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GNOME GUI

New Nautilus Screenshots 111

Posted by CmdrTaco from the look-at-da-pretty-pictures dept.
max cohen writes "Eazel has posted some new screenshots of Nautilus (as of August 2nd) and they're much improved from eariler versions. I can't wait to get my hands on the Nautilus preview release and give it a test drive!" They've come a long way since the last batch of shots: especially interesting is the way it handles albums of MP3s, and its integration with mozilla.
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New Nautilus Screenshots More

New Nautilus Screenshots

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  • . . . was that the text under the icons on the desktop wasn't highlighted in some colored rectangle, with the exception of the text "HOME" under what is presumably the icon for the home directory. From my experience with trying out the KDE2 betas, this looks like a bad move, because the text under the icons could become very hard to read if someone chooses a fancy background from, say, Propanganda or Digital Blasphemy. Highlighted text under icons is always readable no matter what the background. I hope the Nautilus folks have considered this.
  • Oh, dont worry. Wait for additional features and you will get the bugs for free. ;-)
  • Try Debian it is like an entire distribution based on helix-update.

    Debian Rulz

    The ArsonSmith
  • There are some instances where your POSIX.1 buddies come in handy, though. e.g. "uh oh I just realised that I didn't update my email address on my old pages. I need to change my email address from joe_smith@m1.example.com to joe_smith@example.com on all my pages. But there are so many of them!". A quick "for i in *.html ; do sed 's/joe_smith@m1\.example\.com/joe_smith@example\.c om/g' < $i > ._ && mv ._ $i ; done" would take care of that.

    Okay that example was a bit contrived, too. But any time you have to do a lot of similar (yet slightly uncommon) tasks to a large number of files that can be categorised, Unix will be your friend. Doing repetitive tasks is what computers were made for anyway, right?
  • Nautilus looks nice. Much better than it did before...although the non-antialiased fonts really do a number on it's look.
    I have two questions...why is it, that with most of the *Nix community despising Microsoft, that every single new GUI that comes out ends up trying to be just like it?? Let's face it, that whole File View in Nautilus looks almost exactly like Win98/Win2k/IE4's 'Web View', which is a feature that is taken far too little advantage of. KDE has it too. The standard button alignment is also very close to that of Windows....what's the deal here people?? You've got a great product here, but you don't want to distinguish it for itself, or just running out of ideas?
    My other question.....but I suppose this one contradicts the other above, is why is the menu bar always raised? This has always puzzled me about X-based GUIs. MacOS, Windows, and Be, all rely on a menubar that is flush with the rest of the window, and it looks nice. But even the most cutting edge of X-based GUIs have a raised menubar...what is the purpose of this? Its not like we don't see it...there may have been a purpose for it back years ago with monochrome displays or whatnot, but I think it's a practice whose time has come.

    So on one hand, these guys seem to be doing everything they can to look like Windows(at least functionality wise), and then they have the one thing they cling to, and it's probably the one thing they shouldn't be clinging to.

    -Julius X
  • Actually, if you're referring to when they announced the G4 Cube, they were down because they were busy updating the site (uploading Quicktime clips and whatnot), not because of heavy load. Though I'm sure there was a huge load.

  • You guys don't *get* it, do you? (Score:5)

    by extrasolar ( 28341 ) on Saturday August 05, 2000 @12:07PM (#877866) Homepage Journal
    This by far not the first time I am well disappointed with the slashdot crowd. Perhaps someday I will quit posting here. That day is not today.

    Nautilus is great! Maybe some of you can step back a moment to see what Nautilus really it...of course not! this is slashdot! The only one who is allowed to include web browsing functionality into the file manager is Microsoft, right? Wrong! It just makes sense! FTP, HTML, file directories...they all are dependent on each other...they all make *sense* to exist together. Has anyone ever browsed an FTP site in IE? Notice how it looked *exactly* like any other folder in Windows Explorer? That is the *point*! It is called usability, people. It is called ease of use, people. The best interface is when everything looks the same! It is also called power.

    You see, soon novice users will have the power to do some of things you *can't* on the command-line. And that makes you mad. And makes you label Nautilus a Windows clone. Grow up.

    But lets just say for a moment, that you can, theoretically, think out of the box. Then you will see that Nautilus is more than just fancy file manager with web functionality. Did you see the screenshot with the mp3 player? You can play mp3's directly in the file browser! And don't tell me about big Microsoftian applications (again, another stupid comparison with Microsoft) that are monoliths. Nautilus uses components. That means that the web browser is a separate component, the mp3 player is a separate component, and maybe the file browser is a separate component...I don't know! But it is the Unix way, right? Except for the "easy" part which, as we all know...is way to Microsoftian for our own good, right?

    So instead of piping|our|outdated|legacy|flat-text|utilities|to| each-other, we have real power in the OS. Now we can have a powerful yet easy application. Now we can have our cake and eat it too.

    (Note: My hostility is towards several posters who have already posted. I clicked in this story to see if others have seen what I saw in the screenshots of Nautilus. Instead I see anti-Microsoft zealotry. I just think the folks at Eazel deserve a little more. They have actually gone quite a ways beyond Microsoft in both power and ease-of-use. There. I said something bad about Microsoft. You can like me now.)
  • MODERATORS! For gods sake, you are moderating this guy up on the basis of him mis-reading the post he is replying to! The original post was actually pro command line not pro GUI!
    In any case this twerp is misinformed and has obviously prefers to judge without bothering to try graphical file managers which are on the whole moving towards offering the kind of features we like - even in KDE 1 you can select files based on a matching pattern - useful. Work in progress is EFM from the enlightenment guys that adds even more CLI functionality to a graphical file manager.
  • I noticed that Nautilus' zooming interface sure sounds a lot like a now-extinct zooming interface project called pad++ that was originally developed at the University of New Mexico. I'm wondering if some of the old pad++ developers are working on Nautilus or if they licensed this technology or did they just rip it off?

    Read more about pad++ here [umd.edu].

  • While it hasn't recieved the press that other file managers have, and it doesn't have a browser built it, the Enlightenment File Manager is pretty remarkable.
    It's very early in it's development, but it does the one thing that file managers never seem to do right. It acts as an interface to the system, less of a file manager, and more like a graphical shell.
    Mandrake, one of the developers actually forced himself to avoid using the CLI for some time to figure out what EFM needed to do to replace it. And even now, it does reduce the amount of time I spend in the command-line drastically.
    For example, you can still type using the typebuffer, so if you want to install an RPM, just type rpm in the dir to select the rpm and it'll open a term, show you the output, wait for you to type something and close. Honestly though, it also excels in the eye-candy realm, with full alpha-blended windows (true transparency, not the faux viewport stuff we're used to) and anti-aliased fonts. If you're looking for a file manager, I'd give it a look, over at enlightenment.org.
  • The shorter answer is Konqueror. I don't use KDE often, but when I do I am forced to notice that it already offers this functionality. BTW Eazel, the fact that I don't use KDE often is partly due to the fact that it offers this functionality. The only things wrong with GMC are:

    no button to show/hide dotfiles
    slow performance.

