unity-design team mailing list archive

["frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx" <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Michael,

On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 00:43, Michael Shallcrass <mshallcrass@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> Often the actual file name is unrelated to the metadata (track1.mp3 etc..)
> and so it would be very useful in those situations to be able to view the
> metadata directly within the nautilus windows without having to look into
> file properties.
>

Thank you! That's why the metadata, description and comments for a song or
movie are by far more important to the user than the filename.


> If you are looking for an 'easy' way to tag files though, surely a well
> integrated fingerprinting system is going to be as simple as is gets. Right
> click a file (or interact with it somehow that brings up the option,) select
> "Automatically fill metadata" - or something more elegant and user friendly,
> and it just happens.
>

yeah, of course we never want a long way to where we're going.
MacOS for example shows a playbutton on audiofiles, when the mouse is
hovering them. You can then press that button right on the file (its iconic
representation on the Desktop/Finder). Nautilus has a preview on hover for
audiofiles, but users are often confused and don't know where the sound is
coming from..
Better direct manipulation plus an application with a specialized interface
(e.g. Rhythmbox) than only the specialized interface, inaccessible to most
new users.

Looking into the future of the semantic desktop though, isn't the plan to
> move away from file/folder mentality, rendering Nautilus largely redundant?
> Maybe we should be thinking about a more global system for dealing with
> metadata, or at lease one that doesn't need to have a nautilus window open.
>

I'd be careful with ditching Nautilus just like that, there's a lot of
useful code in there, which the entire semantic desktop can build on
beautifully.
Let's rather focus on how to make the GUI of Nautilus more immediate to the
objects it wants to help us manage, forget about the Norton Commander 2-Pane
image Filemanagers have and look at stuff like GVFS or most important to
this particular cause: GNOME Storage¹.

GNOME Storage addresses pretty much everything you suggest, and i hope that
we can all profit of the linguistics research behind it.

¹ http://people.gnome.org/~seth/storage/features.html