're really not. Look: revolution and revolutioniz e both imply "sudden, radical, or complete change". The American colonies didn't fight the Revolutionary War to install a local king. The French Revolution wasn't so they could hire a newer, prettier cake-eater.
The file system, fundamentally, is an implementation detail. It's an artifact of how "things have always been done". It's a drag on doing real, substantive improvement to the way computers work for people. There are millions of people out there who have never used a computer, and have yet to learn. They don't need to learn what a filesystem is, or to navigate it. They need to be able to find and use the information and tools that are important to them, period.
If we truly want to revolutionize the user interface, the user experience, etc., then we really need to start with a more fundamental re-thinking of how things work. Some of the ideas Miguel de Icaza outlined in his Let's Make Unix Not Suck talk/paper are a good starting place. The universal presence of an ORB, lots of small tools cooperating via the ORB interactively, are all good kicks in the pants of the Unix mindset. But, fundamentally, that's nothing more than what Redmond is doing with COM*, etc. There's more work to be done. There's ripping out the filesystem as a mechanism for data storage and retrieval, and replacing it with a dynamic semantic network, allowing information storage and retrieval (don't confuse data and information). There's moving away from skins and into real, powerful, direct-manipulation user interfaces. For those of you that remember OS/2 and IBM's System Object Model, there was some very, very powerful technology underneath all of that! Hell, you still can't reliably drag a document over top of the printer and have it "do the right thing" in Windows or Linux like you could in OS/2. And that was CORBA all over the place, too, so there was plenty of room for those services to make their way out over the network.
Don't even get me started on package management and installation management, or system administration. Suffice it to say that very little of our technology is designed to help us achieve our goals. It's a lot of work, but this community has boundless energy, and the opportunity and environment to do things that are truly revolutionary. We revolutionized the development model, now let's revolutionize the technology.
Nonetheless, I'm pretty impressed with this thing for a preview release of version 1 software. It looks like it may surpass the Mac and Windows file browsers fairly soon...
Oh wait, I forgot, the idea of anyone using a decent GUI filemanager on Linux is just plain painful to the CLI folks. I guess all GUI development should stop so that those people aren't annoyed by the very existence of other ways of using a computer.
BTW, I love CLI, but when I want a GUI, I just use it and don't fret over the lost masculinity.
Hey eazel folks... keep up the good work!
Windows is setup so you can use the keyboard for everything as well. Its ironic that an OS witch is primarily command-line based can't be used without having the mouse plugged in (unless you don't run any kind of GUI at all, at least in any of the default distro setups I've ever tried)
I have to say I agree with the author of the thread as well. A filemanager, whoopdee whooo! Who gives a fuck, really? There are about a billion ways to manage files on Linux, and I don't need to do it that often, especially on Linux.
I guess it goes to show, just beacuse you figured out something cool, dosn't mean you'll ever be able to do think anything else up...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
That users can subclass and that can support simple messaging(a well defined interface is inherited from Object and used by all nodes on the scene).
WHY? well the advantages are obvious aren't they? In this age of always(we wish)on networking it would make sense to represent the most commonly dealt with domain objects as clearly as possible. Bruce Tognazzini made the suggestion that people ought to be first class elements of any net oriented UI. And of course if you have people they have places to go things to do people they do them with, things they need to do them, places where they can work undisturbed, places where they can choose things or make things, places to meet other people, etc, etc. until you reach a place that... well you don't really want to go there now do you?
The neat thing is that it's possible to do almost all of the messy parts in the XML layer, for which there are numerous commodity tools and libraries. It should (in theory) be crossplatform (assuming platforms are compatible to standard). ;-)
My major worry right now is whether most of the SVG clients are going to support in-picture-links as that would be the way to implement most of the method calls on objects. Greatest possible thing would be to be able to write the methods in scheme
Does anyone else get the idea when looking at Eazel's logo that the poor penguin is about to be squashed under the weight of the precipitously balanced puzzle piece? I hope it's not an allegory for Eazel's products' stability or performance.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
It's not obvious and a lot more fuss than just left clicking on it, which was my main point. In any case, your trick doesn't work on fat drives (which is where I store my mp3). So, it is THAT useless.
