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GNOME GUI

Eazel's Nautilus Preview 1 Released 249

Posted by Hemos from the you're-purty-as-a-picture dept.
menthos writes: "Eazel released the first preview release of Nautilus, the new GNOME file manager in development, at the LinuxWorld Expo. You can Download Preview Release 1."
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Nautilus Preview 1 Released More

Nautilus Preview 1 Released

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  • > Thus if I have three JPG images in a directory named:

    > FSMHSusNM131_N2.jpg
    > FSMusNM131_G8.jpg
    > FSMHSusNM132_N5.jpg
    > (and I do,) then I can select any one of these
    > using at most two keypresses and two arrowkeys.

    > On Linux, If I were to do anything to the third file, I would have to type FSMH(tab)2(tab) while
    > squinting to see what was different about the filenames.

    Assuming those are the only files in the directory, to select the 3rd file, I would just
    press alt-g (I have alt-g bound to menu-complete backwards in bash).

    If there were other files just do FSM(alt-g), or FSM(alt-v)(alt-v) for the 2nd file, etc.
  • All the features are cool, but I really need a combination of functionaltiy and speed. There are definite advantages to the GNOME architecture and Bonobo, but if it takes a few minutes to load a directory, then I am going to be annoyed. I recognize that this is a preview release, but this is something I hope you guys will address.

    A few questions:
    1. I hate Eye of Gnome, I prefer GQview. I know that it is possible to map the mime types to GQview, but will I no longer be able to preview images without Eye of Gnome installed (as I understand it, Nautilus uses Eye of Gnome w/ Bonobo)?

    2. Where can I find more information about programming for Nautilus? For example, I would like to map certain mime types to my application, so the user does not have to do it manually.

    Keep up the good work.
  • It we are going to redesign that whole setup of icons and windows and stuff it should be something more effecient. Something that would make it more effecient for the user to use, access, and modify the data.
    And of course, it should be effecient code :)

    just my $.02 - wiremind

  • Of course you could simplify this even more by using:

    [mark@pate mark]$ su -c "cp index.html /home/httpd/html"
    Password:
    cp: overwrite '/home/httpd/html/index.html'? y
    [mark@pate mark]$

  • Ok, ok.... it looks a bit pretty, but why can't anyone make a good NC clone for linux. I know, there is one million attempts, but most are not nearly finished, and those who are (MC) are not much to my liking.

    I like wincmd, it's the best NC clone I've ever seen, but it could be better.
  • I already have come and been shown the grand tour, and may I say you have the best designed business cards at the whole expo as well ;)
  • Sounds good - very good in fact.

    I still want to be able to use the GUI itself to do root commands though. Some things, like moving files around just make more sense to me in a graphical context...

  • I have to point out that the nautilus FM/explorer interface looks as if it could translate well to webtops, consoles and even PDA's fairly well.

    That can't be said for win explorer. I might even try adding some components if they aren't already present such as open file with program y (in new window)(in desktop x), etc as that would be very useful - intergrated command line with D&D/C&P would also rock a lot.

    Aaron.
  • Okay, sounds good.

    If I install this with Gnome, what functionality will I get? Will drag and drop work (not that I really use it apart from netscape) ? What do I need to do to install it alongside gnome?

    Sorry if these are simple questions, but I've never really used KDE since it first came out and I switched to gnome..
  • So, here's an idea for you: Distributed instant messaging. Why has no one done it yet? Or if they have, where is the "+1 Informative" linked reply to this comment to prove me wrong? (Or a "+1 Funny" link to sendmail.com)
    Look at Jabber [jabber.org] from the docs " The Jabber instant messaging architechture is modeled after the internet email system. There can exist any number of independent Jabber servers which accept connections from clients as well as communicate to other jabber servers. Each server functions independent of others, and maintains its own user list. Any Jabber server can talk to any other Jabber server that is accessable via the internet."

    What's really needed of course is a distributed DNS service, although that would be

    1. a major security risk
    2. speed up net.balkanization
    However at present DNS is the one part of the net still tangled in a hierarchy ;-)
  • Save the sarcasm please, and there's no need to shout. Of course I know what a bloody preview is. I use nightly builds of Mozilla, I'm fully aware of its preview status, but unlike Nautilus, Mozilla is actually something new (i.e. a full-featured HTML renderer for Unix).

