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The State Of The GTK+ File Selector
Anonymous BillyGoat writes "The next stable release of GTK+ (from the 2.4x series) will have a new file selector, and of recent, a lot of activity has been going on around that. One of the GNOME artmasters, Tigert, has released a mockup of the new file selector and the GTK developers are busy working towards that. Meanwhile the people from OSNews have some other ideas, while an OSNews reader has made even better mockups."
Will the shortcuts on the left side (home, etc) be configurable? That would be one way to beat the crap out of Windows once again. On my one Windows box, I never put anything in My Documents, I keep it all elsewhere, ona FAT32 partition for dual-booting use. I'd LOVE configurable shortcuts.
You are not the customer.
I love osnews little version, with all the directories in the path displayed at the top, the idea being you could click on them to go back to that directory.
/, root)
Example:
user clicks root, stuff, music
(root, stuff, music, / appears at the top)
user decides he needs to go back to root, clicks root
(top now says:
It could really work, and be really useful.
Keep at it gnome boys!
Microsoft IIS is to webserving as KFC is to healthy eating
The problem with those mockups is that they seem specificaly tailord to GNOME. Ie it uses icons for HOME, Desktop, Most recent files etc but all of these are classic things that are integrated within gnome and no use to someone that uses blackbox or other light window managers as they're primary window manager.
Why cant we just get rid of the icons and by doing so cut down the size of the selector and simplly have a listbox of pre-defined locations to save files?
Also it would be good if that list could be changed by editing a configuration file, maybe an XML file?
KISS
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
I think the next 'evolution' for linux desktop would be the merger of browsers for local and network data.
.MAC account? Or can you upload to your web site? What about sending it as an email attachment? Or a fax.....
:)
Yes, this is like windows. But linux could do it so much better.
A truely cohesive network workstation should be able to save or open any document to or from anywhere. Appletalk shares, WebDAV, HTTP POST, FTP, rsync, etc.
So a next-generation save/open box should include comprehensive network protocol support.
Of course, any mounted file system (networked or otherwise) can easily be saved to with all current file selector dialog boxes, but can you save to your
Be was a great OS, wasn't it....
That left pane is an ugly waste of space. This is especially true under a Unix like file system, where everything is stored under "/". With that ugly left pane, you get shortcuts to "/", "~", and the ever useless "Documents" folder (I won't reduce myself to shlopping all my files into "Documents" when I already have a perfectly good home directory that I can access very quickly already).
Under Windows XP, where your home directory is usually under "C:\Documents and Settings\acct_name\My Documents", the left pane is understandable, but still ugly and wasteful of space that could be better spent putting more file icons on the screen.
Don't say that the pane is for newbies, either. The real way to help newbies is to get them to organize their files out right the first time, instead of giving them an uglier Windows.
Is a damn file selector box, where if I enter a DIRECTORY NAME into the box, and then press ENTER, it will SWITCH to that DIRECTORY, rather than giving me an error, or showing me an empty selector box that isn't pointed to anything.
That's what irks me the most. I don't care how PRETTY the damn thing is.
I can't even make out what the hell half the controls on those mockups ARE...
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
I've been watching XFCE for a short while, and it looks like a superb light-to-medium-weight desktop environment. Its toolkit is GTK2, so you can use a lot of the existing GTK2 themes out there. As for the window manager, it's not Metacity or Sawfish (the two popular GNOME window managers), but it has a window manager of its own that is apparently fairly skinnable. The dock reminds me of CDE or OS/2 Warp, and I remember Warp's dock being very nice. Way back in 1995... wow, that was ages ago.
I haven't installed it myself, but I really want to give it a spin as soon as I fire up Linux again.
Standing at the very edge of my imagination, I peered into the inky void and realised -- I couldn't think up a new sig.
"desktop paradigm"?
That should earn you a score of:
-1 Astroturfing PR-nitwit.
About the "windows bad" vs. "reusing windows ideas good" issue; no there is no problem here, windows does suck major ass, but there are some good ideas in there that are worth reusing.
The biggest problem with windows is not that it's badly designed nor that it's badby implemented (it's both), but that it's non-free, reimplementing features in free software thus fixes the biggest problem with windows.
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
i don't mean point-and-click and drag-and-drop interfaces suck, i just mean: why the mainstream open source desktop environments try to mock the mainstream commercial desktops? why command line and desktop are kept two separate worlds? why <TAB> serves absolutelly different functions in command line and GUI?
i dream about the day when using desktop applications will be as intuitive for a command line user as for somebody whose right hand seldom leaves the mouse. as for now i often feel trapped when i have to use another GUI application [for example using mozilla at the moment. why can't i maximize this text field? because i can't do that in IE?]