Jilles
I haven't tried the preview release yet because I'm at work and can't, but hopefully someone familiar enough with Nautilus can answer this.
Is there any support or capability to do complex shell operations in Nautilus? For example, in the CLI you can append two text files by typing:
% cat file1 >> file2
This is great -- appending files with very little effort, something probably not possible in Windows Explorer. Now, what I'm wondering is, how could this be done in Nautilus? Rather than trying to think up of some GUI analogy for this _specific_ operation, I think it would be best to have some kind of "shell command prompt" sitting below the GUI file listing -- where commands entered would execute with respect to the current directory in Nautilus. The listing would usually need to be refreshed after execution, too.
There's endless possibilities to this, like selecting the file icon and having it paste to the text input box, or having it pass the selected files as parameters. I can't be the first/only one who has thought of this, and I would be suprised if Nautilus didn't already support something like this. Basically, this type of thing would be preffered over opening a new xterm, cd'ing to the right directory, and doing what you want.
So is it already there with a certain option enabled, or does the capability exist through some customization/component building?
wow, I have been waiting for this release for quite a while, basically because I wasn't willing to grab the stuff from cvs to see it... the screenshots look very promising and I sure hope that the eazel guys get nautlilus "done" in time to be released with GNOME 1.4.
:) and pretty soon we'll have 3 desktop environments that offer good filebrowsers, GNOME, KDE and Enlightenment 0.17. That's what I like. I can choose.
When I first started using Linux in 1996 or so, I installed SuSE 4.4.1 and was about to puke when I saw fvwm2 appearing on the screen. Back then I used a Mac as my primary computer and there was a reason for that: the GUI was the best around. Working with Linux was awkward in the beginning, since I wasn't used to using a shell and typing in commands by hand. When GUIs for Linux became better, I bought a better Linux box and then decided to use it as my primary computer... yes, and I am used to the shell by now... I am so used to it, that I never really bother to use gmc for anything, although I must say that I find it easier to remember where what icon is than remembering names.
I like being able to choose between different ways of using my files, I can either use ls and the like, I can use gmc, that KDE filebrowser (don't use KDE, so I forgot the name...), soon I can use nautilus, or I could get the latest efm stuff from the enlightenment cvs and use that...
the idea of linux for the masses very well may fail. i don't think any of the linux companies expected to appeal to the home destop market anyway, however productivity tools like a good file browser and an office suite may just bring linux into the office space and i think that's just what they're aiming for.
I'm reminded of an old NFB film where a king decided that he didn't like the letter "E" and would have his men beat anybody who used the letter.
It's a fuzzy memory from when I was a kid, but the point stuck in my mind permanently.
Anybody know the film I'm talking about? It's animated...
IMO the whole 'folders' full of 'documents' doesn't quite do it for me. This analogy simply doesn't work in relation to a UNIX file system.
Someone needs to think of a really clever way of visualising the directory structure so that it makes sense both logically and metaphorically, hence more intuitive.
Icons and windows must die, we need a genius to create a new analogy!
GTK+ 2.0 will have the ability to draw directly into the Linux framebuffer, meaning that GTK+ apps won't need X-windows to run (potentially). It only works for single applications thus far, but it *is* very cool technology.
Just a minor nitpick :
The correct term is "metaphor" not "analogy".
- sigs are for wimps.
First of, the binary is probably not that big, because this thing is probably component based, and a some of that 20 mb's is probably nice icons too.
Besides, do you think that the file manager in Windows is any smaller, if you add upp all the components/com objects/whatever it probably requires.
And it'd be nice to do something different with devices - representing them as files is fine for console work, but when you've got a gui, try representing it as a device. Not exactly sure how - something that would make linking them to various "streams" a drag and drop kind of process. Perhaps components that can be hooked together, i dunno...
hmmm, i can see where this could take some thought...