    Problem is, unless they rewrite Nautilus from the ground up, it's still going to be nothing new or innovative. It's eye-candy, form over functionality, and even if it were 5 times as fast (which it may well be in v1.0), it's still nothing special.

  • Yes, konqueror. 1. It can be started in super user mode. 2. It can open a view which is a terminal emulation.

    Every other file manager in the world can be started in super-user mode. I don't think that's what the original poster wanted. Something more along the lines of:

    • Execute operation that requires root privileges. (cp passwd.new /etc/passwd)
    • File manager realizes that it requires root privileges.
    • File manager prompts for root password.
    • User enters root password and file manager goes about its merry way

    Starting a file manager as root is not an acceptable solution.

    Terminal emulation? Big deal. Nearly every worthy filemanager (mc, gentoo) includes some ort of mechanism for spawning a shell. Try again.

    -Nathan

  • Well, in my experience of a couple of friends mobiles (I don't own one - no brain tumours for me!) they have to be rebooted from time to time. (I've also heard it from time to time on the train, switching the phone off and on again to make the funny mode go away) However, because mobiles boot in a couple of seconds people don't view this as a problem. Maybe it's a solution for microsoft - get the boot time of windows down to 2-3 seconds.
  • man, your tone is sounding pretty hostile. I realize it's probably hard to maintain positivity in the face of /. talkback morons, but still, lighten up and stop with all the profanity. ~Jeff
  • You can do *all*, (and considerably more) with dired-mode in Emacs (which has been my default file manager since time immemorial). Who'd have thought Emacs would fit all the design criteria of a (supposedly) easy to use interface?
  • I assume that the re-write of the file manager will eventually queue a re-write of most of the apps so we can have "real" drag and drop?

    At the moment, we're still clicking [menu] file-save, then going through the laborious and completely counter-intuitive system of a "file browser" just to save a file in apps. Dragging a file out of [random application] and dropping into the file manager is the way to go. Dragging a file out of [random picture editor] into [random word processor] to insert a picture is the way to go.
  • Have you seen the size of the kernel source tree recently? (about 70M untarred)

    I'm sure Linus would love to hear that the kernel is bloated and / or badly written.

  • Re:The dependencies problem: GNOME killer (Score:3)

    by sugarescent ( 30924 ) on Thursday August 17, 2000 @04:40AM (#849715) Homepage

    It does not even work on glibc 2.0 even if you hand compile it. Trust me.

    If you were following Mozilla development, you might have noticed this bug [mozilla.org] which tells you that glibc 2.0 is broken with regards to Mozilla. Don't do it. Upgrade to glibc 2.1.

    And if you were really serious about compiling from source, you might have taken a look at the Mozilla Detailed Unix Build Instructions [mozilla.org]. This page even gives you a link to a patch [mozilla.org] that makes glibc 2.0.7 behave so that you can compile with Mozilla.

    Somehow people have no problem with upgrading their system with security fixes, but ask them to upgrade system stuff that's broken to fix a bug and they go all to pieces.

    -Nathan

  • Some people here just don't get it! (Score:5)

    by GauteL ( 29207 ) on Thursday August 17, 2000 @01:26AM (#849716)

    PLEASE do not scream about the bloat (20MB download).
    The only reason for this, is that most of the
    libraries are alpha, and not present on ANY
    production systems, hell.. some of the libraries
    included could very well f* up your productionsystem good, if installed regularily. This means that the Nautilus-package (for it to be easy to install) has to include almost everything.
    Of course this is going to mean a 20MB download.
    Think about the size most apps would be if totally
    statically linked. Nautilus-preview is not far from that.
    In addition. It now downloads and installs
    the FULL mozilla-app, while it when finished will
    probably only use the mozembed-package.
    All this means that the whole thing will move from
    a 27MB download (with mozilla) to an about 9-10MB
    download when it is all finished.
    This is NOT too shabby for an application that is
    graphical shell, web-browser etc.

    Furthermore. A lot of people are bitching about it not being revolutionary.
    What are you guys expecting?
    This application will be able to embed about every
    functionality on the desktop through Bonobo when
    finished. Right now, there are not that many bonobo-components. But to get a glimpse of what
    Nautilus will mean when finished, take a look
    at the "music"-view when looking at a mp3-directory. This way of viewing directories is
    just the beginning, and is TOTALLY different from
    the way any graphical shell has operated on Linux,
    and even on Windows earlier (I cannot speak for Macs).