  • Needs a nice screen font... (Score:4)

    by slantyyz ( 196624 ) on Saturday August 05, 2000 @10:16AM (#877871)
    This sounds like a weird thing, but the thing that can have the greatest negative or positive impact on the appearance of a user interface is the default system screen font.

    MacOS and BeOs seem to be the GUIs with the nicest system screen fonts, IMHO. Chicago, the first Mac screen font was designed to be simple, readable and visually appealing.

    The old Mac combo of Chicago (or even Charcoal) and Monaco was killer, and gave the Mac GUI a polished and visually clean look.

    While I am aware you can probably change the font properties, I'm surprised that these former mac GUI gurus forgot to use a better default screen font.

  • Well then try Konqueror for KDE it is very fast and I believe is a better less bloated web browser than Explorer is. How can you compare GNOME to Microsoft. Microsoft does you integrated components such as much of the reuse GNOME is going after but there seems to be nothing to compare MS to them in. I believe GNOME is going a great job and I hope for the best in Nautilus
  • We need a UI that mazimizes screen real estate, a UI that gives users automation/scripting capabilities

    No , whe need an interface even your grandma can operate, and preferably looks nice too. Nautilus looks like its on the right way.
    ---
  • Some of the images are still coming in, but I have put up a mirror at:

    http://dotslash.dynodns.net/00/ 08/05/1616256/i.html [dynodns.net]

    If the eazel/nautilus guys or anyone wants it down, please mail me.

  • One thing about Linux GUIs that I like is their configurability.

    Personally, I use the Gnome panel (and nothing else from Gnome!), one 48-pixel panel on the bottom and a 24-pixel one on top. Both contain task lists, the top one containing the normal windows and the bottom, larger, one having the minimized windows. I have a clock/mailcheck applet and a few system monitors on the right side of the top taskbar, and the GTK+ Licq applet, a quicklaunch applet with icons for Netscape, Licq, XEmacs, Slrn, etc. on the left. I'm happy with it, and generally run programs from xterms as well.
  • nice attempt at flame, but hell, I'll bite.

    1) MSIE is componentized as well.
    2) You make claims about power and ease-of-use based on some screenshots. Is this because the icons are prettier than MSIE's? Seems to me you can't talk about either property without having used the system to do something.
    3) I agree that there is utility in blending functionality within a single GUI. But there is much greater utility in the command line because the command line can be utilized remotely, over a modem if need be, with very little loss of power or responsiveness. The UI you choose depends on the purpose for which you are using the system. If you're using it to replace a bunch of Windows terminals, then Nautilus is for you.
  • too right

    Also this may be heretical but am I the only person who does not think gmc sucks

    My opinion is it is fast does cool stuff lke shoing me contents of tar/rp files installs rp's from gmc

    Useful stuff not crap features that you ca't turn off (eg most of what's in explorer)

  • >Think about it - Explorer is *much* slower than MC, but you seem to think it's a good
    design.

    Actually, Explorer is much faster than MC because I don't have to use the cursor keys to tick through one item at a time -- I can zoom to it with a mouse. Same benefit with GMC of course, but GMC is slower than Explorer in terms of responsiveness (probably because X and GTK and Imlib anf GNOME and so on are running in userspace).
  • This has been said ad infinitum but

    the reason explorer loads instantly in M$ is that it is already loaded - which is why it takes so long to boot up

  • No - serious software

    couln't resist!!

  • "I am in no way a microsoft fan but I'm afraid microsoft has it right with Explorer. You click on My Computer, it opens up instantly, no bloat. You want to use the web, type a web address, THEN it loads up web components."

    The reason that My Computer opens instantly is not that there is "no bloat". it is because the bloat has already been pre-loaded when you started up Windows. It's been made sure that the Windows Explorer code is sitting in memory right where it can be accessed most efficiently. Similarly, when you want to use the web, a lot of the web components are already in memory, which is why IE starts up so much faster than any other web browser.

    This approach would be possible under Linux, but users would immediately cry foul. "This bloatware uses up xx Meg of RAM before it even _DOES_ anything! I just want to use it for the foo function, I don't want everything else to load as well!"

    As for the problems of having to look at every file, this is why we Need A Better Filesystem For Workstations. Windows hacks its way around the requirement for looking at files by trusting a three-letter extension. This can often have really annoying effects (Like trying to work out how to save something from notepad so it _doesn't_ end up named foo.xml.txt) File managers that try this stunt in the Unix world do a terrible job, because file-extensions are not the Unix way. The only files on a Unix system that generally have dot-extensions are graphics and sound files. Finding out what kind of file something is, is what the 'file' command is there for.

    What we need, of course, is real filesystem metadata. Being able to stat a file and get (directly from the fs, and therefore efficiently) a file-type magic number, or a MIME Type for the file would make file managers a hell of a lot more efficient. The problem is, the FS writers are busy writing filesystems for _servers_, which don't want to be loaded down with this sort of feature.

    Charles Miller
    --
  • "They are fundamentally different things - to pretend otherwise is not constructive, since that assumption will lead to misunderstandings."

    No, you are wrong. They are the same. FTP contains files and directories...so does your local file system. Web Pages are simply files in your filesystem. The differences between them are mere technicalities.

    "A similar interface will just lead people to believe that it is a similar function. I'm sorry, but there is a big difference between files on your PC and files on some server across the Atlantic."

    They *are* a similar function! Are you blind! Can you not percieve the similarity! They are simply different machines!

    "TROLL!"

    I am looking for you to back this one up.

    "Save your amateur psychology for another day."

    Okay. I deserve that one.

    "And this is a good thing, why exactly?. Playing an MP3 is a very different thing to moving files around. It requires a very different interface."

    Consistancy. Yes playing mp3 is a little different but Nautilus changes its interface slightly to compensate. But look at the advantages: the mp3 file is just like any other file...it has an icon associated with it. When the user clicks on it, the user sees a control to play and change tracks. The user expects it! It is natural and intuitive to the user! You can't get much better results than that.

    "Oh right. So when it's done with a GUI, it's real power, but when it's done with a command-line, it's, what - fake power?"

    Okay. Now you are responding to my words and not my meaning. I mean that piping flat files to each other might have been cool in the 1970's, we need something more for the 2000's. Nautilus seems to be there. We *need* applications that borrow the capabilities of other applications to fit their needs. And users are no longer programmers and computers are no longer stuck in a one-dimensional text-based world. We need the computer to obey the user and show the user what he needs to see---let the user *visualize* what the computer is trying to show him---and *interact* with the user. Computers are more complicated things now. And we need applications that deal with this complexity and present it comfortably to the user. It is the nature of the industry.

