Latest Eazel Screenshots 238
Soko writes: "Anybody want to see some screen shots of Nautilus, from Eazel? Cool." Check out the rest of the directory images -- the evolution of what's going on inside there is pretty cool to see.
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GREAT MOMENTS IN HISTORY (#7): April 2, 1751 Issac Newton becomes discouraged when he falls up a flight of stairs.
Re:What, is Windows the pinnacle of GUI evolution? (Score:1)
Re:sort of off-topic but.. (Score:2)
I like my GUI. Writing a loop requires thinking, even if it doesn't require very much. I don't own a computer so that I can waste all my brain power telling it what to do in precise terms. I own a computer so that it can do some of my thinking for me.
Re:In Response to the flames (Score:1)
Re:AND METALLICA TOO (Score:1)
Re:MS not innovative? Not likely! (Score:2)
Hypertext links are more like the "soft" symbolic of a Unix filesystem. The inability to distinguish files and links is a real confusion that MS has perpetuated upon users.
Putting it another way, I can design a webpage to look exactly like a file browser, so that the IE user is fooled into thinking he is in filebrowsing mode. But, as soon as he tries to do something like rename a file, the reality of what he is doing manifests itself. Files and hypertext links have different properties, and should not be the same!
Re:acme - was Re:what's so great about this? (Score:1)
Re:Perhaps I should clarify (Score:1)
original replier was irritated that this would
break unix filesystem expectations... That is
probably a legitimate point, but some OS's like
NeXTStep used symlinks so they could (sort of)
have both. OTOH, it is pretty ugly what they
did.
WRT config files, well, naturally apps should
just look in ~/.appname(rc?)
That is, look in the user's home directory for
a dotfile. The app choses the particular name for
the dotfile (sometimes dot-directory for apps with
many config things, like netscape), and that's
usually mentioned in the manpage of the app.
Global config stuff, if there is any, probably
belongs in
Re:Absolutely right! (Score:1)
Things like this have no room for negotiation in a UI. They're parts of Unix that'll never be rid of. When I compute in just about any Unix, I use Unix, not $WINDOW_MANAGER ... I'd get nowhere without fiendish programs like /bin/sh (be it bash or POSIX) and /bin/ksh, whereas the only thing from $WINDOW_MANAGER I may use, and it's not even a part of it, is {x,a,w,E,dt}term
I don't mind a UI trying to mask these things away, but depriving any of what CLI folks expect in the process is the Wrong Thing. lose lose
(all of this has been my diatribe... uh, I mean, my opinion)
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Re:They've got one thing right - integration (Score:1)
I think Microsoft deserves a lot of credit for actually making the web browser / file manager concept work. But I still remember reading Marc Andreasson (sp?) talking about "the browser is the new os" while MS was still pushing MSN.
-rt-
Re:sort of off-topic but.. (Score:1)
beating them at their own game (Score:2)
None of this has anything to do with real "innovation" anyway. The resemblance between the UIs may make users feel warm and fuzzy, but it hardly represents any kind of technological advance. And Microsoft copied this particular feature from others anyway.
As an open source alternative to Windows, Eazel seems to be going in the right direction: make everything as familiar to Windows users as possible but try to enhance the usability incrementally. From a technological point of view, I have to admit to a certain disappointment, however: there are a lot of nifty things they could have done with a new UI.
Drag and drop - a quick comment (Score:2)
Just because the apps don't support it, doesn't mean the support in the widget sets isn't there - a lot of apps that probably should recognize DnD don't, but (at least in GTK+, and from the look of it, in Qt 2.x/KDE) it's not a huge undertaking to add DnD support in apps where it would be relevant. (Wish some coders would read the widget-set docs more... of course, it'd be nice if someone would finish the GTK+ API docs.)
Mirror (Score:1)
Enjoy! There will be more to some soon.
Anthony
Counterpoint (Score:2)
> shell along the lines of gmc on steriods.
Nautilus is actualy going to be pretty innovative (or at least will combine innovative features from other systems
> Take the new nVidia kernel driver.
Take my new nVidia kernel driver. Please.
Seriously. If nVidia makes it that hard to install their hardware, shame on them, and shame on you for buying their stuff. I don't think it's really fair to blame Linux as a platform for a vendor's packaging problems. Normally all it takes to load drivers is a "modprobe driverfile", right? Personally, if a vendor makes it hard for me to install their crap, I won't buy it.
As far as system configuration is concerned, Nautilus is going to have some sort of a GUI-driven interface for viewing (and editing?) a system's hardware configuration. It looks kinda like Windows' system device tree on steroids, but I haven't personally played with it, so I'll shut up know.
> They just don't get it.
PS: Some (many?) of them don't, but enough of them do. I think we'll learn not to underestimate these folks...
Interesting Similarity (Score:1)
Is having a web browswer (or at least web-like functionality) apart of the operating system or user interface such a bad thing? Is it only bad when evil empires (i.e. Microsoft) do it? But, I'm assuming it's alright when freedom (i.e. open source) does it.
Is this a double standard? Just wondering.
A Total Disappointment. Eazel Doesn't Get It. (Score:2)
rip-off of an already bad Windows Explorer.
You all know what the number one problem with
Linux is? X-Windows and its lame-ass inability
to anti-alias fonts. No matter what you build
in X, it will look like crap. And it will be
slower than it should be.
As much as Microsoft sucks, their fonts look
nice. And Apple's new display system for OS X
looks just plain awesome. Linux will only get
further and further behind until the burden of
X is lifted.
Yeah, I know, ditching X means re-writing all
of your programs. Too bad. It needs to be done.
And *some* kind of application UI standardization
must emerge or the masses will never be able
to make sense of things. Limited UI options
actually make Windows and MacOS easier to use!
All is not lost. Even though we open-source
folk are much better at copying than innovating,
maybe we'll copy Apple's OS X display system.
Re:Design (Score:1)
You know... I heard about this same problem during the Microsoft thing. Something about Microsoft not being supposed to have 'system-wide consistency', and being able to let vendors mangle the system in any way they wish. Good thing the DOJ has shown that Mac and Linux users don't exist (so that Microsoft has a monopoly, of course).
OS X won't run X apps natively?
I think he meant X11 Apps.
Re:MS not innovative? Not likely! (Score:1)
One area I don't fault MS in is how innovative many of their products are. People complain about them being a monopoly and then go on to imply it is soley because the people who head the company and determine corporate strategies are rat bastards. They may be bastards, but in many cases their dominance of a market segment is due to the lack of worthy competition. Years ago Wordperfect was the dominant word processor. Before that it was Wordstar. Wordstar is a fossil and Wordperfect an also ran. Lotus-123 used to be the dominant spreadsheet. But then IBM bought the company (for notes) and 123 is almost forgotten. Meanwhile MS was actively promoting its office products every step of the way while working to recruit and cultivate the best talent they could find to push the products forward technologically.