    Nautilus is not finished by far. But if you look
    closely you may get a glimpse of what it may all
    look like when finished.
    The concept of different views for different kinds of people is excellent. And if you try to use
    the "Novice"-view, you might understand how easy
    Gnome may be to use come Gnome 2.0.

  • This is a Nerd site, buzz off !

  • I guess my discomfort with the whole thing is not so much about any inherent properties of the distribution method, but rather the presentation. Part of the reason a lot of people are pushing development of Gnome is to make Linux/Unix a more viable desktop OS for people without a strong computing background. People who don't know about 'tar -tz' and are mostly just trustingly following directions. I can't help but think of all the old BOFH jokes about naive users being told 'okay, to rename a file, type 'rm -rf /.*'

    Your complaint is ridiculous because in a sense tarballs are the method that gives you the MOST security and control, and that's what we're distributing

    I don't agree with you that tarballs give you more security and control than rpms or .debs... In all three cases, you can manually examine and extract the contents of the archives to a particular directory. rpms and .debs are also a lot easier to clean up if you decide to remove the package, and .debs (not sure about rpms) offer md5 package signing so you have some reassurance the package hasn't been tampered with). In all cases, performing any of these tasks involves understanding the tools involved. Giving step-by-step directions to be typed as root, without explanation, may in the long run be teaching people to shoot themselves in the foot.

    Additionally our tarballs install into their own path (/nautilus-preview or something) so they'd be easily removable when you're done playing with it. So its neither sloppy nor insecure unless *YOU* are sloppy and insecure in how you deal with them.

    And that's exactly my point. I have enough experience with tar to know it's not a smart idea to su to root, cd to '/', and untar a file containing a piece of beta software from someone I've never heard of before. But that's precisely what the install instructions on the Nautilus page recommends.

    If you'd like to suggest a way to make the process not require root, but still be able to install to places like /usr/bin, we're open to suggestions.

    If the preview installs into it's own path, why does it have to write to /usr/bin? Why not $HOME/bin? (I will refrain from opining on the virtues of /usr/local, and how dumping any old beta software into the system directories tends to lead to instability and cruft).

    How about an installer script that gives an option between a 'safe' install in $HOME or /tmp, or a system install, which must be run as root? (and includes a brief message explaining exactly what this entails).

  • Windows 95/98 lets you choose between single/multiple windows. After years of using the multiple windows setting I switched to single window a few months back. After all you can always open a second window when you need one (by double clicking on my computer). A menu option clone window would be usefull though. Also adding back/forward buttons makes life easier.

    As nautilus is targeted to end users, it seems sensible they choose the single window approach. I hope this file browser is better than the current generation of file browsers on linux. I find myself using the commandline very often on linux. Not because I like working on the commandline so much but because linux filemanagers pretty much suck right now.

    Example, I wanted to rename a few mp3 files the other day. As I'm a lazy bastard, I prefered not to use mv for that since that involves typing the filenames in full. So I launched gmc. Silly me, renaming a file! No can do. Of course there is a move function but I just wanted to change a few characters in the filename, not type the whole bloody thing.
  • Well, I gotta say, it looks pretty. I think it could have potential, but they need to make everything optional. This loading of icons based on file information is far too slow (I'll admit my system is slow, but come on, this is a file manager). It doesn't really seem revolutianary, except perhaps in architecture (looks pretty standad to me, though the virtual folders sound intriguing). Unfortunately this preview doesn't seem to show much of that, as all the viewers didn't work. Also, it wouldn't load a web page, maybe thats because I'm using a nightly build though. I'll be playing with it more after finals, but right now 20 seconds to load a directory is way too much time. Pretty good for a preview though. For now, I'll stick with ROX Filer. Tim

  • What about the other *nixes? (Score:3)

    by softsign ( 120322 ) on Thursday August 17, 2000 @04:59AM (#849738)
    Reading through the install instructions, I'm struck by the fact that they say several "Linux libraries" are required... Further investigation of the build instructions doesn't reveal any Linux-only libraries, just a few Gnome libraries like libghttp. Is this just a misnomer? Is it a constraint on the preview release?

    Considering that they're offering a source tarball as well, I would think you should be able to build it on any system.

    I've been following the news on Nautilus and it looks pretty exciting to me. However, I only use FreeBSD and Solaris. It doesn't make much sense to me to limit Nautilus to Linux only, when Gnome holds so much promise for any system that runs X.

    Hoping it's just a semantic error...

