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Re: Replacing Nautilus

 

On 05/06/2012 12:32 AM, Gregory Merchan wrote:
While emblems allowed some distinction, a
tweak to the icon color would have allowed distinctions that carried
over into the modes with smaller icons.

Uniform walls of folder icons are indeed not very helpful. An old concept, going beyond just color or emblems:
http://thorwil.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/infolders-informative-folders/


Mainstream GNOME has all but abandoned Nautilus in favor of
single-purpose applications. That could be just an implementation
detail, but I don't think I've seen the kind of cohesion that you'd get
from a good workplace shell, like Nautilus could have been. Unity
development seems to be proceeding on the premise that a file manager is
not needed.

Renaming, moving, copying and deleting files hasn't been addressed outside of file managers (or the commandline), so I don't see how current GNOME or Unity could do without.


As I see it, there's a need for Unity to have it's own file manager. I
haven't seen any designs for this, at least none I liked enough to
remember. Is anyone else giving this any thought? What's going to
replace Nautilus?

I agree with much you said and do think this should be addressed. I have to warn against starting a design from "replacement for Nautilus" or "a file-manager", though. The best answer is not necessarily an application, technically or in appearance.


The Dash, the file dialogs, Nautilus (or similar file-managers) and the commandline all offer different modes of access with varying capabilities. That's a whole library of mental models a user needs to pick the best way for some tasks, plus the cost of choosing many times over.

- Are all the differences necessary; what are the costs and opportunities of unification?
- Could at least file-open dialogs be made similar to the Dash?
- Could we avoid file dialogs entirely?
- Could the Dash be extended for managing files or could a file-manager be Dash-like?
- Are the file and folder semantics even the right answer to user needs?



--
Thorsten Wilms

thorwil's design for free software:
http://thorwil.wordpress.com/


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