    "Ever thought about not taking things so personally?"

    Okay. It was the posts that got to me...not the poster.

    But could you please try to respond to my meaning instead of taking pot shots at my choice of words?
  • What I saw in those screenshots looked essentially like Windows 95 Explorer with only one, maximized window, with two minor tweaks: content previews in the icons, and simple media players embedded in the window.

    BTW, Windows 2000 (and I think 98) already supports media player previews. Windows 2000 also has some limited support for iconic content preview, but (I think) this functionality is limited to the "My Pictures" folder.


  • Captain Nemo's going to kick your ass after he finds out what you said!
  • No kidding. This is outrageous. How am I suppose to whore if I don't get any karma. If this continues for much longer people might have to start making thought-out and meaningful posts.

    Thinking eh? Is that something I can find in a newsgroup?
  • It'd be nice if the article header said what the Nautilus application was, for those readers not in the in crowd. I've heard of Eazel, who are trying to make Linux easier to use, though I haven't kept track of which thing Nautilus is. Once I waded through the slashdottedness of the site to look at the pictures, the couple I saw just looked like a file manager thing running in a browser. Slightly prettier than Netscape's default directory display, if you like that sort of GUI stuff, but if that's all it is, it's boring. What's does Nautilus DO?

  • Mirror (Score:3)

    by Trumpet ( 42631 ) on Saturday August 05, 2000 @08:21AM (#877887) Homepage
    Since the site seems to be slow as ass, and I'm just dying to get my DSL link slashdotted today, I've got a mirror of the screenshots up at http://www.trumpie.net/nautilus [trumpie.net].

    Enjoy.

  • Ahem (Score:3)

    by Inoshiro ( 71693 ) on Saturday August 05, 2000 @08:22AM (#877888) Homepage
    "Hmm, a file browser + web browser without the bloat of two separate products"

    Since when has integration of a file browser and a web browser been a good thing?

    Yes, it's nice to have a file browser which can do useful things with the various types of files, but I define "useful things" as launching the application that works with files of that MIME type -- NOT loading another component into place in the file browser window.

    You present new users with an interface that keeps changing, and doesn't give a clear line between different applications. This is confusing to people still struggling with the "executable programs and content data" split, not to mention probably not what the people experienced with computers wanted. I prefer to work with the data I've selected in a separate program, as opposed to in plae, so I can arrange them on my virtual desktops and continue to use the file manager for its purpose -- managing files.
    ---
  • It may not look like much, or be that impressive right now, but wait for when it's done. I find that many opensource projects that have been done before in one way or another start out with common features, get them done right for the first release, and then add new features. There's bound to be something new, but somethings come before others.

    Also keep in mind that Nautilus is targeting new users. The seasoned vets among us may not have use for it, but the newbies will. Of course learning the innereds of Linux is the best way to go.

    God bless! Geeky.org [geeky.org] All Things Geek
    Geeky.org [geeky.org]

  • For most tasks, Windows Explorer is still the fastest and easiest way to move files around the system.
    Ok, try doing this in Windows Explorer with 100 files...

    [neural]~/tmp$ for file in *.html; do mv $file $file.old; done

    That F2 key will get old real quick.
    I don't know what all this stylized presentation garbage is all about, but I can imagine it's a real hog of CPU and memory resources to preview the contents of every item in a folder.
    It's much less CPU and memory intensive to load up a light viewer instead of a full blown application everytime just to view a file. That's why I use less to view text files and nedit to edit them. I don't load up the GIMP every time I want to get a quick look at a few PNGs.
    When I upgraded my W2K workstation with a new hard drive and reinstalled the OS ...
    I don't know what to say, I haven't done that in years. Well ever since I started using Debian GNU Linux.
  • The screenshots look nice, I must say; one thing I would consider to be very important would be sensible navigation ability using the keyboard (tab key, ctrl-tab, arrow keys, ctrl-[cxv] etc...) between tree listings, directory listings, mp3 player (?) etc.. In linux I use almost exclusively the CLI to do file management, which for the most part works fine and is very powerful. However there are times where having the directory structure laid out in front of you is helpful. One thing I really like about Windows expolrer is that it is very easy to navigate and move files around using the keyboard. If I had to point and click constantly to use Nautilius, then it will just be a wrapper around gecko.
  • Old Vulcan saying: it's never too late for a sequel.

  • Re:interface expert or not... (Score:3)

    by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Saturday August 05, 2000 @08:34AM (#877893)
    The problem is that it's UGLY. An interface not only needs to be functional but RESPONSIVE. Even on my 300MHz computer, KFM still crawls compared to Win95's explorer. Sure KFM looks a little better, but it really doesn't matter. Writing bloated code and hoping proc's will get fast enough is something best left to Microsoft. If something can be good looking and functional without taking a huge amount of resources, then it should be programmed that way. Every program should be coded with a correct balance. The current mantra is (add features, speed be damned!) That's what lead to using CORBA in the DE and Gecko in the file manager. They are very feature powerful, but most of those features are really useless. Does anybody actually take advantage of the HTML customizablity of their folders? File previews are nice, but that is very simple to implement (WITHOUT a powerful XML rendering engine like Gecko!) In the end, you can replace Gecko with some nice bitmaps in the corner, and 99% of people won't be able to tell the difference. If you code for that other 1%, then you'll end up with a crappier product. Ever wonder WHY Windows is so bloated? Not so much sloppy coding, but feature bloat. OSS projects don't need feature bloat. They don't HAVE to make people upgrade to new versions because of new (usually unused) feature. GNOME these days is reeking of Microsoft. I mean only MS would go and put a rich, powerful, distrubted framework like CORBA into the DE. I mean how many people NEED their AbiWord component distributed over a world-wide network?

  • "The fact that GUIs are considerably more popular than CLIs is some evidence that more people are visually-oriented than verbally."

    The problem with this popularity contest is that the majority have never really been given a choice. If one had set a CLI and a GUI side by side and said "pick which one you want" then you would have more of a point. But the majority haven't been given so objective a test. It has been more "this is what you'll be using from now on", and the alternative either is briefly (footnote) mentioned, or not at all.

    True enough. What I was actually thinking of was the switch over from DOS to Windows in the late 80's/early 90's. A lot of people voted for a GUI over a CLI with their hard-earned greenbacks. And that was to a pretty crappy GUI (admitedly from a pretty crappy CLI :-) Of course there were other factors involved as well, such as upgrading of applications, but I do believe that a preference for GUIs over CLIs was a large part of this. If we were on DOS 15.7 right now, I don't believe there would be nearly as many computer users in the world.

    Obviously a CLI like bash is going to be more efficient at expressing the commands for 1. But assuming that the files related to my web site are not organized according to a regular pattern, then doing operation 2 is going to be much easier using a GUI (I just click on the set of files I want and drag them)."