"What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is"
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Maybe Slashdot needs a new kind of discussion where posters review product releases. How about a reverse Slashdot Interview that asks US to review a new product by day and time X, and at that time post the article to which we can post reviews or comments?
There will of course be no way to eliminate trolls, but the mod system will at least have some more-informed posts to chew on.
Does slashdot have a suggestion box? Time to hunt...
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
I havent downloaded it yet (cant) But I'm pretty sure the tarball isn't just Nautilus. Nautilus depends on a bunch of different things like GnomeVFS, Bonobo, etc. The tarball contains all its dependencies, making the package bigger. Hey, it's better than downloading all the packages separately and installing them by hand, don't you think?
-Brandon
Revolution is almost always a bad idea. Evolution, now, that tends to work a lot better. Occasionally I guess that one actually does need to cut back to the root and build up again from "scratch" (not really, but it can sure feel like that). But usually there is a way to avoid it.
... and pretty soon your shiney new windowing system starts to look pretty kludgey.
E.g.: suppose that one wanted to revolutionize the X Window system. You look at it carefully, and there's just too many things that it keeps you from doing. The whole thing is one massive kludge from start to end. You decide to begin from scratch. Well, that means redoing all the API's. And that breaks everything that used the old one. So you need some ad-hoc way to shoe-horn the old applications into your shiney new windowing system. So
The alternative approach is to start with the current system, identify one thing that you think is most important to add. Figure out how to implement it in the current system, using the best techniques that you can manage. And abstract the processes as you go. Implement high level abstractions that are passed to particular localized instantiations. (I.e. Object Oriented Design.) This retro-fitting of the new design onto the old system results in a gradual change of the structure. And it doesn't require any particular language. gtk manages to work Object Oriented Design with C (I think I've got that straight).
Evolution keeps the system working while changes are made. Behind the scenes as much as possible. Revolution is dramatic, and makes obvious changes. People frequently go for the dramatic, but it isn't always the best choice.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I think the thing to keep in mind is that you can only contribute what you can actually do. If you do not have the experience to do mime typing for gnutella now, then focus on things you can do that will increase your experience. It might be hard to let go of an idea because you don't have the time, or the skill to implement it, but it's more important to be the type of person that can come up with new ideas. Don't stress over not having the skills just yet. Also, don't think your so very far behind, it might take years to get the experience neccesary to do some of the more advanced projects, but then it is only years and they should be enjoyable if you really like this stuff.
Lastly, good ideas might be a dime a dozen but that does'nt mean you should'nt contribute them. A lot of good ideas don't get shared by people, or someone may have a good idea in general but need refinement. Just be ready to take some serious heat. OS development is not like your fathers big iron company. People are often downright cruel. Learning to fend for yourself and support your ideas is a very important part of all this, so continue to be involved.
Cheers
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
Sorry, but Nautilus is also powerful. we use userlevels to provide a way to give a dumbed-down experience, and also a powerful hacker experience. Its the first GUI filebrowser I've actually found useful except for KFM (which I used for about a year before going back to the command line after I moved to gnome...gmc sucked!).
There are lots of things you can do in Nautilus that are useful to developers and sysadmins that aren't super convenient on the command line. Usability has two aspects - dumbing down, and making it easier to get from point a to where you want to go. The first kind doesn't appeal to me either (though there's a place for it), the second helps everyone. The 2nd is definitely going into Nautilus.
ANyone try looking at Eazel's own webpages in Eazel??
m l)
Most of them are OK, but the screenshots page flashes more than a Pokemon episode. Unlike the other pages, this one was crafted in Adobe GoLive, without IMAGE width and height attributes.. as the images expand the page reflows until you think to yourself it's time to wake up the gim.. I mean bring out Netscape.
