I was recently pondering file managers, too. A discussion a while ago covered how "regular users" should never need to use a file manager. Software like F-Spot and Rhythmbox in Ubuntu, as well as our *fantastic *drag and drop support, makes this a definite possibility. I can grab one of my photographs and edit it in GIMP without touching the horrendously ugly file hierarchy. In the future, this type of functionality will be incorporated more and more. There is work to integrate desktop search and backups under a single command set. The result of standardization there is the ability for those applications which abstract files to easily incorporate integrated functions for backing up and restoring content -- all without needing to know where that content is stored.
The desktop seems, to me, the next logical step. I have never understood what arbitrary thinking has this happening in desktop environments, but it is wrong. The file managers should be an interface that goes where you tell it to go, so it should indeed be able to go on the desktop. However, the desktop background itself should, by default, be handled by a different program entirely. I'm not thinking it should do much other than integrate with the file manager, mind. Baby steps, here... The main goal would just be to trim down and straighten up the uses of Nautilus. Right now, default file managers are bloated pigs because they are arbitrarily expected to handle the entire desktop experience. That made sense 20 years ago, but the shell has evolved far past that and no longer requires *anything* to do with file management. Granted, everyone has to use the file manager from time to time. That will not (and should not) stop being the case! However, The problem with file managers is that everything is presented as equal. I am going to use a basic photo CD as an example. Often, people may want to use such a disk with their Linux computers, but (of course!) the CD's software will not work. The alternative is to poke through the files via the file manager. Traumatizing, for the uninitiated. One major problem here is that every file is presented equal. Be it a tiny database file, an unusable Windows executable or the many photographs that the user actually cares about, each file is presented in the same visual space, where the only way to find out which ones are important is to manually read each file name and look at the icons. This gets particularly disorienting when those important files are in subdirectories. I think that can change! It would be neat to see an intelligent task-oriented file manager, that presented files all differently depending on how much weight they bear in a particular task. The task could be determined by details such as installed software (available MIME type handlers) average type of files present within a particular depth, and the user's habits determined from files he has accessed before. Such a file manager could display files not just as a neutral grid where everything is the same, but as something more like a web page, where the files that the user may be interested in get more attention. For example, photo CDs usually have the actual content crammed into some far off directory. With conventional file managers, this is difficult to figure out. With the file manager of the future, the system could think "hey, lots of very large images, just like those ones that user was looking at last week! those must be important!". Even with those images in a distant directory, they could be given more weight, which is carried back to their parent directories. Thus, the photo CD and the directory with those notable images gets extra weight. Considering how cool *that* would be, conventional file managers seem like 1980s technology whose front-ends deserve no further life in this world. -Dylan McCall On Fri, Feb 8, 2008 at 7:54 AM, Greg K Nicholson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Fri, 2008-02-08 at 14:52 +0000, Webmaster, Jhnet.co.uk wrote: > > how is it possibly a good idea to 1) Have a programs list that > > *SCROLLS*, 2) Have all the programs at the top of the menu (when you > > open the menu by clicking something underneath it). > ... > > most frequently used/last used programs as shortcut icons next to the > > traditional menus. > ... > > most importantly it gives *single click* access to programs! > > This sounds somewhat like Symphony OS's Mezzo desktop > ( > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezzo_(desktop_environment)<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezzo_%28desktop_environment%29>) > and gOS's > approach (though the latter seems less well-thought-out). > > > The reason I am so keen on clinging on to the old classic menu is that > > the gnome menu is almost completely organized in a useful manner. > > This was one of the things that attracted me from Windows to Gnome. > > -- > Greg K Nicholson > > > > > > -- > ubuntu-art mailing list > ubuntu-art@lists.ubuntu.com > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-art >
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