    Assuming no organized pattern then both methods would be slow. Remember the brain is a pattern-matching machine, be it verbal,graphical, or otherwise. If their is a pattern then the deciding factor of one over the other is what comparative sense is being used. .

    I agree, but if I want to identify three files from 50 in a GUI, all I have to do is find them in the list. If I want to do that in a CLI, I have to find them in the ls list, then copy each filename down into the cp command. Its more work that way.

  • Flame me all you want, but I always thought Windows Explorer was one of those very few really good products Redmond unleashed upon us.
    But the more I look at what Eazel is giving us, the more I think we're witnessing one of the biggest developments in the history of computing.
    People, this could be the second biggest thing to happen to computers (first being C language).
    I hope my karma can survive what is surely to come :)

    -----
  • I agree. When it was publicized that the Eazel guys were the folks that worked at Apple to design the original Mac interface, I was excited.

    I thought they were going to rearchitect the UI and do something that would be an imporovement and make the GUI more efficient, intuitive, and faster to use. I thought they were going to do something that's better than Winows and better than MacOS.

    But their strategy just seems to be yet another "I dunno what to do. Let's just copy Microsoft." strategy.

    How do you convice people to switch from MS Windows when what they'll see is another Windows?

    You don't. There has to be something better. We need a UI that mazimizes screen real estate, a UI that gives users automation/scripting capabilities, a UI that's faster to do things and find files and programs.

  • I have two questions...why is it, that with most of the *Nix community despising Microsoft, that every single new GUI that comes out ends up trying to be just like it?? Let's face it, that whole File View in Nautilus looks almost exactly like Win98/Win2k/IE4's 'Web View', which is a feature that is taken far too little advantage of. KDE has it too. The standard button alignment is also very close to that of Windows....what's the deal here people?? You've got a great product here, but you don't want to distinguish it for itself, or just running out of ideas?

    Because of the intended audience. The only operating system the vast majority of potential users have any experience with is Windows. A smaller number has experience with Macs. For better or worse, the pre-existing experiences of these users has to be taken into account. Like it or not, Microsoft has defined the user interface "standard" for a while.

  • I was hoping for something a little more interesting, maybe like Jakob Nielsen's Anti-Mac Interface [acm.org]. The so-called "next generation" Nautilus interface is just a hackjob of the Windows Explorer. Why is this company worth $11 million [eazel.com] in VC funding?

    They will never be a "better Windows than Windows". OS/2 tried and failed. Then again this might not be surprising, if you consider that these are the people [eazel.com] who created the horrible General Magic PDA interface.

    or maybe these screenshots are just a cover-up for the really cool stuff their developing... :-)
  • I second that recomendation. If you can get it going it's very cool. It is a nice change to have a command line and a GUI at the same time.

    --Ben

  • I meant 'faster' in terms of performance, not how quickly you can get things done (which, again, is a function of good user interface design).
  • For a site that is for a project part of GNOME it sure isn't pretty! Can't the spend a few minutes from coding and take a hint from pages like http://tigert.gimp.org and throw a few images up? hehe

    _joshua_
  • If you like RPM-based distros, Mandrake is the best -- specifically MandrakeUpdate, which does exactly what you ask. Then there's RedHat's up2date, which reliably crashes 75% through doing what you ask. Then there's Debian's apt-get, which is not for the impatient but certainly has its adherents.

    Best of all, there's rpmfind --latest and a little bit of shell script.
  • Screenshots are great, but it would be really cool to have something to play with. Right now I am really worried that it is going to be a memory hog. Are there any plans for a preview release any time soon? Also, one thing I would really like to see is improved maneuvering with the keyboard in X. I would like to be able to do everything with just the keyboard if I have to. I know that it is possible to map the mouse pointer to the keypad in X, but on a high-resolution monitor it is just too slow. Now that I think about it, maybe they could just improve on this feature in X...
  • > nice attempt at flame, but hell, I'll bite.

    I guess it can be interpreted as a flame. But I really hate zealotry.

    > 1) MSIE is componentized as well.

    Yes. I don't understand the point though.

    > 2) You make claims about power and ease-of-use
    > based on some screenshots. Is this because the
    > icons are prettier than MSIE's? Seems to me you
    > can't talk about either property without having
    > used the system to do something.

    This is a GUI app. Much of the functionality is apparent from screenshots! The power claim is easy. Do you see the web browser? Do you see the mp3 player? That is power. Ease-of-use claim is left as a trivial exercise to the reader.

    > 3) I agree that there is utility in blending
    > functionality within a single GUI. But there is
    > much greater utility in the command line because
    > the command line can be utilized remotely, over
    > a modem if need be, with very little loss of
    > power or responsiveness. The UI you choose
    > depends on the purpose for which you are using
    > the system. If you're using it to replace a
    > bunch of Windows terminals, then Nautilus is for
    > you.

    Nautilus *can* be used remotely (from others who have used it, I haven't). I am not here to tell you the command line is obsolete. There are thousands of people who are used to this interface and there will be things that can only be done in this form for quite some time. What I *am* trying to do is open your eyes. This isn't about Microsoft and it never was. It is about making more use out of the capabilities of modern computers. And bringing everyone else with us.
  • Are you kidding? Konqueror is even slower? On NT Explorer (NOT IE, regular Explorer) pops right up. Same thing with Tracker (BeOS.) However, Konqueror takes just as long as IE to load. And when I simply want to move a file, it really isn't worth it. My point (which you seem to miss) is that feature bloat is BAD. There is no real reason to integrate web-browsing and file browsing. There is no reason to draw your interface with XML. If you took regular Windows Explorer, added back and forward buttons, and let the user specify a custom background picture, then 99% of people wouldn't notice that it wasn't IE. Same thing with Mozilla. If you rip out the XML renderer as UI thing and replaced it with a conventional themable UI, 99% of people wouldn't notice the difference except the fact that it was more responsive. The problem with GNOME is that it is subscribing to the same feature bloat as Microsoft is. The difference is that GNOME doesn't have to. MS needs to sell it's software. It needs to put in features to make it so you have to upgrade very two years. GNOME doesn't have to do that. All it has to do is make the best DE possible. Sure it sounds cool on paper that GNOME is so feature rich, you can run objects on remote UNIX servers via CORBA, that the file manager is based on a powerful XML renderer which is also a CORBA component, etc. However, what does that gain you? How many of you have access to high performance remote CORBA servers? How many people are going to write custom XUL files for Mozilla? How many people will notice (or care) that XUL is so much more powerful than a conventional themable UI. All people will notice is that CORBA takes more memory than COM, and that Mozilla's UI is very unresponsive. Rich, powerful components have no place in a core system like GNOME. The simple stuff should be clean, fast, and modular. Take COM/DCOM for example. The standard COM can't handle remote connections. However, install DCOM (and put up with the resulting increase in memory use) and you've got something that come close ot CORBA in power. (People|Companies|Projects|Groups) in GNOME's position really shouldn't program for that 1% of the population that needs the extra features. They should program their app simple and fast for the 99% and make it modular so the other 1% can extend it if they need to. GNOME is currently running in the tens of megs. For a desktop environment that is simply too much. I can see why they do it, of course. Writing simple software isn't sexy. The allure of supporting every possible feature is probably just to great. But is DOES result in less than perfect software.
  • In response to the first comment, I think I got off on a tangent talking about GNOME. My point was that a good interface should be responsive. Engineering all this "neato" features may be more sexy, but in the end, 99% of people won't use these features, but WILL notice that their interface is slower.

