On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 03:06:37PM +0100, Allan Day wrote: > 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).
It would probably be good to include available cloud drives (e.g. if you've already signed into an owncloud account) with a link to Online Accounts if you're not signed in. > > 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? I dunno, "network volume" maybe? Perhaps that's too geeky. What do other OSes call them? I think cloud drives is good for personal storage over the internet (e.g. an owncloud setup) but not so good for a local windows share. > > 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]. I like the last one "Add Disks and Servers", although I think it should be possible to also include online accounts in that list too. From a technical perspective, an owncloud account is just a webdav share, so it seems weird to treat it differently. Having a single list of mountable volumes regardless of their location seems like the cleanest approach since from a user's perspective, there should be little difference in behavior between a local disk, an sftp mount and a Google drive. Perhaps the UI for adding a drive to the sidebar can be unified with adding a bookmark for a network volume? -- Ross Lagerwall
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