So what do you have? A computer software industry dominated by the rat bastards who run a company whose products are boldy concieved, if not always well executed.
But many members of the "Brotherhood of the Penguin" like to pretend that MS does none of these things. That MS's software sucks in every way blah, blah, blah. If it sucked that bad, they wouldn't have the market position they do. Their software is hardly the best around, but it is good enough to get by. Products with the most technical merit aren't the ones that necessarily win. Ask Sony, they'll tell you a hell of a story about something called Betamax.
If linux is to "win," it will have to be more than just better than other products. It will have to offer something that other products don't. Something that is important enough to potential customers that it alone would encourage them to buy. Being better in some obscure way that only matters to hackers like us won't cut it. Hackers don't define the market like we used to. Nowadays it is the mom and pop types that make up most of the users. Those are the people who we have to cater to if linux is to be more than another server room curiosity.
Lee
Re:EFM is better (Score:1)
you babble to much... (Score:1)
maybe you should write your own graphical interface if you dont like the current ones. the source is there. and if you dont want a graphical interface dont use it. no one is forcing you to.
"The importance of using technology in the right way has never been more clear." [microsoft.com]
Re:what's so great about this? (Score:1)
Also recommended, if you have a keyboard with winkeys (I don't anymore, but I used to) is WinKey, which allows you to map programs to winkey combinations. WinKey is here [copernic.com].
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Re:It Lives! (Score:1)
Yeah, but if MacOS displayed a black hole iff removable media were present, and you ejected such media by throwing them in the black hole, that would make a heck of a lot more sense then ejecting them by throwing them away.
Aqua isn't necessarily good HCI (Score:2)
But there are several problems with it.
1. It's not going to be a lot of fun for colourblind people, or people on monochrome displays (yes, they do still exist).
2. Just using colour for the window gadgets isn't intuitive - there are *no* visual cues to tell you what gadget does what.
3. It's very busy to look at - that slightly grooved appearance that the window background makes the overall thing look fussy, and therefore it's harder to pick out what it is you're actually supposed to be looking for.
That said, it's definitely a step forward. I'd be interested to see what J. Random User thinks of it once it gets out there into the land of The Public.
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I dunno about the creeps here but... (Score:1)
i think GNOME is doing a kick ass job lately, especially with the 1.2 release. i used to be a KDE user but i converted to gnome shorty after 1.2 came out. though i am also a Window Maker user, i appreciate the differences between the two environments. however they were built for different uses and i dont think its fair to comapre the two.
in closing, its always nice to see the linux community ganging up and bashing upon a new project (not even in alpha stage). its so nice to have pride in the community when they act so impulsive and with out anything but a selfish opinion based on a few crummy screen shots. if this is a trend we are going to see more of then pre-install windows on my PC and drop me out of college.
"The importance of using technology in the right way has never been more clear." [microsoft.com]
Re:sort of off-topic but.. (Score:1)
Or, just highlight and smack ye olde enter key.
-- --
Stay Tuned Next Week For...
The Adventures of Open Souce Man!
Re:Ease of Use. (Score:1)
You know, there are a lot of things besides hardware drivers. I use Linux for Real Work (TM) for years, and I never had to upgrade hardware driver. That's because I don't need it to play with latest nVidia card, I need it to do real work - write programs. For this, two years old ATI/Matrox/whatever is good enough, and Linux supposrt them like charm. If fact, I had much more problems with NT on drivers that with Linux. And definitley I'd give all latest 3D support for one good office app on Linux. Here is where we need real work to be done. 3D is for toys (or high-end CADing, which is another story) and office apps are for work.
So, if you want to use cutting-enge 3D-graphics toys, you'd have to compile. But if you are using computer as a tool for work, as opposed to playing with lastest-and-greatest gadgets, best chances are you'll never need to upgrade.
As for not knowing too to handle ipchains, I'll tell you about one for free - gfcc. There are at least five more I tried, this came out as a winner. Too bad linux.com people don't know about it, but that's not Linux's fault. That's their fault - they don't know their tools, shame on them.
Re:Ease of Use. (Score:2)
years, and I never had to upgrade hardware driver.
>>>>>
If you've never had to upgrade the hardware driver, then you are a dinosaur to say the least. Do you care at all for taking full advantage of your hardware?
That's because I don't need it to play with latest
nVidia card, I need it to do real work - write programs. For this, two years old ATI/Matrox/
whatever is good enough, and Linux supposrt them like charm. If fact, I had much more problems
with NT on drivers that with Linux. And definitley I'd give all latest 3D support for one good office
app on Linux.
>>>>>
Well, that's you isn't it? Being a student, I don't get paid for my work, but I do real work too. I develop OpenGL programs. I mess around with graphics programs. I write graphics libraries. Key work here, "graphics." There is more to life than database engines and POSIX code. Are you saying that 3D modeling isn't real work? The Pixar guys will have your ass on a stick! Coming from someone who is statisfied with a moldy old Matrox card, what does your opinion matter to what I'm talking about? Home users upgrade reletivly often, gamers play a very large role in that market, and people install new types of hardware quite often. As a programmer who obviously doesn't do any graphics work, your experience has no relation to any of this.
Here is where we need real work to be done. 3D is for toys (or high-end CADing,
which is another story) and office apps are for work.
>>>>>
Bull shit. Utter bullshit. Sit there happy with your database engines and your programs that calculate the amount of paper used in yearly tax forms. I can assure you that they guys who make these "toys" (ie. Carmack) have more programming knowledge than you ever had. I don't like being mean, but somebody with your attitude deserves it. No wonder everybody thinks that Linux users are hardcore sysadmins who wouldn't notice if somebody replaced their PC with an XT, long as the server was still up!
So, if you want to use cutting-enge 3D-graphics toys, you'd have to compile. But if you are using
computer as a tool for work, as opposed to playing with lastest-and-greatest gadgets, best chances
are you'll never need to upgrade.
>>>>>>>>>
A) I use computers for work. In fact, I am taking a graphics class which develops in OpenGL. Now let me tell you, running OpenGL on a Matrox is no fun.
B) 3D graphics is not a toy. The gaming market currently makes billions of dollars a year and it is games that made PCs powerful enough that you sysadmins would not have to use Suns for everything.
C) Okay, say you're a Photoshop guy. We've established that he does real work. (And gets paid quite well I might add.) You saying he can get by with an S3 graphics card?