    As for Microsoft, don't get me wrong. I am a big Microsoft fan, and I think it would be wise for Linux projects to emulate some of their practices. However, the fact remains that Windows by and large is heavily deteriorated by feature bloat. All this "whiz-bang" features that really aren't necessary hurt the environement. However, that is forgivable in Microsoft's case, they have upgrades to sell. However, projects like GNOME don't have that agenda.

    As for COM, it is a gift from god. COM and DirectX are two technologies sorely missing from Linux. However, CORBA and COM are two entirely different beasts. Wheras COM is a (relativly) simple API, CORBA is quite a beast. Look at the two APIs. You can actually write something COM-like in a week or two. Most of the stuff is simply a standard and the C++ compiler handles most of it. However, implementing CORBA in a week or two is impossible. It is simply too complex. And in that complexity lies the problem. COM (not DCOM, the distributed version) is simple enough to allow you to use it for something like an API, or even reusable objects like stacks, etc. No way in hell you'd use CORBA for an API (oh wait, isn't that what they're doing in Berlin-land? Another stupid feature-bloat idea.) A CORBA-based stack object? I'd like to see that! In GNOME, CORBA is going to be much less usefull then another system would have been. It takes to many resources, and I predict that it will never gain the acceptance that COM has.
  • While true...that doesnt necessitate a copy of the platform they have just come from. When features are copied so exactly, people will go and look at it and say "So? It looks just like Windows? Why should I switch when I already have that?"

    We should be concentrating on making a unique(but also very user-friendly) experience, not one that copies what we already have.


    -Julius X
  • Does anyone else find it mildly disturbing that whoever took the Mozilla screenshot was doing a search for "Darva Conger"?

  • Nautilus, Konqueror, and Embedded parts (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You mention that Konquerer already does all these things. Yes, it does. The problem is performance and reliability. I think others have commented on their concerns about poor performance with Gnome in dealing with very large files, lists of items such as files in directories being displayed, etc., even without Nautilus.

    Have you really used Konqueror for much? I have.
    Performance of gmc is much better than Konqueror. That's because gmc is much simpler and is currently only in maintenance while the "design wizards" (shudder) apply their techinique to Nautilus. I fear that Nautilus may blindly follow in the footsteps of Konqueror in designing in overcompexity using a component model that mimics Microsoft's COM without but the entire OS built around that system that MS has to enhance its performance at the expense of everything else.

    When dealing with very large directories or very large lists of anything to be displayed using this component architecture where every item is an object at least (often several embedded objects) performance drags to a crawl even with a very fast computer. This is apparent when loading large web pages with thousands of tags (even with no frames and no tables) because the page is treated as thousands of html "objects". Ditto very large files in OOP word processors (KWord). All these great "component based" apps become unusable.

    The architecture sucks because all these list and tree structures are fully loaded with data in their components which are created when data is read, instead of having their objects created and destroyed as needed for display and manipulation by the user. Moving these huge lists of objects around with every mouse click is insane. A solution to this problem has already been pointed out by a very competent observer on the kde mailing lists, "talin". No, that's not me. However, that solution was ignored.

    This seems like nitpicking but the magnitude of the problem becomes apparent when using the Kde 2 betas and alredy is somewhat true of stable Gnome (1.12). Has the Eazel team thought about ways to deal with such design problems? Not just the above described problem, but the inherent instability and impracticality of a rigid adherence to object oriented methodology in general? Ways to bypass CORBA entirely, for example, if so desired? I hope so.

    Currently Kde is fatally flawed because of over-reliance on parts and objects for everything, and every operation is also io-bound to the max. The degree of complexity and circluar dependencies in loading and unloading objects becomes unmanageable, and crashes become seemingly random and unpredictable. It is very obvious why things take so long to start - the loading and unloading of parts for every little thing, and the registering of so much io in the background.

    This is a shame because otherwise Kde 2 is so promising. If these kinds of problems are not addressed and some of the object oriented "theory" taught in CS departments coupled with mimicry of MS COM is not acknowledged to be the problem rather than the solution, it will only get worse.
    By that I mean a colossal, embarrassing failure.

    Kde team wake up! Gnomers, learn your lessons from the mistakes Kde is making (as well as the things they are doing right)! I do want these new desktop systems to be usable. We need you!

  • I agree, and would like to offer these comments:

    Compare the speed of:

    Move all files to parent directory

    • mv * .. (bash)
    • Ctrl+A Ctrl+X Backspace Ctrl+V (explorer)

    Move all files starting with a-n to the parent directory

    • mv [a-n]* .. (bash)
    • a press-shift m up release-shift ctrl+x Backspace Ctrl+V (explorer)

    Move them back:

    • Ctrl+z (explorer)
    • Not sure of the best way to do this with an existing CLI.

    Conclusions:

    1. Graphical file managers can be just as fast as CLIs for many operations.
    2. For me, the only useful file manager is one that supports intuitive keybindings, and does not require a mouse to be efficiently operated. This is why I enjoy the pre-win98 explorer and why SFM [chez.com] has become one of my most treasured linux apps.
    The problem I have with all file managers, possibly including Eazel, is the speed at which they do their work. I hate it so much when I arrow-key-navigate past a 300MB tiff in Windows Explorer and my system slows to a crawl trying to render a handy "preview" image I didn't even want to see in that particular case. Maybe easel will borrow from the 3d-videogame arena and have an option which renders in less detail as the system load increases.

    If I were to build a desktop operating system/windowing system/file manager geared toward end users on desktop PC's, its first priority would be the user interface responsiveness. I don't care about disk writes, backup drives, underrunning CD-R's, whatever... the user interface, above all, must be perpetually snappy and responsive, no matter what else the system might want to do at the time. I get mad when my machine won't listen when I'm trying to tell it something. And I mean immediate. When that mouse button goes down, 1.5 seconds is far too long to wait for a popup menu.

    If I were the designer of a windowing system and file manager, it would be a GUI at the very base-level (see the MacOS), and it would integrate a cool drag n drop GUI file manager with the BASH shell. As in, you could use a single keystroke to switch from GUI-Mode to terminal-mode. (Terminal using antialiased fonts, of course.) From there, maybe version 2 could implement a Mozshell-like blend to create a terminal that is supplemented with graphics. Anytbody know of existing software that approximates this?

