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Building Nautilus: Behind The Scenes

Posted by timothy on from the lookin'-forward-to-mandrake-9-with-this-and-2.6;) dept.

mholve points to this LinuxPlanet feature titled "A Sneak Peek at Nautilus from Eazel." Despite that title, it's not just a collection of bulleted feature lists and screen shots. Instead, it's a nicely balanced, in-depth look at the thought process behind the creation of Nautilus as well as a description and critique of the current preview. The article raises some interesting points about the complications that Eazel has found in trying to make Nautilus distribution-neutral: "In the future, I think we're going to have to look for a way to abstract the package system much in the same way we've abstracted the file system," [Darin Adler, Eazel software engineering honcho] allows. In addition, he notes that the diversity found in other areas of Linux distributions presents a daily challenge: "We try to get weirdnesses out of our code as much as possible, when we discover we've accidentally done something distribution-specific, we try to 'unweird it.'"

1 of 84 comments (clear)

  1. I'm still mixed on this... by Millennium · · Score: 5

    Nautilus is certainly a fine tool, and a very good copy of Microsoft's IE-integrated file manager. But even the best copies of a bad interface are still bad interfaces. There is no need for quite a few of Nautilus' features. Foremost among these if the integrated Web browser (Konqueror is guilty of this too). A file manager is for managing files. A Web browser is for viewing files. To integrate the two is to create confusion, because you have the same app doing entirely different things (remember the OSX Dock, both an app launcher and task switcher? Same basic problem, though the purposes it serves are different).

    Gnome doesn't need The App That Does Everything (neither does KDE, for that matter). All that does is lead to bloat, redundant apps on a system, and confusion for new users.

    The Win/IE filemanager does have a few strengths, but these can be gained without bloating the filemanager itself. For example, the ability to show file information in a sidebar, rather than pulling up a new window for it. OSX's Finder can do this without the need to throw a browser in. The ability to navigate a filesystem using buttons in the toolbar is a Good Thing (particularly if you use only one window for file browsing), but you don't need a whole browser to do that (OSX's Finder, however, does this one very poorly; just a Back button which runs totally counter to the column-view paradigm).

    I'm not trying to bash Gnome or KDE. I'm just pointing out that they're making quite a few of the same interface mistakes Microsoft made, and it'll only hurt them in the end.
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