As for not knowing too to handle ipchains, I'll tell you about one for free - gfcc. There are at least
five more I tried, this came out as a winner. Too bad linux.com people don't know about it, but that's
not Linux's fault. That's their fault - they don't know their tools, shame on them.
>>>>>>>>
Ah, but I can handle ipchains. Quite simple if you read the doc. However, I am not representative of an average user. For the average user, Linux.com IS the Linux help source. Them being wrong is like ZDNET being wrong. The entire PC industry gets heat when Windows is too hard, so why shouldn't the entire Linux community get heat for Linux being too hard?
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Several things come to mind... (Score:1)
2. A monkey in an electric chair
3. A firing squad of monkeys
4. A monkey swinging from a gallows (That'd be Hartlepool Nautilus, then
5. A monkey on a guillotine
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Re:sort of off-topic but.. (Score:1)
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
Wow (Score:1)
Re:I completely Agree. (Score:1)
The Third Reich shall DDOS their site for that misspelling...
Re:acme - was Re:what's so great about this? (Score:1)
Looks very nice. Too many buttons, but it looks like I can remove the ones I don't need (all of them). Can't tell if it can be set for one-pane mode, and one-pane-and-tree mode (you know, like that windows thing), but for 2 pane mode, I've been looking for a program this smooth since SID for the Amiga.
Much better than Nautilis.
Midnight Commander (Score:2)
How is this going to suceed where other projects have failed?
Sure, the screenshots look nice but they don't really tell me anything except that the developers like to add lots of early features, which is fine as long as they get properly debugged before a stable release (the features not the developers).
Devil Ducky
You are contradicting yourself (Score:2)
"All the great GUIs in the world will not
make Linux easy to use. "
Then you go on to list a number of GUI-advantages
that BeOS, Windows and Mac has.
All those wizards and the likes, are just GUI-frontends for more complex stuff, and Linux
can have them as well.
Eazel is adressing one concern (poor filemanager).
Helix is adressing others (poor mail/productivity
-clients).
Both gives the user an easy and good GUI-frontend
to something that can already be done.
The Gnome-project adresses even more concerns,
and if you've seen the wizard for Palm-connectivity, you'll se how far Gnome has
progressed.
Gnome 2.0 will be powerful, flexible and easy to use.
Re:If they don't make it customisable... (Score:3)
Um... why not?
GNOME Control Center - User Interface - Applications - uncheck "Toolbars have text labels"
Yes, I'm aware these ARE development shots. I'm just saying look out!
Translation: "I'm aware these ARE development shots, but I will make assumptions about the way the interface works from them, and use them as well as FUD-laden terms like 'look out' to get attention."
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No more e-mail address game - see my user info. Time for revenge.
Re:Ok.. (Score:2)
Nope, we're stripping the merits right out. (Score:5)
See those broken pencil and eyeglasses modifiers to the file manager icons? Rest assured, those are just bugs in the development release; the final Nautilus will run as root and give everyone insecure access to the entire system, just like Windows. It will refuse to run on remote X servers, limiting you to the local display just like on a Windows desktop. It will delete apache, gcc, and all those "server" programs which just confuse users and which should really only be run on the $500 Linux 2000 Server anyway. It will carefully check your CPU, and refuse to run on non-Intel Linux versions. The source code will be wrapped in a big #ifdef __linux__ to make it non-portable in the short run to all the other operating systems out there, and in the long run they're going to ditch glibc and Posix and reinvent the wheel like Win16 (and Win32, and in another 4 years Win64) did. It will stick itself in one spot on the screen and refuse to be launched in or dragged to any of those weird "virtual desktops". It will cost $100 for the single user upgrade, with license fees for each additional user. It will save all your settings in undocumented binary format in an enormous hierarchical registry file, then it will orphan a random number of registry settings each time you upgrade or uninstall. And, of course, it will uninstall any previous user interfaces that you might be upgrading from, like that threatening KDE or that archaic bash. It will be released under the Grossly Proprietary License, will be sold for whatever the market will bear, and will generate fake error messages and invalidate your OEM's pricing discounts if it detects any competing software installed. Rumor says that the developers originally intended to create an easy to use, familiar GUI for new users moving from other operating systems to Unix, but scrapped that idea when they realized that cloning Windows was much more profitable.
>Sad.
Idiot.
It Lives! (Score:2)
At least it's better than the P.C. recycle bin (bleh) and the 'twilight zone'-ish black hole.
(Let the wars begin...) ;)
Re:Counterpoint (Score:2)
It's still not what users are looking for... (Score:2)
I know that gnome (and KDE) are still very early in there life but I don't see them heading in the correct direction. It's as if the all gnome people use 21inch monitors at 1600x1200, file browser windows are ridiculously bloated (in appearance), icon sizes are very large and widget white-space padding seems unnecessary. I'm still a fan of MacOS's finder GUI. Give me a title bar (close box on one side, window ops on the other please) and maybe another bar with directory stats (number of files/folders and current size of the directory in K). I wish the gnome people would stop going for appearance and start heading towards interface ergonomics, ease of use, fuctionality and intuitiveness. Right now, gnome feels more like a toy to me and less like a real GUI. I would be more than willing to help out on the project as far as human factors go if someone would contact me..
Moderators: Be rational please, this is intended as a comment, not a flame..
Re:MS not innovative? Not likely! (Score:2)
In the pre-GUI days (1982), the Lisp machine allowed you to do
this. Emacs allows you to treat ftp addresses and files in the same
way, and has for donkeys years. But Iguess some folk think if it
isn't GUI, then it doesn't `count'.
Ease of Use. (Score:3)
Re:sort of off-topic but.. (Score:2)
BTW you can do for loops in DOS:
"for %a in (*.zip) do pkunzip %a" is the right sort of thing.
Browser buttons - the right stuff (Score:2)
The counter argument is that the "stop" button is in some sense a "final" kind of action, therefore should be on the right like a period at the end of a sentence. That is where it is in Netscape, and I find that a pain.
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Re:Design-you're wrong (Score:3)
I haven't posted in a while; but I'm pissed now. I can't believe this comment was moderated to a 5-informative.
What the hell was I informed about this post? That this amateur thinks that these pre-alpha screenshots that are not really for public consumption are not worthy of GNOME or Linux? Nautilaus will be part of GNOME. Thus the GNOME icon guy will do the finished icons; duh.
I've proven myself right. I knew that when Slashdot was purchased by Andover, which subsequently went public, that the overall quality of the site would deteriorate. It has.
Posts are inferior; as are the stories. Now, total idiots are given moderator status. Moderate me down all you want. The publishers of this site (i.e., Mr. Malda) should crawl out of their hole and emerge into the real world where things move fast and smart people are paying close attention.