Look at
i ze /92.png
http://www.kde.org/screenshots/images/3.1/fulls
For KDE 3.1.x file selector screenshot. I prefer KDE version much more than the proposed GTK+ variants for the following reasons:
1) Preview that works fast and well. The previews for text, ps, pdf, jpeg, gifs etc. are very fast and very readable (even for texts). Also, almost all filetypes that I have run across are "previable".
2) Back/Forward arrows. I wonder how come they are not there in Gnome mock-ups. They have proven to me to be very very useful.
3) Network integration.
4) Icons/Look very well integrated with the rest of the KDE applications. For example, up/back/forward actions use the same icons as in the konqueror browswer.
In the mockups, there's a arrowed list of each component in your current path. "/" should always be present in the list and not findable only after multiple left arrow pressings.
An On
The problem with those mockups is that they seem specificaly tailord to GNOME. Ie it uses icons for HOME, Desktop, Most recent files etc but all of these are classic things that are integrated within gnome and no use to someone that uses blackbox or other light window managers as they're primary window manager.
Why cant we just get rid of the icons and by doing so cut down the size of the selector and simplly have a listbox of pre-defined locations to save files?
Also it would be good if that list could be changed by editing a configuration file, maybe an XML file?
> Open Source isn't about innovation - it's about copying... no driving force except playing catch up.
Its true, OSS doesn't have much of an R&D budget.
But our code is more solid and most of all, free and open. Therin lies the main attraction.
The unofficial
The whole "Locations" column is redundant once you've started selecting a file.
Let's see some long filenames and long pathnames in those mockups, and see how it holds up. The example has no scrollbars. That's unrealistic.
Why do we have "full screen", "minimize", and "close" options on a dialog box? Note that the "Cancel" and "close" buttons typically do the same thing.
I design user interfaces for a free network management application,
KDE1 did true network transparency first.
ever since KDE1, any kde app can read/write files in any app in a network-transparent manner, using not just ftp://, but also sftp://, smb://, http://, and several others -- just prefix the filename with the correct URL prefix and it just works.
try doing that in notepad, or even window explorer for that matter.
Ah, the eternal C vs. C++ flamewar. I've been somewhat of a C++ fan, actually learning C++ before C when I started learning about programming a long time ago. But lately I've been gravitating towards C, primarily because of its simplicity. Rob Pike (one of the creators of Plan 9) summarized C++ quite well with "it's a very difficult, tricky, special-case-ridden language that takes taste and experience to use well.". E.g. take a look at gotw.ca (Herb Sutters website) for a large bunch of situations where C++ manages to bite your ass, in quite non-obvious ways.
Now, on to GUI programming. If there is one area where OO programming languages shines, it's GUI programming. I'm personally not very much in love with doing OO programming with C, GTK-style. What I prefer is using a high level language with bindings to a GUI toolkit, my personal favourite being python and the wxpython bindings to the wxwindows toolkit.
While python as a (bytecode)-interpreted language is slow compared to C/C++, performance of a GUI app doesn't suck that much because much of the prosessing is done in the C/C++ layers beneath your own code.
And if performance is a problem, it's easy to code that part as an extension with C and call it via python (SWIG is very helpful here). This is, IMHO, a very powerful approach to develop many kinds of applications, i.e. code the majority of the program in python, while the parts that are critical to performance (if any) are done in C and then use SWIG to make the C code callable from python.
It would make more sense IMHO to abolish file selectors altogether and instead throw users into their preferred file manager for opening files. All it would need is a freedesktop.org standard protocol for file manager/application interaction and perhaps a $FILEMANAGER environment variable. (Theoretically, $FILEMANAGER could then also be a shell in a terminal.)
-F
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
And of course the idea of transparent terminals is sooooooooo original and unique that Apple would never be able to come up with that when the OSS people hadn't.
Just wondering, are you also angry with Apple because they "copied" the Terminal itself, or maybe the command line? Or maybe because they also have a Unix-like filesystem?
An interface designed for DnD saving will not encourage maximised windows, or it will let you use a panel/taskbar-with-shortcuts-to-folders. ROX does both.
Look out!
... that *no* industry is about innovation, but playing catch-up. GM/Vauxhall/Opel are touting headlights that swivel as you turn corners as a great new thing, but that's just playing catch-up to Citroen who had those on the DS nearly 40 years ago. Likewise varipower steering - ancient French technology. Or what about BMW, with paddle-change gearboxes where you select the gear with the paddles, then press a button to engage it? That's just playing catch-up to the Wilson Preselector gearbox, found in 1930s Wolsley and Frazer-Nash cars.
I honestly don't know what kind of hardware you run, but on my P4 2.4Ghz, KDE is lightening fast. If the whole KDE system takes up 3GB of disk space on my dual 320GB system, who cares?