    Comments, whatever. Apologies for the poor grammar and lack of focus. I'm just textually mumbling to myself at this point.

  • I run helix gnome on a 350MHz with 64 megs of ram, and it runs fine. I don't think it's Gnome itself thats slowing you down. I run Linux, though, so maybe it's something to do with the FreeBSD port, who knows. YMMV.

    Here's my [radiks.net] DeCSS mirror. Where's yours?

  • Microsoft's OS's are buggy and bloated, but they did get the UI right in many ways.

    Actually, wih reference to windows controls, they fucked up big time, by putting the close button right next to the non-destructive minimise/maximise buttons. One slip of the mouse, and that soon-to-be maximised window is now destroyed. The Mac platinum interface is much better as it has the close button on the left by itself, with the minimise/maximise buttons over on the right.
  • Nice, another piece in the puzzle. Lets keep this in proportion tho'. it does not look like that huge an improvement on Midnight Commander.

    Displaying the properties of the mp3s is a nifty feature and i like it :)

    --
    Cumulative, cumulative, cumulative, the biggest advantage of open source is you dont have to reinvent the wheel.

  • Real-time Simulation (Score:5)

    by Hrunting ( 2191 ) on Saturday August 05, 2000 @07:23AM (#877914) Homepage
    The thing is, with Slashdot hitting the site so hard, you're probably getting a real-time simulation of how the pretty GUI will load on your system.

    Cheers.
  • I thought the Nautalis was still buried deep under the ocean who-knows-where after that affair with the hurricane and the giant squid. I mean, I know they have all those new submersibles and the Jason and things like that, but I didn't know they knew where the nautalis was located, let alone go down there and take pictures of it.

    Will the wonders of science never cease?

    --
  • I'd love to see how Nautilus could render some other directories, such as /proc, /var, /etc... The possibilities could be pretty interesting. inetd.conf component, a /proc process browser..
  • Grammar my sucks!
  • Anyone who is dissatisfied with their file manager under Unix/Linux should check out FileRunner http://www.cd.chalmers.se/~hch/filerunner.html.

    Among other things the fact that much of it is written in TCL makes it easy to hack customisations.

    I use this all day at work.
  • Well in between all the big graphical images it still reminds me of a mac file manager interface. I don't have much experience with the mac, but it still looked vaugely familiar. (Well, with a few guys who worked on the mac originally, I can see why). The other images wont load now, most likely due to the /. effect but from what I did see it's starting to look much cleaner and nicer.

    Oh well, hopefully the natilus shell and file manager will be stable and useful and included in GNOME. I think it'll attract many "newbie" style users. I like the idea of user levels and the structure/capibilities you can change. That's a good idea and hopefully it will be implemented carefully. I have faith in these guys. I never liked the mac but hell, I can say these guys can't hurt, they can only help. :-)

    Oh welpers

  • All the people who said "it's hideously ugly" or "it doesn't have feature X so it sucks" can eat their words. Funny how programs in heavy development sometimes don't look too pretty and shouldn't be critically analyzed in their early stages!
  • For most tasks, Windows Explorer is still the fastest and easiest way to move files around the system.

    I don't know what all this stylized presentation garbage is all about, but I can imagine it's a real hog of CPU and memory resources to preview the contents of every item in a folder. I thought we had "long" filenames covering the job of explaining to the user what the contents of a file are.

    The single folder view is really obnoxious. With the Explorer "All Folders" panel, files can be moved just about anywhere with ease. When I upgraded my W2K workstation with a new hard drive and reinstalled the OS, it was EASY to drop files from the old drive into the new one before wiping it and giving the Linux box a nice upgrade, too. Interface experts be damned, I want my multi-panel display!

  • Good news (Score:4)

    by MostlyHarmless ( 75501 ) <artdent@freeshe[ ]org ['ll.' in gap]> on Saturday August 05, 2000 @07:33AM (#877922)
    The good news is that from this screenshot it looks like they're using gecko embedded through bonobo, skipping the mozilla framework itself. This is a good thing (not a Good Thing(tm)). Mozilla tries to be a platform, not just a browser; this conflicts with Nautilis also aiming to be a platform, not just a file browser. The end result would be a huge bloaty product. However, by just using Gecko, you get your file browser to be the platform (better than the web browser) while still having a speedy web browser for web pages.

    Hmm, a file browser + web browser without the bloat of two separate products. Sounds kind of like Internet Explorer minus the bugs and security holes.
    --

  • Re:Usefulness of a file manager (Score:3)

    by gwernol ( 167574 ) on Saturday August 05, 2000 @08:37AM (#877923)

    While a file manager is useful to a newbie, I always find that I can get work done faster using a cli to a good shell like bash.

    Then I would highly recommend you continue to use a CLI.

    A file manager is to a cli as a first grade primer is to a novel.

    Why be so offensive? Are you simply trolling? File Managers are not signficantly less powerful than CLIs. They are good at different types of operation, and they suit some people better than others. Many people are more visually-oriented than verbally-oriented. The former tend to prefer GUIs, the later CLIs. The fact that GUIs are considerably more popular than CLIs is some evidence that more people are visually-oriented than verbally.

    One can be lot more expressive with text that with pictures. Sure, a picture is equal to a thousand words but the only problem is 'which one?!'

    I disagree. Two scenarios:

    1. I want to move all the files that end in .txt from directory A to directory B

    2. I want to move all the files whose contents relate to my web site from directory A to directory B

    Obviously a CLI like bash is going to be more efficient at expressing the commands for 1. But assuming that the files related to my web site are not organized according to a regular pattern, then doing operation 2 is going to be much easier using a GUI (I just click on the set of files I want and drag them).

    Even when there is a regular pattern of files you want to work with, a GUI can often be easier (if less efficient) because I can just select the files I want directly, and I don't have to go through the cognitive process of forming the right pattern-matching command. If I want to pick 3 files out of 50, it often feels quicker to just click on them in a GUI view, than figure out the particular command that would select just those files. And in UI what feels quicker is often "better" (i.e. prefered by users) than the actually optimal strategy.

    GUIs and CLIs are different tools that are optimized for different purposes. Both have strengths and weaknesses. I personally like to have both running and feel free to switch between them.

  • Can somebody post a mirror please?
    Thank you!
  • I wish it was just a huge database of software that I could pick from :)

    Try rpmfind.net [rpmfind.net]. You can browse it online, or use the rpmfind [rpmfind.net] tool. Not quite as pointy-clicky as helix-update, but a great resource nonetheless...