I've had a habit of checking this site daily for about three years; but I'm starting to get peeved. This site has begun to smell of fat, slow, sloppy, arrogance. Linuxtoday, is more current.
EFM (Score:2)
I downloaded the developer tree and built it a while back. The combination of antialiased fonts and alpha blending in the file manager puts all other file managers to shame in the looks department. Unfortunately, the Eazel stuff is not going to match EFM in that department.
http://www.enlightenment.org
What, is Windows the pinnacle of GUI evolution? (Score:3)
It's as if everyone thinks there is absolutely no middle ground between total interface chaos (the X Window m.o. so far) and Microsoft Knows Best. How dare anyone try to think of something new, or even to emulate much else besides Windows and its half-baked design principles.
What does the Windows style guide get right? Which features of its UI work better than their counterparts on other platforms? Which elements of the system are absolutely perfect and could not stand any improvements? Ain't much in there that's great, some elements are good but not great, nothing strikes me as perfect. The Windows paradigm is one of confusing layered toolbars with nondescript icons (and tooltips to bail you out), 1001 uses for a folder icon, file dialogs that are not well thought out, unnecessarily complex dialogs (with layered tabs and "More..." buttons), things shoehorned into a Web metaphor without actually adding anything useful, and interface elements like combo boxes that "fit all" but never fit any task they're assigned to do. And this is what we're supposed to WANT TO EMULATE? And from what I read on here, we're supposed to emulate these things for the same damn reasons these misfeatures exist in the first place: market forces.
Go right ahead and moderate away my measly karma, if you think I'm not right about this sorry state of affairs. UNIX got where it is BECAUSE of its spectacularly sane, beautiful, consistent and flexible UI - the one you access from the command line. But as soon as it moved into the second dimension, into the land of graphics, it all went to hell. X Window bears no resemblance to the UNIX underneath it, which many of you seem to think is because CLI is the only way to go and GUIs are a flawed concept anyway, but I think is because no one ever thinks about it from a UNIX perspective. It's never about actually designing an interface, it's always a matter of borrowing the most obvious ideas from whichever OS's market share we covet.
UNIX has a lot of concepts that don't translate well to the metaphors used by other OSes. File permissions, for example, I have NEVER seen "done right" in any file manager - it's always bolted-on functionality, since most file managers are borrowed more or less from OSes where permissions are bolted-on functionality. Why not put checkboxes in the "view by list" mode in file managers, one checkbox for each protection bit, and have it so you can click and hold on one checkbox and then drag down the list and set or unset that bit on a whole bunch of files at once? If you can rename files without a dialog, why not set permissions without a dialog?
Similarly, consider how you use your home account: THAT IS YOUR DESKTOP when you run from the command line. You arrange the dirs in your home dir such that they make sense when you hop into it first thing in the morning, and your fingers are maybe hardwired to type out paths to a couple of other dirs (/home/www for example). Why not simply have the desktop actually reflect the contents of your home dir, instead of a bunch of symlinks and loose files in some subfolder buried deep within the file system as most file managers (on every OS) seem to do?
Devices under UNIX work like they do in pretty much no other OS on the planet. It will NEVER be possible to shoehorn floppy mounting procedures into the model used on the Mac for instance - so let's try to think of a new metaphor for removable media under UNIX. After all, UNIX already treats removable media as directories - a metaphor. Not that the Mounter in BeOS has been a great success, but there MUST be some metaphor that will make the attaching and detaching of pieces of file system make sense visually. Has anyone even attempted this? (Most of my ideas in this department are vehicle metaphors: ships docking, the moving van pulling up out front, the ice cream truck parks out front, the flying Chinese restaurant in Fifth Element.)
I think we can simplify and clarify the role of the superuser in the OS by calling it the Janitor (at least for the consumer-end UI). System functions the average user has no business messing with would be presented by the interface as "in the utility room" or such; I think most consumers would feel quite comfortable with such a metaphor, and would understand WHY there are things they shouldn't mess with (and why UNIX handles this so differently from other OSes). The janitor user "has the keys" (and the interface would incorporate su in the context of "borrowing the keys" in order to perform janitorial duties).
Pipelines should be incorporated into the UI. Have "droplet" apps (like those common on the Mac) that you can not only drop files onto to have them processed, you can drag a little piece off the droplet's icon and "chain" it to another droplet (it could even draw a line onscreen indicating this connection!) - and when done, you simply drop your files onto the frontmost droplet in the chain and watch your processed goodies fall out the other end. These "droplets" would, I suppose, be 'snapshots' of a command and some parameters; use a GUI to set the parameters once and create the droplet. Most of us would have zillions of droplets neatly organized in folders, something like shell aliases on steroids. I can also see droplets that function as loops, droplets that pop up and ask for parameters, droplets that are mere file viewers, droplets that tee the output, and droplets that are just good old-fashioned shell scripts. I can even see droplets that accept multiple chains, for, say, combining text files. Essentially a visual scripting system. Then - as if that isn't sweet enough - file dialogs will let you select droplets as filenames you can save files to, thus letting you save through the pipeline.
These are just blue-sky ideas I coughed up in an afternoon. Why is it I have to come up with this stuff? Why instead does every new GUI toolkit or file manager showcased on Slashdot look exactly like some other OS? Is there ANYTHING to Linux except emulating other people's design flaws? Or is it just that programmers are never UI-inclined, and thus those of us who talk about improving things are forever cursed to be unable to do anything about it?
Note: I'm not saying there's NO research going on, just that it seems like there's NOT MUCH research going on. But then, maybe Slashdot should run features on the TRULY innovative stuff (wherever it's hiding) instead of the Explorer clone of the week club.
Also note I do think there's some merit to having a Windows UI on Linux, I just worry when I see so many people basically attempting the same project (cloning Windows under Linux) when there's so much more to be done. Assuming we need any MS Windows, we only need two: the official one, and an open source version. We don't need five, not when the "perfect" UNIX GUI remains unattempted.
In Response to the flames (Score:5)
I am currently contributing to Nautilus, but am not an Eazel employee. I thought I'd just speak out about some of the claims against Nautilus and address some of the concerns that people have been bringing up.
First of all - the screenshots are 75% JPEG format. i.e. they't not the best of quality - so it may not look as good as in reality. A better choice would have been 100% JPEG or PNG format
Secondly - please take into account that this isn't even alpha-level software. Eazel Inc. is still experimenting with icons and stuff. They decided to give SVG icons a shot. They are playing around with different UI concepts. Nothing is final yet. Let them 'explore' different icons and stuff. Please do not say 'oh these screenshots suck, therefore Nautilus sucks, therefore Eazel sucks'. Also note, that the you can change the 'icons' to anything you want, I think that also includes the toolbar icons.