    --

  • For those of you running debian, a much more convenient way to check out nautilus is to use the (aptable) debian archive provided by Takuo Kitame.

    See the README at http://www.debian.org/~kitame/gnome/. [debian.org] for the exact lines to put in your /etc/apt/sources.list file. Then you can just do `apt-get install nautilus'.

    I tried them out, they seem to work fine, and are much smaller in terms of both disk space and download size than the mega tar file provided by eazel.

  • Sorry, man. I don't know what I'm talking about. I really should put a lock on my account so I can't post after midnight.

    That and I shouldn't believe everything I read on /. Someone earlier mentioned that it existed indepentently of X (and I presumed, of GNOME).

    Have a greay day!

    Kevin Fox
  • He must be browsing through his file manager again...

    (Why it's not a good idea to have a web server and a robust GUI on the same machine)

    (Then again, I bet Quartz and Aqua [apple.com] is no light-weight combination either. I should just go back to full-screen bash.)

    Kevin Fox

  • Comments by a Nautilus developer... (Score:4)

    by nullity ( 115966 ) on Thursday August 17, 2000 @02:13AM (#849746) Homepage
    "While I support the ideals of this company, namely, to create a user friendly, almost 'mac-like' interface for Linux, wouldn't it have been better to refine a pre-existing one?" Such as...? I hope you don't say Konqueror, because I'll point out that that was a rewrite too (and a good one too!). Would you like to propose a pre-existing one that had a strong enough architecture that it would have been worth rewriting? In fact, adding necessary GNOME support (bonobo, gnome-vfs, etc etc) would have probably been more difficult than writing from scratch - almost all the original code would have had to have been nixed.

    Code is only re-usable if it was written right. Period. And the architecture is part of what makes Nautilus great... You'll hear Miguel rave about bonobo but its true, Nautilus components are really reusable in other applications. And bonobo means that Nautilus *isn't* a total rewrite. There are some great bonobo components like EOG that we were able to just use off the shelf. What we're building is an architecture that means the next file manager revision, even if its by somebody else or a different architecture won't have to be a rewrite. (and yes, I am a Nautilus developer)

    -seth (seth@eazel.com)
  • 20 megs for a file manager? Get real dude.

    But it's okay, because you can cache it in RAM!

    Kevin Fox
  • In case the site has been slashdotted:

    eazel-preview-1.tar.gz [kaufmansoft.com]
    mozilla-M17-2.i386.rpm [kaufmansoft.com]

    --
    Kiro

  • Continuing the posts likely to be moderated down to -1 (If we keep this up, they'll find a way to mod it down to -3), this is, unfortunately, one of the traditional failings of Open Source software. Adding the little nit-picky details to actually finish the software just isn't sexy enough for anybody to actually do it. First off, it isn't impressive to say "I'm the one who added support for Ctrl-DownArrow" and secondly, nobody will hold off a release when its "good enough" to use. After that's done, all the work goes into more big features and the details get left out again.
  • Major releases calculated to coincide with big trade shows. That has always been a sign of hype over substance.

    At least this time it's not a 1.0 "stable" release that comes in the middle of a storm of new bug reports and latter had people excusing it with comments like:

    "Of course it's ready. The developers have been in insane bugfix mode for the past week"

    Yes,. This actually happened with Gnome itself. Linux, SaMBa, Apache, KDE, XFree. These are serious free projects that release code "when it's ready" and issue betas "when the software is complete enough to be called beta and normal people can help with bug tracking". Nothing but technical considerations are relevant.

  • On my system, Nautilus eats half the CPU even when it's idle and hid behind another window or minimized.

    I completely understand about needing to do algorithmic optimization for active operations, but when I'm not frobbing the window, the algorithms running should be O(zero), which does not seem to be happening.

    As you say, I look forward to seeing what happens with optimizations.

  • I'll never use Mac because there is no method for switching between apps from the keyboard.

    I had an INIT that did this in 1989. It's been in the System since 8.0. 1997, baby. Come on, keep up.

    Having to reach for the mouse slows you down.

    Actually, this isn't so. Using the mouse feels slower than the keyboard -- because pointing with your arm is a muscle memory task, while remembering a keystroke and locating the key is a cognitive task. While your brain is occupied, your time sense is suspended.

    You know that "Holy fuck, it's 6:30 AM, how the fuckin' hell could I have been playing Civ II for ten hours straight when it feels like fifteen minutes or so" feeling? This is the same effect on a micro level.