    ---

  • Why doesn't /. ever get /.ed? I mean if they can take Apple's site out, that's some serious hardware /. is running on!
  • this_is_a_picture_of_the_house.png
    This_is_another_picture_of_the_house_but_closer. png
    Yet_another_picture.png

    However, with preview, I can tell at a glance which is which. And just so you know, I didn't make those filenames up. Someone on our network dropped them on the shared drive.

    Anyways, just a couple examples of why previewing files is sometimes more efficent (or userfriendly) then long_descriptive_filesnames.txt
  • Slashdot is run on a load balancing system, with separate servers for database, images, static pages, etc, from what I remember reading. How else do you handle half the geeks in the country compulsively hitting "reload" every five minutes?

    "What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is"

  • Writing bloated code and hoping proc's will get fast enough is something best left to Microsoft

    That's not what I said. Quality user interface design and bloated code are 2 completely different things.

    GNOME these days is reeking of Microsoft.

    Microsoft dominate more than 90% of the desktop market. They must have done *something* right. And code re-use with COM+ is one of those things.

  • I'm having trouble seeing them because Netscape to this day has problems with PNG. Every time I click on one of the image links, I get some funky reference to my browser's cache followed by "unknown or unsupported image type".

    Help?
    ----------

  • This is the truth. Helvetica (often 12-pt) is the default font. Helvetica was never meant for a screen font at all -- it was designed for printing headlines.

    The standard console font is very nice for console work, but it's too big for X work, and doesn't scale down nicely.

    For some reason, Chicago and Charcoal just don't feel right on X. This is probably because they were designed for other GUI's. A good font for X, would need to be bitmap (10, 12, 14 pt.), postscript, and probably truetype. Anti-aliasing would also help, Keith Packard of XFree is doing work on this, I have heard (doing rendering fast client side).

    I have to agree it's time for a new X default non-monospaced font. Fixed in X is a pretty good monospaced font, but as it name implies, it's not at all scalable. Something existing just won't cut it -- even KDE's attempts at making a bolder default font (Helvetica Bold 10), seemed out of place.
  • Sorry to burst your bubble, but Eazel also has ex-NeXT people, and they know a thing or two about file browsers.

    (having given Microsoft the "inspiration")

    --
  • How is efm's stability? I'm itching to try it based on your description, but I'm a bit wary about any software (and particularly file managers) with version number 0.0.0. Then again, Enlightenment is still at version 0.16.4 and I use it all the time without problems, so it could easily be that the e people are very conservative in their version assignments. How would you rate efm on stability?

  • Re:Last Post (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why not innovate new ways? Because if it isn't broken, don't fix it. To attempt to do so would be to make the same mistake that KDE has made for 2.x. They've changed the interface all around and made it more macintrash like. To boot there is no way to change it back so that it works like kde 1.x.

    To me this is a very bad bad thing. New revisions are supposed to offer improvements to products. I hardly call macintrashing an interface an improvement. Just like apple, the KDE group has shot itself in the foot. I think they may have done it in response to the anti-windows zealots who probably bitched to high heaven about KDE looking and working like windows. Once again, if it isn't broken, don't fix it. KDE is supposed to be a newbie friendly desktop environment. Well guess where most newbies are coming to linux from? I personally prefer the windows UI for many things. It stays out of your way for one thing. I can maximize all my apps and switch between them from the toolbar on the bottom. There aren't some screwy buttons or windows that you need to control the UI which are always on the screen getting covered up by maximized windows.

    To me the perfect window manager is KDE 1.x, after some tweaking. I make the Kpanel run vertically along the left side of the screen and put the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. On the Kpanel I have an icons for Xterm and netscape. Another leads to a submenu with xxmix, xmcd, and xmms. I've got one other icon for xkill, so I can kill progs that are running awry without opening up an xterm and typing kill -9 ...

    Any other program I need to run I start from a shell prompt. The fact that KDE's maximize, minimize and kill buttons are in the same place as windows is a good thing.

    Microsoft's OS's are buggy and bloated, but they did get the UI right in many ways. Like I said, the UI is simple, lets you get your work done, and stays out of your way. It doesn't make you jump through hoops to resize windows and it doesn't make you have to worry about whether app X is going to cover up window manager window Y that is needed to function Z.

    I know this is in response to a troll, but the very idea that a project should "innovate" rather than make use of successful patterns that already exist simply because they come from microsoft is pretty damned stupid.

    Religion belongs in church, not in OS design.

  • Ah, only an AC changes topics in mid paragraph.
  • ok, i've got 128megs of ram, a 3gig drive, and a peppy celeron. if i need more storage i have big servers at home and work. but...

    i have an 800x600 screen.

    can't really change that. but gnome apps seem to want/expect 1024x768. open the control panel. look at the gnome gpg tool.

    please, please, PLEASE remember us laptop users. please.
  • I've tried to get EFM from CVS, but all I get is:

    cvs [login aborted]: recv() from server cvs.enlightenment.org: Connection reset by peer

    Wah. Wish that there were daily snaps of EFM. It looks rather interesting.
  • > Then there's Debian's apt-get, which is not for the impatient but certainly has its adherents.

    The impatient should probably try fiddling with their /etc/apt/sources.list ... http.us.debian.org
    ends up being much faster than ftp.debian.org because the former redirects to a number of different http hosts, while the latter is a single ftp server. -- $.02
  • In my experience, EFM (from CVS about a month ago) is very stable, as well as being exceptionally lovely. Try it. If you like the command line, you'll love it.

    My favorite feature is that you can type commands, file names, and web sites right into the root window, and it does the appropriate thing. - for example you could just type "www.slashdot.org", and it brings up netscape with slashdot loading. You could type "/home/mp3", and it will bring up your mp3 directory. Or you could just type "killall mozilla-bin", and it would run the command.

    And don't even get me started about the background image quality, antialiased truetype fonts, and font styles...

    Abe

  • I find that MandrakeUpdate is not very useful. It has only 27 packages listed right now, even though there are certainly more packages on my system that could be updated. Also, it lists XEmacs, for instance, as "essential," even though a) it's not essential in the first place and b) I already have the same version, down to the patch number. Helix Update is far more useful: it only lists things that you actually don't have, and its assessments of your needs are more plausible.
  • The icons are not only prettier, they are more informationally rich. There is a world of difference between a cartoon drawing of a portrait with a filename ending in '.jpeg', and a thumbnail of a JPEG file.
  • Try the Uniread font from the Linux Font Project [nitro.dk], among other fonts.
  • Has anyone ever browsed an FTP site in IE? Notice how it looked *exactly* like any other folder in Windows Explorer? That is the *point*! It is called usability, people. It is called ease of use, people. The best interface is when everything looks the same! It is also called power.

    Have you ever tried dragging files in IE's ftp? (Version 4, not 5+). You can't drag them to the desktop. An interface sucks if it is not consistant.