Third - Nautilus is a 'graphical shell' much like Konqueror for KDE is a 'graphical shell' much like 'EFM' is a 'graphical shell'. Although Nautilus is more like Konqueror than EFM. Nautilus is not exaztly like Konqueror, but it is very similiar.
Fourth - The thing that Eazel is marketing to make things easier for the user are the SERVICES that its going to provide. These are not found in any screenshots and have largely not been talked about. These services will be able to be accessed through Nautilus (I think this is how Eazel plans to make revenue). This is what is touted to make Linux so much easier for new people. I think some of these services will include remote file storage, backups, an apt-like system for RPM. These will all be tied into Nautilus I believe (if you're not subscribed to Eazel's services you should be able to easily switch them off). The services are of course not 100% certain, and I may be wrong since I do not work for Eazel.
Finally, I would just like to say please don't judge Nautilus from a few meazley screenshots. These hackers are GENUINELY trying to make a contribution to the open source community. They are experimenting with new ideas and new concepts. Nothing is definate at this point. I mean there hasn't even been a 0.0 or 0.1 release yet. Nautilus is VERY buggy, VERY unstable at this point in time. Please do not expect so much from it. Eventually Eazel and the Nautilus crew will be a stage or point to be able to release snapshots and releases to illicit user feedback. In fact, feedback is encouraged even now if you wish. But please make it USEFUL feedback not things like 'this sUxs, it l00ks like winbl0ws'.
I would like to thank all the people who have provided constructive feedback. I am sure that the people at Eazel have been reviewing it and taking it into account. (for example, others have previously complained about the SVG icons looking bad - and it is still under consideration wether they will be used in Nautilus 1.0 or not)
Sincerely,
Ali Abdin
P.S. Nautilus will not really embed the entire mozilla. It will embed the the 'gtkmozembed' widget. It is basically the HTML component that mozilla uses for rendering. Also there is a 'gtkhtml' widget for light-weight HTML rendering (the help stuff in Nautilus will be using this I believe) - but for a general web-browsing experience I think people will be using mozilla
Re:*YAWN* (Score:2)
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No more e-mail address game - see my user info. Time for revenge.
Check out EFM, while you are at it... (Score:3)
Anyhow, stop reading this right now and go check out EFM [enlightenment.org] from CVS. It's awesome. Be sure to check it out of CVS, the tar ball is oldish.
Chris
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
Pres, SVLUG
Window Managers, Desktop Shells, and Lions, oh my! (Score:2)
Many smaller projects are being integrated into far larger ones, and bloatware is not too hard to come by, even in our stability/usability driven unix world. The end user may not always want something which is usable, and want something pretty [apple.com]. The whole idea of theming, along with general extensibility, is pretty active in the open source community. Well, we _do_ have access to the source, and can change the feel of our applications, along with the feel of our desktops in general. Bad thing, or good thing? WinAmp and Mozilla are both very popular theming items, read: http://www.salon.com/tech/fea ture/1999/05/19/desktop/ [salon.com]
But in this theme and customization driven market place, where a few [apple.com] vendors have taken hold of many consumerization-tactics that drive many of America's other industries, where do we find our usability? Surely, gnome and KDE are both very usable desktop environments, but neither addresses some of the major easy of use problems in linux.
Nautilus is a bitch to compile, and is NO where near being finished right now, as to why this article was posted, I know not--It only reflects poorly on the work which the gnome-team and Eazel have done....It just often seems that the level of easy we need, ends up being a more limited system in general. I'm not really sure of linux's future as a true desktop Operating System, but as long as there's companies like Eazel out there, trying and trying, I'm sure we'll get somewhere...
However, I like the idea of using a computer, I would be using computers even if they werem't as exciting or popular. So because of this, and because I am willing to take charge of my own experience, I don't like to run a complete Desktop-Experience, such as gnome or KDE. Whatever gets the job done, boys.
Re:It Lives! (Score:2)
Not The Font Thing Again! (Score:3)
Windows doesn't antialias fonts; never has, never will. It only smooths them. And then only at point sizes where it doesn't need to do it anyway. You don't need to smooth 18 point text.
Antialiasing = the removing of aliasing artifacts; i.e. fooling the eye into thinking there's more resolution available than there really is.
Antialiasing, done correctly, is required at *small* point sizes - i.e. 10 and below. Also you have to do something substantially more clever than the edge smoothing that Windows does.
The only reason font smoothing is in Windows is to make PowerPoint presentations look pretty.
The only OS that has ever had proper, complete font antialiasing was RISCOS on the Acorn platform. And it did it with only 8 shades of grey.
That did real-deal, subpixel antialiasing at *all* sizes. And the results were way better than anything Windows has ever offered.
That said, I know BeOS does something like this but IANABU.
And never mind what Nautilus *looks* like. Have you checked a copy out of CVS and built it? Used it?
Nah, didn't think so.
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Re:It's got nothing on Aqua (Score:2)
Mod this up. (Score:2)
Well said. You seem to understand exactly how much benefit will come from having an awesome and intuitive GUI, evolved from a combination of the world's most popular GUI's and an awesome core OS.
WebDAV support - WoW! (Score:2)
I wish there were more screenshots of the support for WebDAV; I'm very happy to see something like this built into Nautilus..!
Here's some Microsoft PR [microsoft.com] (Yes, I know, sorry), on the PUBLIC STANDARD, WebDAV [webdav.org]. It's relevance to Free Software developers should be immediately apparent.
Re:MS not innovative? Not likely! (Score:2)
I'm sorry, but I shall have to disagree with you: a file manager is NOT a HTML browser! HTML only allows 1 action per click, file browsers require many actions (open/activate, show properties, rename, etc.)
The only reason MS replaced the file viewer with a browser was to have a reason to embed the browser into the "OS" (actually, the operating environment or OE, but MS has always blurred that line).
Now, integrating an FTP client into the file manager is a GOOD idea, since the operations of the two are very similar. But the differences between a browser and a file manager are too large to make them one and the same ("It's a desert topping! It's a floor wax!")
Now, merging an HTML browser with the help system is great!
.
Great, so that when some @$$h013 sends me a file with an embedded link to a cookie, or a web bug, and I save it to disk in order to dissect it, it will *still* be invoked!
Call me old fashioned, but I happen to think that for file management, the old GEM desktop on my TT030 was almost perfect (just needed a right button context menu...)
Notice to lamers: I didn't imply this individual was on crack, or gay, or lame, or a stinkin' 'Softie. I responded politely and cogently. Try it yourselves sometime....