    The upshot is, that although people swear up down right left that hotkeys are faster than mousing through menus and so forth, actual objective timings prove the exact opposite. People of course refuse to admit that the timings could possibly be right, because they "know" that it was faster when they were using the keys.

    Apple did a lot of research on this in the eighties; they eventually had to start making videotapes for proof because the test subjects simply would not accept that the recorded times could possibly be correct.

  • It turns out that the initial run of nautilus that I did (the one that took me to Eazel's site to view their system config stuff) had not completely died in the face of a crasher, and I had a completely invisible nautilus process spinning in the background.

    Obviously nautilus shouldn't ever get into a spin like that, but I've seen various versions of Netscape on Solaris do the same thing when they lose their connection to the X server.. something down in X lib perhaps, or else just convergent buggage.

    Anyway, Nautilus under normal operation does not seem to eat the processor when idle, as it appeared to do for me.

  • We *have* fucked the filesystem (Score:5)

    by nullity ( 115966 ) on Thursday August 17, 2000 @02:42AM (#849775) Homepage
    Its interesting that you bring this up. I don't want to go into a lengthy response, but the Nautilus architecture is in place to totally remove the necessity of a conventional filesystem for users who don't want to manipulate it. We won't drive that to the interface for 1.0, but post-1.0 almost all the underlying stuff is in place and will be tied in.

    Medusa, which was developed at Eazel and will be part of GNOME 1.4 is a disk cataloger and search tool similar to slocate - except that it indexes far more than just filename. It takes about 30 minutes to scan a normal to large disk, and of course isn't going to be doing this while you're working :-) The index files are pretty small (10 megs or so) and of course optional if you don't want this feature.

    So what does this all mean? This means that arbitrary, complex searches take a couple seconds to run. Medusa is *also* interfaced in through our virtual filesystem. So, the term I like to use for it is remarkably similar to what you quote... Medusa *is* a multi-key semantically queried virtual filessytem. And yes, post-1.0 this will be tied into virtual folders that are actually "searches" that will live update as you change the disk, etc etc. And it will be *fast*. That's only one example of all the things Nautilus architecture is letting us do...

    -seth (seth@eazel.com)

  • a Nautilus developer's response (Score:5)

    by nullity ( 115966 ) on Thursday August 17, 2000 @02:56AM (#849777) Homepage
    Linux is great. I like it. X is pretty fscked and makes it hard to do some things. X is great because its so networkable, etc, but X is definitely showing its age. This sometimes limits what we can do. There are things we'd like to do but couldn't because of Linux too, but all in all Linux (do to its draw on Unix) is a pretty good architecture, and at least its really stable :-)

    I strongly doubt that you've actually used Nautilus, because it doesn't work like explorer. In fact, I thought we'd be flamed to death for it working so much like the Macintosh, but a bunch of lam3rz saw the sidebar and rather than actually looking at Nautilus decided that it looked like Windows Explorer. Guess what? We aren't exactly running explorer next to our development stations. And I'm not hearing people bitch about other free software products like Evolution, KWord, AbiWord, and KDevelop (not to dis them, they're great products - if somethings good by all means copy the good stuff!) that rip off Microsoft products interfaces DIRECTLY - to the menu organization level in some cases.

    So guess what? Its not windows explorer. People don't think of mobile phones as computers, and hopefully Nautilus will be intuitive and physically consistent too. Explorer does a lot of things right, and has some good underlying architecture, but they just don't get the final result right. Its really missing in the "feels right" department. And Nautilus isn't. Even this really preliminary release, slow as it is, should give you a feeling for how cool Nautilus is going to be.

    And its not a simple file browser. File browser is stupid and limiting. I'm too tired to really go into why its not, but basically Bonobo means that Nautilus can do a lot more to interface you with your documents, data, code, etc etc.

    Besides all this, when you actually use Nautilus it looks nothing like Windows explorer. Nautilus has a lot of great eyecandy. Our sidebar is actually fucking useful too, not just wasted space (though I often prefer to turn my sidebar off, all that being possible and configurable of course). The sidebar allows you to access meta-view components like a tree browser, a drag board, annotations, man/info browser, etc etc (all componentized, so its easy for anyone to add new ones, we just have some sample ones).

    Try Nautilus. Those who have just looked at screenshots...Fuck off. Come by the booth at LWE and I'll talk about the architecture. It rocks.

    -seth (seth@eazel.com)
  • Let the paranoid and psychotic (not to mention entertaining) speculation about Eazel's true future plans for Linux begin!

