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Sun Announces It Will Ship Solaris With Eazel
miester writes: "Sun has recently announced that it will take advantage of Eazel's Nautilus software. The article also mentions that Dell has invested in Eazel and will be shipping all Dell Linux workstations with Nautilus as well." The Nautilus previews have been slick and pretty -- you can tell that the Mac folks involved haven't lost their touch. And more hardware vendors installing a nice Open Source file manager can only be good for users.
Why is a file manager with huge shaded icons, that use up loads of colors and make it harder to see the filename, better?
When the web first got going properly there were loads of horrific web sites featuring uber-graphic-design that made it really difficult to actually get at the information. Most of them died a death - nowdays we have things that are a lot cleaner, simpler and easier to use (like slashdot).
As technology becomes a familiar tool - rather than an exciting new thing to play with as well as use, it gets more and more boring. As it should - fading into the background to just do its job, rather than existing up front, to be looked at and impressed by.
I suspect, that, just as people turn off all the anoying sounds associated with a window manager, until there's just a beep for errors (usually), people using a filemanager such as Nautilus, or KFM, will shrink the icons and make them less 'attractive' until they have a minimal, functional tool that doesn't take up more real estate or perceptual space than it needs to.
Actually - this is probably wrong. Most users will just say 'I don't like it, it doesn't feel right', and turn to something else...
The Nautilus previews have been slick and pretty -- you can tell that the Mac folks involved haven't lost their touch.
I must be missing something, because all I see in the screenshots are pictures of a green-themed Internet Explorer with improved file icons being used to navigate the directory structure.
This has been available on PCs since Win95.
Most people don't use this mode, though, because the typical browser is a bad interface choice for system & file operations.
I'm guessing that the Nautilus team is composed solely of ex-Apple graphic designers and doesn't include any user-interface experts.
Maybe I'm just being cranky, but these screenshots are singularly uninspiring. I dare say if the MS folks announced this as the foundation of their next-gen GUI, they'd be laughed off the stage.
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D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
A GUI is more than a file manager it's more than a desktop. It's a way work can be done. It's more than drag n drop. It's more than scripting. It's more than application communication services. Look at Windows. Each feature by itself is not problemmatic. How they interact with each other is the problem. I have a Windows. I'm write this on it. It's internet service is provide via PPP shared by natd on MacOS X PB. I can tell you this. MacOS X may not have an Apple menu (which most users don't ever use anyways), or an Application menu, but all the elements of a good GUI are there. Everything flows. I have yet to see a SINGLE error message. It's been on for 65 days. Daily use. Everything behaves EXACTLY like it did in MacOS 9 (with the exception that in the PB Bluebox isn't so transparent with copy/paste drag/drop). From what I've seen of what Eazel is doing, it's better than Gnome, but it isn't a MacOS yet. Mac users aren't going to switch to Linux when MacOS X PB is more usefull than RedHat7 and still much easier to use than Windows, and most likely Nautilus 1.0.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Does anyone think that Nautilus might be taking away from the MacOS crowd when it goes mainstream (eventually)? After all, you have a pretty nice GUI, plus Apple is really confusing people w/ the interface for OS X to the point that even the beta testers are modifying it. Perhaps Mac is putting itself into a very uncomfortable place. (What, like the backseat of a Volkswagon?)
-Mr. Fusion
I quite agree. Whatever happened to the Bauhaus principle of 'form follows function?'.
I think this point is really important, it disturbes me the way things are going.
Surely, the point of a GUI front ent to an OS is:
i) to give you the relevant information quickly, efficiently and as unobtrusively as possible.
ii) to let you navigate the data and apps to get the job done as easily as you can.
This sounds to me exactly the same demands placed on the signs we take for granted in metros and streets. Taking Harry Beck's fantastic, London Underground map as an example, it takes the complex tangled mess of underground lines and represents it with a clean and simple diagram. Sans serif fonts, no complex shading, straight lines and a complete lack of unnecessary clutter.
The same is true for road signs and the direction signs around public spaces. No beautifully shaded pictures of toilets or telephones, just a few distilled strokes that are enough to clearly represent the concept. I dread to think how many more people would die in fires if these simple design principles weren't stuck to by the graphic designers responsible for 'Fire-Exit' signs...
I use SPARC/Solaris as my primary development setup. While I prefer the setup in Linux, thye development tools are still much better under Solaris (though Linux is gaining ground); for example, dbx under Solaris runs circles around gdb. There are also some commercial/legacy things that come with it that aren't as simple to set up under an open source environment (e.g., Display Postscript, Motif, etc.). Lots of the APIs and the like are also better documented (see the Linker and Libraries guide). New Java VMs are also released more quickly. And, best of all, it is close enough to Linux, etc. that porting is trivial.
Unfortunately, Sun has really flubbed the default interface. There is an odd melange of CDE-style tools and ugly Openlook stuff that makes lots of assuptions about how you have your window manager set up and whose mouse controls and menus work differently than every other UI package in the world. To make it usable, you have to strip it of all that stuff and build the various programs that your typical Linux distro sets up (fvwm2, etc.) If Sun has come to its senses and has realized that rather than making embarassing attempts at UI, it should just outsource the job to someone who cares, the difference will become even more transparent.
Every commercial UNIX I go to, I always have to compile bash and tar and grep and all those other goodies because the old UNIX equivalents of those programs invariably have fewer features and more bugs. Dump everything but the Solaris kernel and possibly the compiler and you'll have a great UNIX. Of course, the FSF will make you change the name to Gnu/Solaris, but it's a small price to pay.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
OK, first the price. I should have been clear that that $175 was in local currency (Canadian dollars). $75 + shipping + GST + duty comes out to very very close to $175. (I think it was $172 and change)
And you must have a different meaning of free than I do. The right to use it on up to eight processor machines is free. There is no licensing fee for those computers. Sun throws the word "FREE!!!" around their site like popcorn, and yet you can't actually install it unless _you_ own the media. Can't borrow it from a friend, don't forget--that's a violation of the license agreement.
Believe me, I've read the FAQ.
For the record, I'm not running it on my own machines, legally or illegally. Once I get the console wired up, I'll be installing NetBSD until I acquire a legal copy of Solaris 8.
As for the six CDs of junk, they're junk. Why would I want to pay for a CD containing an OLD VERSION of a (crappy!) office suite? Besides, everything on those CDs is available for free and unrestricted download from one site or another. I've got the docs I need, I don't need a demo of Oracle 8i, and I will suffer through thumbscrews before using StarOffice 5.x (especially 5.1!) again.
My point is that it's a lot more expensive to get Solaris now that the license is free than it was when companies had to pay big bucks ($500--not that big!) for the license. Furthermore, claiming that the cost of the media is $75 is absurd. If they'd just be honest and say, "for a moderate fee" or the like, then I'd be happier.
Also, they've been promising a download option RSN, for about three months.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Looking at what's happening to tech stocks, I predict that Sun will have a new slogan very soon...
"Watch these suckers jump when I get root." - l33t j03
Call me an old curmudgeon if you will, and I won't necessarily deny it. However...
When is Sun going to get off their asses and allow Solaris to be downloaded, as they've been promising for months now? I know all about the 'free binary license' as long as you buy the media for $75USD plus shipping and handling. Up north of the US border, that amounts to about $175 by the time it gets to my door. That's a lot of money for a free OS on 2 CDs plus 6 CDs worth of junk that I don't want. Not bad for work, admittedly, but for my Sparc at home it's just silly, and a long ways from "FREE!!!"
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban