Hi all, I've been taking another look at the "add drive" designs for Nautilus, which will hopefully be worked on as a GSoC project this summer. There are a few elements to the design, and there are some open questions about it (both design and technical), so I wanted to lay it all out in writing.
There are a couple of goals for the design: 1. Retire the existing "Browse Network" part of Nautilus - it's clunky, seems rather old fashioned, and overlaps with "Connect to Server". 2. Stop showing all internal volumes in the sidebar - they're not relevant a lot of the time, and clutter the sidebar. The design aims to address these goals by: * Merging "Browse Network" into the "Connect to Server" dialog. Where you currently see a list of recent servers, there would also be a list of servers that have been discovered on the network. * Instead of showing all internal volumes in the sidebar, hide them by default but add controls to allow the user to configure which ones are displayed. A further step could involve merging Connect to Server with drive configuration, into a generic "Add Drive" dialog (which could be called something else, such as "Add Drives and Servers") [1]. As far as I'm concerned, there are a number of open questions which could influence the final design. These are: 1. Is it possible to discover servers on the network, in order to present them in a list? Are there scenarios where this wouldn't work for UX reasons (say, in environments where there are a lot of servers)? 2. Should we include online account configuration? This could be a good place to advertise that you can add OwnCloud to the sidebar (and hopefully Google Drive in the future). 3. Related to the previous question - what is the best way to describe "Connect to Server"? Common terminology is evolving in this area - are these servers, "cloud drives", "online accounts", or something else? 4. Depending on question 2 and 3 - does it make sense to merge Connect to Server and a dialog for adding internal drives? To some people, "servers" and "disks" might not logically go together. Also, disk configuration might work better as a preferences dialog, rather than an action dialog. The mockup experiments might help to clarify the significance of some of these questions [1]. Finally, if we do make these changes, we should think about how to help users adjust to the new design - we shouldn't just hide internal drives, or retire Browse Network, without providing some guidance. We should design some kind of information bubble or dialog that explains the changes to users. I consider this guidance to be an essential part of the design task. Allan [1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/nautilus/nautilus-next/add-drive-experiments.png -- nautilus-list mailing list nautilus-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/nautilus-list