    I should note that all those Es look awfully suspicious too. Could be a sign that they are funded by a large number of venture capitalists bent on expanding the use of the letter E and then copyrighting that letter.
  • Is the Gnome crew going for a full "suite" based around Gnome? I know that this is obvious... but hear me out.

    Emacs, as you may know is a powerful (some say bloated, but then these people actually like vi...) tool. You can stay in it all day and get numerous things done. As useful as it is, it is textonly (x version not withstanding).

    It seems to me that this "simple" file browser is doing for Gnome what Emacs does. It looks to do everything. This is something that MS has been going for (with the internet/desktop browser integration into windows.) The problem with this idea has been that, in the past no one has gotten it right because there are too many propritary standards to get in the way (like quicktime vs realaudio vs windowsmedia...) and you must launch a separate application to view each.

    If it pans out, this certanly looks like the first good shot at providing a "do all" program for Linux (or any OS that I know of for that matter) that is GUI based. I still have this feeling that this is exactly what MS has been chasing - total integration.

    I think that the GPL version will win out however.
    Why? Nothing propritary to get in the way. If its propritary, you can be sure it won't be easially integrated with the GPL ideals/software. (Nvidia drivers not withstanding either.)
  • Gnome provides all of the look, none of the feel

    This is why we need experienced people like Andy Hertzfeld in the loop. Cool by itself is not enough.

    Gnome moderation radicals: please don't mistake this for an attack.
    --

  • Re:Why a single-window browser? (Score:3)

    by bartdecrem ( 193647 ) on Wednesday August 16, 2000 @10:33PM (#849782)
    That's a user preference setting. Set your user level to Intermediate or Expert, and go to Edit Hacker Settings. The first option lets you open each item in a new window.

  • Forget Nice Graphics, I want to be able to (Score:3)

    by twoshortplanks ( 124523 ) on Wednesday August 16, 2000 @10:36PM (#849783) Homepage
    ..do two things

    1) Run occasional 'commands' as root. I tend know the root password (and therefore should be able to do what I want when I want,) but for obvious reasons I don't want to be running as root all the time. At them momement if I want to use my GUI to perform an action as root (e.g. copy a file into /etc) I have to load up an entirely new GUI from the command line.

    2) Switch between GUI and command line easier. Back when I used to use Windows I did this with the 'DOS Prompt Here' Power Tool and the 'Start .' command. Now I'm in Linux I find I can't swap backwards and forwards easily, and end up doing everything from the command prompt - but I shouldn't be forced to do this.

    Can anyone tell me of a GUI File Manager that has these facilities?

  • Congratulations, Mikey likes it! (Score:3)

    by jonabbey ( 2498 ) <jonabbey@ganymeta.org> on Thursday August 17, 2000 @08:16AM (#849786) Homepage

    Well, I've spent a half hour or so playing with Nautilus now, and I have to say I'm impressed. There's a lot left to be done with optimizations and bug fixes, but as nullity said, it does just feel right to a surprising extent.

    I like the Novice/Intermediate/Hacker menu.. it feels surprisingly intuitive. I'm not used to working with software on Linux in which you look at something and immediately feel a ghostly sense of the perfect metaphor perfectly drawn and shaded hanging on, but I get that sense in several places with Nautilus.. the hacker menu, the way the drag select is rendered, icon stretching, the fact that if you drag an icon to the description panel on the left, you focus on the item you dragged, color and image dropping, and more. Much like with the Macintosh, oddly enough, but with some of the really nice touches of the OS/2 Workplace Shell thrown in. And browsing with Mozilla in Nautilus feels good too (although a progress/loading bar, right-click menus and keyboard page up/page down support wouldn't kill me).

    I agree with nullity that Nautilus isn't going to truly 100% come into its own until Bonobo gets moving, but I can imagine living in Nautilus, and that's the first Linux environment I've felt that way about other than the command line.

    Congratulations to all involved! Now, when will we get the ability to use the Nautilus shell as the default desktop background, a la gmc?

  • Re:uneasy about installations... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    And how is that *ANY* different then grabbing an RPM, su-ing to root and typing 'rpm -i foo.rpm'?

    The fact of the matter is that 'make install' and 'dpkg -i' and 'tar zxf' are all commands that are potentially dangerous as root. But so is 'rm' for that matter. So what is there to do?