Re:Nautilus preview release? (Score:3)
Re:I like the iconography in Nautilus (Score:2)
The CLI might be sufficient for advanced users. That's probably not Nautilus' core target audience. See, money's to be made here, but only if and when Joe User can figure out how to run Linux (or at least the GUI that keeps Joe User from having to deal with the innards!)
That said, I think the icons are purdy. If only they had the GUI equivalent of command-line completion... ;)
Re:Ease of Use. (Score:2)
I'm also a Be fan. I have FreeBSD installed and am playing around with GNOME 1.2 (after running with just Windowmaker on both it and the Linux partition it replaced, for reasons that are another story!). Despite the fact that there's some compelling reasons to stay in FreeBSD or Linux over BeOS--naming three of them off the top of my head: Acrobat 4.0, Netscape/Mozilla and Java--I spend most of my time in BeOS because I can do most of what I need with the tools I have there, and the UI is substantially more elegant and responsive. The responsiveness is something I don't think is going to be easy to match under the constraints of a desktop manager on top of a toolbox on top of X11.
Having said that, I think the work being done with GNOME is being misunderstood in (some of) the Linux community... and vastly underestimated in most of the BeOS community. At times we give diehard Amiga fans a run for their money when it comes to pound-for-pound smugness about the things our chosen platform gets right. At the very least, there are ideas in GNOME that aren't duplications of work on other platforms. And some of them are pretty intriguing. I think complaints about ugly minimalist icons or the obvious similarities between the Nautilus UI and other file managers is a case of missing the forest for the trees.
And, it's worth noting that two former Be programmers, including the programmer of the BeOS interface (the recently-opened Tracker/Deskbar), are now at Eazel.
Re:Design (Score:2)
Otherwise I don't really see what you're talking about. The images are all fairly clean, and for the most part they leave behind the faux-3D, which I think has gotten rather old and makes for funny shapes, where rectangular shapes are more usable. Screens are all 2D, why should the icons deny it? Also, 2D icons are easier to modify programatically, adding text, changing colors, etc.
I actually like the button proportions -- I still find icon/text buttons to be very bulky, but these screenshots show a more compact proportion than usual.
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Re:Design (Score:2)
Until you run it with a larger than average setting for your X server's DPI setting: I run 1600x1200 on a 21" monitor, with my X server's DPI setting set to 120 dpi (via the --dpi setting in my startx file). The result is that the fonts get scaled up to a reasonable size (and look quite smooth without antialiasing). However, most Gnome apps seem to think that all fonts will the the same height (in pixels), thus all Gnome apps have most of the text cut off in the window layouts. Wish I could paste a picture into this to show you. Then again, with some of the trolls around here, maybe pasting pictures would be a bad thing....
They've got one thing right - integration (Score:2)
Now, you cannot find a window manager that doesn't imitate the principle of web integration. It's simply too *intelligent* to treat resources all in the same manner. And as bandwidth increases among the general population, the glitch of time between accessing files on my hard drive and on, say, infidel.org, will diminish to amounts humans find negligeable.
So my question is, when will Microsoft get the credit due to it for this groundbeaking innovation? Or are we going to resort to that old game, exhuming some dusty old prototypes from Xerox PARC and Digital in an effort to discredit MS?
Yeah, it's a rant!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Absolutely right! (Score:3)
Take a look at some screenshots of (a) Windows and (b)Mac OS 8.5/6 (Yes, there's finally a proper CLI in OS X, but they've made such a hash of everything else). You would think you might be looking at some marvellous, instructive examples of what (a) to avoid and (b) to imitate in human computer interaction, interface design, etc.
But you wouldn't. You'd be looking at some pretty dull, uninformative pictures. The only noticeable difference would be that the Windows menus are attached to the windows, the Mac ones to the top of the screen. And I'm not about to get into which is superior, it'd be a flame war.
UI is about things like customizability, consistency, scriptability, informative names, consistency, elegant scaling, abstractions that don't get in your way, efficient placement of controls, and did I mention consistency?
So while the Mac OS has way better HCI than Windows, but you won't be able to tell that by looking at screenshots. You can tell by reading tech documents, interface design guidelines, scripting dictionaries (is there even such a thing in Windows?), etc. And of course by using the system in question.
And this means, I'm afraid, that giving Linux decent UI is going to take a lot more than Yet Another Desktop Environment. It'll take getting rid of directories called /etc, /usr/bin, /var... It'll take instituting some real user interface guidelines and standards, both in command line apps (so what does ^S mean in this context, I wonder?) and in graphical ones. Cause all YADE means is you get pretty screenshots.
Hold your judgement (Score:2)
It's only screenshots!
Can you tell how stable it is from a screenshot?
Can you tell it's ease-of-use?
Can you tell it's level of intuitive functionality?
As far as I can tell, all we can really do is make judgements on how pretty it is, something that is customizable to personal preference anyways.
Why don't we take a deep breath, holster our guns, and wait for release.
Re:They've got one thing right - integration (Score:2)
Well, some folks are going for massive integration, but I'm not one of them.
The difference between inside and outside is very important, as Windows users are beginning to learn. The "We're all one big, happy family!" approach is not compatible with maintaining security. It has been observed elsewhere that MSFT's design decision to make clicking on a file "open" it (which runs it, for executables), has been a contributing factor in users running the various VBS trojans.
When MSFT decided to make IE the user interface for the OS, I disagreed. Windows has enough problems without making the interface to their unstable OS an unstable web browser. Not to mention the performance hit (oh, that's right, we're supposed to go out and buy faster computers -- again).
I also don't think we've seen the last of the security problems with Windows. Making the OS scriptable, and then making that scripting engine available to J. Random l33t d00d isn't my idea of sound engineering practice.
We'll have to see how these projects come out. If they are over-integrated as Windows is, many will not use them. There are plenty of wm's that aren't that way.
Choices. That's what it's all about.
Gordon.
Re:Not another Anti-X person... (Score:2)
A bigger shortcoming of X that will prevent its move into the modern world is that it handles only display, keyboard, and mouse. This pretty much lets out multimedia, which requires audio and video at reasonable frame rates. I've tried writing programs to run meteorological "movies" on X, and it just cant work very well. Synchronizing audio and video when delivering the video via X is effectively impossible since X doesn't even know audio exists.
In my mind, these are the reasons X must go. The fact that for all practical purposes its fonts can't be fixed is just one more reason. If X doesn't get replaced *very soon* then the battle for the desktop will be over and W2K will have won not only the battle but the war. (There is a rapidly coalescing opnion in the industry that the only end-user interface that matters going forward is Windows (2000|ME|CE) and IE. This is believed even in companies that are largely considered to be "Linux-friendly", like say, the largest computer company on the planet. If that perception isn't changed soon, it will be too late to matter.)