I emailed their webmaster 2 weeks ago about this, but I'd guess since the page was done by a clueless person who needs GoLive, that person must be a manager and the webmaster is afraid to approach them or edit their code w/o permission. Heh... Dilbertisms at a Linux company. (Course, I'm stretching circumstancial evidence here, but the fact is their product and Mozilla look like shit when viewing http://screenshots.eazel.com/aug-02-2000/index.ht
Because when Bonobo components start being written (when GNOME 1.4 is released in a few months and the library starts shipping with dists), bonobo will stop being transparent to the user. It'll make a wealth of new, easy to write components become available. Its said that you say that it doesn't focus on the user since Eazel employs some of the best user interface experts (can you say Macintosh? NeXT?). We're definitely user focused, sometimes I think we're too user focused ;-)
Obviously you don't understand how MIME types work on Linux. It sounds like you use a lot of Windows, because currently there is no heavily used MIME-type to application mapping. That's done by the filemanager. So *DUH* of course we're going to be giving you some defaults for that - nothing currently exists. And you'll be able to launch your MP3 files with whatever you want, Nautilus just lets you view them differently, its not an MP3 app.
Just one of the many people who have put this question out there...but.
Does ANYONE actually try software/read articles/whatever before posting here? Seems like over half of the responses in this topic are inane, given that the poster wouldn't have even posted had they gone ahead and tried the software.
At any rate, the software is quite cool, and also customizable (and pretty). As everyone should know, its not a finished product, so take what you see with a grain of salt.
Anyway, keep up the good work...its nice to see a large # of options out there.
I'm all for the G.N.O.M.E project, but I think that with Nautilus, integration is being taken much too far with Mozilla. It's almost as if Mozilla is to linux as IE is to windows. Integration is now forcing everything into one application, which makes everything that much more complicated, bloated, and stuffy.
--NovaScorpio
Matt
A Mac user berating Linux software for a lack of keyboard shortcuts. Hee-hee ! I mean, it's funny, and yet I agree completely !
I'm looking at Eazel development for quite a while now, and I think, that the Eazel Project is one of the Projects I would call Open Force. It has the possibility to blow down M$! Not because of its speed or stability, but because of all the stuff that we still miss on GNU/Linux. Ease of use, beauty and function overload. Yes, it will need faster computers with more RAM to work fast (because of MP3-Preview functions etc.), but it doesn't matter. The end-user has the money to buy new hardware. Why don't we create an Open Force Software union that is possible to break into the desktop market. There should be in: Eazel, Koffice and... any other suggestions?
It looks as though Eazel, like many other interfaces, makes use of a single-window file browser. Personally, I prefer a multi-window browser such as the current Mac Finder, in which opening a folder normally causes a new window to appear with the folder's contents in it rather than displaying the contents in the same window.
This design seems to be common in other interfaces, including Apple's new Finder in OS X, and it does seem to have its advantages - reducing screen clutter, for one. However, I find multi-window interfaces more useful to me; for example, when working with groups of files in different directories, or moving files around into different folders, it seems easier when opening a folder creates a new window.
It's worth noting that I've been a Mac user for years, and my opinion may be derived at least in part from my growing accustomed to this way of working. I'm open to the idea that a single-window browser may be a more effective interface, though I'm not especially fond of it at the moment.
The only Linux box I use regularly is a relatively slow system used primarily for server-type functions; I don't run X often, so I'm far from an expert on graphical interfaces to Linux. However, I'm curious as to whether there are any interfaces that use the same sort of multi-window design that the Mac Finder does, and why the single-window file browser seems to be more common these days.
Life is far too important to be taken seriously.
~Socks.
"In the future, we will all have our 15 minutes of privacy."
how come they don't provide installation methods for people using Slackware ? or are they assuming that since a user uses slackware, they don't need something as simple as our products.. i'm all for compiling from source.. but not when i need 25 different things.... Patrick.. please make something like apt for Slack. Will make my life soooooooooo much easier. then I'll actually be able to slack :).