:)
I've heard this bloat and speed thingy about KDE and Gnome for years, but I have never experienced it myself! I have also used XFCE4 a lot, but it lacks all of the little things I use from KDE.
Another argument is the startup time of KDE (Gnome), but i don't care if it takes 1 second or 30 seconds, I normally only start the GUI every time I need to boot into a new kernel, so it is not an issue.
I think it is just the new and 1337 thing to call everything but the most uber-cool and geeky WM for bloated and slow. Pay no attention to these fools
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
i photoshop user interfaces all day, so forgive me for not having the energy for visually articulating this idea...
the idea was inspired by Suggestion 3. if you go and read the discussion thread about this, the idea was actually to implement a FILTER rather than a SEARCH. i find this articulation a bit silly really because SEARCH implies a global search not a filter.. which made me think:
if you had a really simple dialog box that had a search capability you could just start typing in "hilton pari". in the background one just interrogates the slocate database and starts to put all items that start with "hilto..." in a list view below. the list view should display the parent folder of that element with a hyperlink/expander of sorts to illustrate the full path to that file.
furthermore if you abstracted this functionality, you could offer the same global search capabilities across filenames in the "recent documents" interface. so this would extend the search boundary to elements that are possibly not in your slocate database (SMB shared docs for example).
there would still be browing capabilities to allow users to do regular browsing of CD, Network etc... but i just thought this would be a highly Googleian way of opening files.
Please dont have a default dialog that encourages devepers to add lots of extra widgets.
I predict it will get very ugly very fast.
Huge cluttered dialogs here we come.
I stongly believe there should be an options button at the bottom of the dialog to take users to a seperate window for toggline all sorts of extra settings and that developers should as much as possible avoid cluttering the dialog and instead aim for clarity and simplicity.
I have to admit, I've never seen it and I follow Gnome (and to a slightly lesser extent KDE) closely. I see far more anti-C antagonism from the KDE/Qt crowd than anti-C++ antagonism from Gnome/GTK. In fact the GTK developers have even said that if you use GTK for a big project you probably shouldn't be using C.
Of course, C++ bindings are available for GTK. But who will use them if there is an a priori hatred for the language? Do you see my point now?
No, I don't. In fact GTKmm is used plenty - often by in house commercial projects. See the gtk.org success stories - many of them are based on GTKmm. I've never seen people flaming GTKmm because it's C++, in fact.
A huge issue is generic programming. Few people understand the boon of the STL until they use it. And home-grown generic templates are unbelievably useful as well.
Templates have costs and they have benefits, same as anything else. The costs are obvious - fewer people understand them, and being basically a textual hack when they go wrong the error messages have to be seen to be believed. The benefits can sometimes (often, perhaps) outweigh those costs.
I can't specialise on structures written in C, a real strength of KDE/Qt.
I really think you should check out GObject. It's a light year from being just "structures in C". In particular GObject has things signals and reflection. It was designed with object orientation in mind, and as such wrappers like GTKmm can do a good job.
Sorry. GTK is used in VMWare, and so far as I know, that's the only commercial app on earth that uses it
Then I'm afraid you are seriously misinformed and I see no reason to take you seriously. See the gtk.org success stories page, they are almost entirely commercial/proprietary software developers.
I have seen it happen many times - people who are scared by OOP, defensive about their lack of knowledge, and maintaining that C is perfect for everything, when Python, Java, or C++ are better fits.
I hope that comment isn't targetted at me. I've written plenty of OOP code in my time, in a variety of languages. I'm certainly not "scared" of it. I've written bindings from Delphi (which has a pretty clean object model) to Python. I've written Java class frameworks. I've implemented parts of COM (though whether that's object oriented is highly arguable). Object models are in interest of mine - I can argue with you about the merits of CORBA vs GObject vs [D]COM vs .NET vs native C++ all day.
What I am pointing out is that your blanket assertion that anybody who doesn't use C++ or Qt is "irrational and emotional" is pure zealotry - the real world is simply not that black and white. Why do you think so much software is written in Visual Basic? Because of its merits as a language? I think not.
No offense, but I get the feeling you write code as a hobby, not for a living. You have all the time in the world to plink away at your little projects. I don't want to belittle your efforts, but please get real.
Then your feelings are as incorrect as your beliefs. I've worked for my countries Ministry of Defence (Java, C, XML and relational databases, webapp development), I've contracted (Delphi) and I've been paid freelance to do free software. I've worked the span from education software for preschool kids to reverse engineering DCOM. I would have done more but I'm 19 and simply haven't had the time.
In the case of much Linux software development, C is a popular choice because lots of people are very familiar with it, and that's more valuable than being able to play with functors. If you want to of course, GTKmm lets you do that: the interfaces to (for instance) the tree view are designed to strongly resemble the STL.