Nautilus preview release? (Score:2)
I just asked on the Gnome news site, and I'll ask here, too; does anyone have a ETA on an official Nautilus preview release?
I'd love to try out Nautilus and give some feedback to the developers, but I tried building all the required packages from CVS and just don't have the time or perserverance to work out all the macro build problems.
Heck, I'd settle some tarballs or RPMs that someone could throw together for us unwashed, CVS-impaired masses.
Re:In Response to the flames (Score:2)
You just won the "Fire Extinguisher Award" for stopping those unnecessary flames about the Nautilus project being developed by Eazel.
One thing people conveniently forget is that on recent desktop versions of Solaris the interface literally IS a system browser--you access all resources in graphical mode using what is more or less a Web browser, even more so than Microsoft did with Active Desktop on Windows 95 OSR 2.5 and later!
I strongly support your efforts on Nautilus. The fact that one of the big contributors is Andy Hertzfeld (one of the few programmers out there that truly has a clue about graphical interface design--after all, he did much of the work for original Macintosh GUI) bodes well for the project.
Uh oh. Not Metallica Mp3's (Score:2)
Double J. Strictly for the . . .
Re:I like the iconography in Nautilus (Score:2)
I can see part of this. For the "read" monkey, there's a monkey sitting at a desk with reading glasses staring at a piece of paper. For the "write" monkey, you have a monkey with a pencil in his hand. But just what exactly are we supposed to use for the "execute" monkey!?
"Mommy, why is George W. Bush killing that monkey?"
Re:I like the iconography in Nautilus (Score:2)
Then again, simple RWX letters along the side might be sufficient for advanced users.
Re:MS not innovative? Not likely! (Score:2)
Now, integrating an FTP client into the file manager is a GOOD idea, since the operations of the two are very similar. But the differences between a browser and a file manager are too large to make them one and the same
What you don't remember is that at its roots a browser is not a means to display HTML files. It's a means to navigate remote directories, which happen to contain HTML files most of the time. Remember that the original web browsers displayed nothing more than text, and HTML was only sparsely used for decorative formatting.
A file manager is a generalized browser - when positioned as a superset of the web and FTP, it makes a great deal of sense.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Many more shots (Score:5)
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Re:what's so great about this? (Score:2)
Anyways, since version 99a, there is integrated support for keyboard shortcuts. Mostly CTRL-SHIFT-*. Shouldn't be too hard for you keyboard junkies. And it does work well.
Re:Not another Anti-X person... (Score:2)
On the other hand, it is true to some extent that elements of X *are* a problem. Some are cultural problems, and some (shockingly) are real technical problems.
Amongst the technical problems is the fact that the rendering model was not very good even when it was designed (there was a rather good article linked from
Antialiased fonts are a good example, in fact. Since X's text drawing commands only work with things X knows are fonts, and these are defined to be bitmap fonts, X knows nothing of the vector info needed to antialias text. As an application programmer, if you want anti-aliased text, you're left with one option - render the text yourself against a known background as a bitmap, and send the bitmap to the server to draw. Its slow, and it leads to code living on clients that should live on the server,
As an X server programmer, can you fix this ? Kind of. You can subtly break the protocol, and draw anti-aliased vector fonts when you're asked to draw bitmap fonts. This will probably work most of the time, but the "right thing" to do is to define an extension to the protocol, which is perfectly possible, but here we move from the realm of technical problems into socialogical problems.
For extensions to work in X, both client and server need to know of them and explicitly use them. This works fine with a small set of extenions - such as the shape extension - that are now almost universal, but adding new ones, to support a better rendering model allowing efficient use of "modern" rendering primitives and even (gasp) 3D, has proved very hard.
Partly the blame for this must be layed at the door of the standards bodies that have had de jure control over X - the X consortium and the open group. They have proved vulnerable to political manipulation and prone to premature propogation on standards (such as PEX and Motif) whose sole virtue was that they coule make everyone agree on them. Part of the blame lies with the protocol itself, and the fact that there is no provision for the client to extend the server's capbilities - or compensate for the lack thereof - in an elegant or easily implemented way.
Given that X on commercial Unix is almost dead outside of a few specialist operations and development shops, there are currently, as I think you kind of suggested, for the free software community to grap its de facto control of the standard by the throat and promulgate the extensions that are really needed to make X work, however as yet, this has failed to happen.
Antialiasing (Score:2)
Yes, Nautilus has the capabilities to do fairly advanced antialiased rendering. The current development snapshot has the option to use the antialiased renderer in the Gnome Canvas (joint work between Federico Mena-Quintero and myself). This does full alpha-blending and enables the use of icons with semitransparency. The Xlib renderer will probably remain an option for those with slower computers. Icons can be provided in both SVG for full scalability, or in PNG in a graded series of sizes.
My current project is integrating Freetype 2 [freetype.org] text with librsvg, adding antialiased text capabilities with both TrueType and Adobe Type1 font support.
The current architecture of X makes it relatively straightforward to implement antialiasing and alpha compositing within a window, but impossible to composite across windows. Thus, Aqua effects such as having windows cast soft shadows, or having drag'n'drop icons antialias correctly, are currently beyond the scope of what X can do.
There is active work ongoing to add true alpha to X, led by Keith Packard of SuSE. I'm following this work closely, and am eager to see it come to fruition so that we can start to apply a rich imaging model across the entire screen.
Raster is doing some very cool work with EFM [enlightenment.org]. Some people seem to think there's a kind of war going on between the Gnome and E camps. I don't see it this way at all - to me, it's a friendly competition in the best sense of the word. Raster is at the cutting edge of graphics capabilities, while Gnome is doing more work on integration and making sure everything works well on a broad range of systems and configurations. Both approaches have their merits, and if nothing else Raster's work serves as excellent protypes for Gnome development. I had lunch with Raster and Andy last week, and we had a really nice discussion about extending X, getting access to hardware acceleration for antialiasing and compositing, and so on. We also talked about some of the requirements for making sure all this stuff is useful from the Gnome Canvas, and I'm hopeful good stuff will come of it.
I also want to talk a little about antialiased text. The best of all possible worlds is an unhinted, antialiased display at 140 dpi or higher. Since those displays aren't widespread yet, we have to make do with some tradeoffs. The most fundamental tradeoff is between edge sharpness on one hand, and smoothness on the other. Also hanging in the balance is the faithful reproduction of the glyph shape. Whenever you antialias, the edges become softer. However, you can sometimes get a slightly better tradeoff by aligning vertical and horizontal stems to the pixel grid, thus ensuring sharp edges for these, while diagonal and curved segments get smoothly antialiased. However, this process does distort the font somewhat.