    -- Thrakkerzog
  • Yes, and you can do this in 5.0 and up. Yes, they fixed the problem. I seems that since you posted above you can't do this in 4, not 5+ you knew this already...so why bother trashing them just for kicks?
  • Easy there, tiger.

    I wasn't trashing anything. I'm just saying that using the same interface is pointless if the functionality is not the same.


    -- Thrakkerzog
  • I don't know what all this stylized presentation garbage is all about, but I can imagine it's a real hog of CPU and memory resources to preview the contents of every item in a folder.

    This isn't an issue with the interface design. Since neither of us have either used it we can't really speculate on how fast it will be, but I bet that won't be an issue in the future - we'll all be running 4 ghz Athlons with gigs of RAM and Nautilus will fly. Think about it - Explorer is *much* slower than MC, but you seem to think it's a good design. The most important thing Nautilus has to concentrate on is good user interface design, and worry about performance optimization later.

    Interface experts be damned, I want my multi-panel display!

    I would be very surprised if the final release of Nautilus doesn't have this in one form or another. They probably just didn't take screenshots of it.



    • You see, soon novice users will have the power to do some of things you *can't* on the command-line. And that makes you mad. And makes you label Nautilus a Windows clone. Grow up.



    Yes, that does make me mad (er, just annoyed enough at the shortsightedness of it to speak up). No it's not immaturity at all.

    Linux/unix's big strength relative to other operating systems is its scriptability. Don't get me wrong, I'm appreciating GUI's more all the time, in fact sometimes I feel grumpy if I have to open an rxvt to get something done.

    So bring on the GUI, but most definitely, don't give up the scriptability. The ideal system allows you to do everything from a GUI and everything from a CLI, and to easily find out how doing something in one could have been done in the other.

  • I dualboot Win95 and SuSE 6.4 and can compare them for a 233Mhz Pentium w/ MXX and 128Mb ram.
    GMC and Explorer are similar in speed.
    MC is so much faster that even in X I use MC most of the time.
    In regards to using a mouse, perhaps you are thinking of Lynx in file manager mode? Rather than MC?
  • And then, after you get all that tasty Karma you can...you can...well...you can do whatever it is that pisses off all those "Karma Whore!" shrieking Anonymous Cowards!

  • Having Trouble Loading Images? (Score:5)

    by LionKimbro ( 200000 ) on Saturday August 05, 2000 @07:42AM (#877951) Homepage

    I've mirrored some of the images. [taoriver.net] (They are quite impressive; Note that as you zoom in on a text file, you can actually read the text within the file..!)

    Consider it an experiment in Slashdotting.

  • Well as far as loading time. Relative to other WEB BROWSERS it loads pretty quickly. Being that Explorer is integrated with the whole Windows environment it does give explorer an edge. Anyway as Konqueror reaches it finalized form I bet it will be faster and more responsive. I don't use Konqueror as a file manager and I really don't plan on using it as one. I need it for one thing. Web and maybe quick FTP.

  • Major problem with nautilus (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This thing is going to be too damn slow when viewing a directory with lots of files. I hope this will be available via helix update. It would be nice if I could get everything from helix update -- not just helix/gnome stuff. Like I wish I could get stuff like star office, wordperfect, various games... everything -- I wish it was just a huge database of software that I could pick from :) even drivers and kernels!! oh yeah and mp3s. Also I wish I could do my grocery shopping from it :)
  • Unfortunately, karma doesn't seem to be moving for people over 50 (karma, not age). It kinda takes the fun out of it :-(

    --
  • Slashdot didn't take out Apple.com by themselves, the combined linkage from all of the press really slowed it down though.
  • The short answer is that Nautilus is Eazel's open source replacement for the current Gnome file manager, gmc. As the Gnome hackers discovered once they were deep into the project, Midnight Commander [gnome.org] wasn't the greatest of file managers to use as a starting point for a Gnome file manager. Also, as The Gnome Project [gnome.org] has matured, we have new technologies to work with, such as Bonobo [helixcode.com]. Nautilus will use these new advances in the Gnome framework to provide a next generation file manager for the Gnome Project. Nautilus will not only allow you to manage your files, but also to view documents using embedded viewers. The next generation Gnome help system will use nautilus, for example. Once nautilus is released as part of the Gnome desktop, users will notice an incredible difference as it will play a very integral part, and should appeal to newbies and Unix experts alike.
    ----
  • I think many window managers really miss the boat on usability. Many of them are designed to look cool with utility taking the back seat.

    A window manager is a program designed to help you make better use of other programs. As such it should not interfere with the function of other programs. It should stay out of your way.

    A window manager should provide a simple method for starting new programs and an easy way to switch between running programs. The fewer steps necessary to do both the better.

    If you look at windows, particularly win98 with its desktop enhancements, it does a very good job of this.

    Running tasks are all shown in a bar along the bottom, allowing you to quickly switch to any task. When windows are maximized they do not cover this bar. The menus under the start button allow you to start up any application which is on the system. Links to frequently used programs can be inserted in an area next to the start menu so that they are always immediately accessible.

    With other window managers more effort it needed to keep the desktop in a usable state. Maximize a window and it covers up things you don't want covered. Or it might only maximize vertically instead of truly maximizing. The users has to spend time and effort managing the windows when that is what a window manager is supposed to do.

    It seems that people who create window managers spend a lot of time and effort making it look fancy and themable and all that instead of concentrating on making it useful. Also they may intentionally make it different from windows out of some misplaced zealousness against anything microsoft.

    KDE for the most part gets it right, at least in the 1.x version. The default config for it isn't as good as it could be, but it is easy to fix.

    2.x on the other hand has been broken. I'm going to have to find another window manager because I can't stand the one in KDE2. The only thing I use KDE for is its window manager anyway, so moving to something else is no big loss.

    But unfortuneately it looks as if I'm going to have to write my own window manager. All the ones I've seen are broken in some way or another.

    At one time we were all stuck with FVWM or MWM, or OLWM. Those days really sucked. We made do with those because there wasn't anything better. But then things like Afterstep started showing up and life got better. But now it seems that things are going backwards again, back towards cumbersome complex desktops that fight you rather than help you.

    I won't have it. I'll write my own WM rather than be forced to play games with one that doesn't work right.

    Lee
  • Am I the only one who thinks that Nautilus is really ugly? It looks like the window manager has a seperate theme from the menus, and the menus have a seperate theme from the actual body. And do you know how SLOW its going to be loading EVERY SINGLE FILE before displaying it? Thats pictures, text files, etc.

    I am in no way a microsoft fan but I'm afraid microsoft has it right with Explorer. You click on My Computer, it opens up instantly, no bloat. You want to use the web, type a web address, THEN it loads up web components. Same thing with BeOS. The tracker is very efficient and small, and gets the job done. I'm beginning to feel like it isn't worth it to open up the file manager in KDE/Gnome to copy a few files since its 10x easier in a shell.

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