In order to take advantage of 140+ dpi displays, you have to write your apps to be resolution independent. Fortunately, with the Gnome Canvas (which is what Nautilus uses for its icon view), it's pretty straightforward - in fact, there's a zoom control that scales the whole canvas uniformly. I was surprised and a bit disappointed to see that Aqua is not resolution independent, and in fact has many of the dimensions hardcoded. Thus, down the road I think it's not unreasonable to expect free software to have the best rendering, bar none.
It's a lot of fun to be developing this stuff, and I'm looking forward to getting a desktop with advanced graphical rendering into the hands of lots of people.
Re:Ok.. (Score:5)
Nautilus has many neat features, including:
Re:MS not innovative? Not likely! (Score:2)
OK. {Shuffles through old software boxes} Thanks Peter Norton!
MS not innovative? Not likely! (Score:3)
Re:will Easel support hardware UI advances? (Score:2)
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Re:MS not innovative? Not likely! (Score:2)
I *dont* like the iconography in Nautilus (Score:2)
I don't like the icons. Sure, they look fine, but they're too big. Yes, I know Nautilus can stretch icons, but they're not likely to look good at anything other than they're natural size. This is one thing that every Unix file manager I've seen has got wrong, and MS (for all their other faults) has got right. Sigh.
Re:MS not innovative? Not likely! (Score:2)
Re:MS not innovative? Not likely! (Score:5)
One thing that's remained absurdly constant over the last 12 years or so is that regular (l)users have real trouble understanding "Shared Drives" (as they call it in DOS-space) or mounted directories or network paths or whatever. The concept of a "hard drive" being somewhere "on the network" just eludes them.
On the other hand, most users take to webpages like water. Back on "Pearl Harbor Day" in 1995, when Microsoft announced that they were going to integrate IE into Windows, my third thought was that there was lots of potential in the idea. (My first thought was that it would be bloated and slow and crash a bunch, and my second was that this was going to put Netscape out of business, but that's another Slashdot story...)
Imagine a system, which instead of presenting a dull list of file attributes and creation dates, presented metadata about there in, or one which could provide instructions along with the files, to help the users share their information, or which allowed quick searching and sorting from a GUI interface, or one which could provide simple document managment and versioning.
Of course, Microsoft hardly implemented any of the application-level features to make web integration really anything more than slower, crashier, more illegal version of the same thing. Part of the reason is that they sell products like Exchange that do many of these tasks. On the other hand, a open source infrastructure which provides web integration would be more likely to be expanded to support some really useful applications that run above the filesystem.
Call me old fashioned, but I happen to think that for file management
You're not old fashioned, you're just a geek. Users don't manage 'files', they manage information.
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Give them a BREAK (Score:2)
1) As has been pointed out, these are really early shots from a really early non-release. So go shut up for a while.
2) To those who are boo-hoo'ing the lack of total innovation, have you put no thought into this or what? If I'm going to design an 'easy-to-use' interface (to anything, computer or no), I'm going to go with whatever requires the least amount of extra learning, if any. By combining MacOS and Win elements, both of which are well known by Joe Q. Public, the Eazel folks are doing just that.
Really, I mean, give the folks some credit, ok? It's not exactly fun to sit here and read whine, bitch, moan. There are times when /.ers can really lay down some great ideas. You don't like what's there? Then what should be?
Re:beating them at their own game (Score:2)
Re:Ease of Use. (Score:2)
Re:Ease of Use. (Score:2)
I like the iconography in Nautilus (Score:3)
(While the latter may make the average user happy, the image of broken glasses is likely to make many fellow geeks cringe. ;-)
Re:Paragraphs!!! (Score:2)
Before the war starts... (Score:5)
1) These are DEVELOPMENT screenshots, there has been no official release, not even a development release, it's all from their CVS.
2) Everything is / will be customizable. Don't like the icons? The icons can be changed. Don't like a particular way of viewing files? It can be changed. Think the sidebar takes up too much space? (Hopefullly) it can be hidden.
3) Everything is modular using Bonobo, so bloat is not an issue. Don't use your file manager as a web browser? The HTML component (Mozilla) won't be loaded into memory.
I'm sure this will do nothing to prevent the inevitable bitchings, but oh well.
Re:Ease of Use. (Score:2)
Screenshots are meaningless (Score:2)
The proof is in the *using*, so there's really no point in arguing back and forth about the "usability" or "innovation" of something that NONE of us have used!
. . . until we can actually use the code, there's nothing to be said. Anything we DO say will be purely speculative and will reflect nothing other than our own biases.
Re:You are contradicting yourself (Score:2)
Re:Counterpoint (Score:2)
Re:Ease of Use. (Score:2)
Re:sort of off-topic but.. (Score:2)
Or, if you have winzip, you could select them all, right-click drag them to where you want to unzip them, and click extract.
-- iCEBaLM
Where are the constructive comments? (Score:3)
I'll weigh in with my opinion here: I think, that with the track record of the people involved in Eazel, we should give them all the support we can, regardless of whether we see their work as a threat to our pet project (it isn't - remember, it's all open-source and any of the good ideas from Eazel can be incorporated into our other projects).
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Design (Score:3)
All the comments about how it looks like Macintosh or Windows, how it's not innovative (I agree, BTW, it looks like the bastard child of Windows 95 and MacOS), it's just ugly. Recently in Time or Newsweek, there was an article about the increasing awareness of design in the American consciousness (sue me, I'm American). When I look at the Eazel screenshots, I see something very kludgy, very awkward, like icons are the wrong size, the wrong proportion. Line weights are too thick or too thin. Colors are too garish. Buttons are too small or too big or have too much blank space (why do the close buttons have to be even smaller when they're surrounded by so much space?). The one thing I like about GNOME (and don't get me wrong, I think both GNOME and KDE feel "heavy") is the professional elegance of it's imagery. Icons feel well designed (I think tigert designed quite a few of them; they appear to be his style). Default buttons feel about the right size and proportion (proportion is ever more important than size). Here, the Eazel developers have started to throw all that out in an effort to look just different enough that people can call it 'different'.
I don't know what's causing it. The early screenshots looked promising, but these just don't fulfill expectations. They look almost like they're being underdesigned, and given the real lack of innovations these screenshots are displaying, it's really going to take a user interface that enlivens the Linux desktop to sell this thing. Yes, I know you can customize it, but frankly, I don't want to download something ugly to make it look beautiful. I want the best with minimal effort.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, though, and I have a critical eye. Do other people feel the same way? That this is kludgy? Or does this have the potential to be the new aesthetic?