    Easy.. You just CHECK first. You want to know what 'make' is gonna do? Put a -n on the damn thing. Query your RPM's. Query your Deb's. tar ztf your tarballs. Be a RESPONSIBLE sysadmin. Decide to trust some software vendors, because you are volunteering to install their software.

    As long as you're complaining about things like this, you may as well complain that you have to be root to install Redhat 7.0 :P

  • I'll never use Mac because there is no method for switching between apps from the keyboard. (someone correct me if this has been implemented since I've used a Mac)

    I've had my Mac zealot friends explain to me how keyboard-centric MacOS really is, and how efficient it is to get around. They mention all the shortcuts that you do. Great, someone at Apple thought their interface through.

    They thought it through, but not enough. Switching apps is a vital and common activity for anyone who actually uses their multitasking operating system to multitask. Having to reach for the mouse slows you down. This is a massive hole in the "Mac is good for keyboard users" argument that I keep hearing.

    As for the state of Linux file browsers, I have to agree that it is grim. I prefer the old Win95 Explorer to any file browser for Linux that I have ever tried -- and I've gone down the page at Freshmeat. Good thing I don't mind using BASH for all my browsing needs.
    Those in the Linux camp are fine with revolutionizing interface, as long as it doesn't interfere with legacy
    Read up on the Berlin project, and keep your fingers crossed. There are people working on replacing X, but it's no easy task.
    I would have to type FSMH(tab)2(tab) while squinting to see what was different about the filenames.
    Dude, up your font size. Many term's have hotkeys to do it.
    Usability is not a foreign concept, people... why do so few people get it?
    I'm really sick of people on Slashdot talking about people geting it. Atleast you didn't say "XYZ company just doesn't get it...." Did Jon Katz start this?

    Hmmph. You thought your post sounded like flamebait...


    --Lenny
  • The revolution I think is that since hardware is now a commodity, we are moving away from a hardware-bound system to a system where the bottleneck is merely *the ability of a user to retrieve and process information*. The user is now the bottle neck. Filesystems, etc., weren't created for the *user*. They were created for the *system*. Well now we are bound by the vast amount of information possible, and we have to find ways of using it effectively. I think we will move away from linear "file" systems, and move more into multi-associative "resource" systems. The web itself is basically a "resource" system that is catalogued. Well the same needs to be done for actual file systems, and other aspects of operating systems. What matters to the user is not where a file is located in *physical* space, but where it is located in *conceptual* space - how related in this aspect is it to this other resource? How related in some other aspect is it to that other resource? What is its types and attributes? I think we'll move to something like a object-relational database of information, and likewise human interfaces will have to change to accomodate that.

    You are already seeing it in Evolution, where a "folder" is not just a physical location, but more aptly, an aggregation of information based on a set of criteria. My "friends and family" folder shouldn't just be a physical location, it should be a conceptual location, containing all messages by, from, to, and about "friends and family". Which may also overlap with a "Recent" folder, etc.

  • gui shortcuts (Score:4)

    by xdaemon ( 31170 ) on Wednesday August 16, 2000 @10:47PM (#849807)
    I only need one shortcut to work quickly in linux: ctrl+alt+backspace
  • Yes, konqueror. 1. It can be started in super user mode. 2. It can open a view which is a terminal emulation. You can even make it follow the views above or drag and drop files from the panels. Lotzi
  • I just downloaded the preview release, and Nautilus seems to be pretty slick. Eazel and the other contributors have done a lot of work in a pretty short amount of time. It even seems to be fairly stable for such an early release, though it did crash after about fifteen minutes. That said, I can't really see this replacing either emelFM [pitt.edu] or the console, which are my primary file managers.

    Sure, Nautilus looks really professional, and has plenty of eye- and ear-candy, but when considering functionality, how does Nautilus really benefit the user? For example, how is being able to play an mp3 right in the file manager using a bonobo component any better than just having xmms pop-up to play it? Other than just being a cool technological feat, I can't see how a component architecture is really advantageous in a file manager.

    Another concern I have is speed. This release is dog-slow on my Athlon system with 160 MB of RAM. I know its not fair to reach conclusions about the finished product based on such an early release, but can we realistically expect this app to ever be blazingly fast? I'm curious about how long I will have to sit and wait while Nautilus draws the contents of a directory with a few hundred or even a few thousand files, especially with all of the content preview functionality enabled.

    I guess what I want is something where I can turn off all of the extraneous stuff made to help newbies and still have a file manager with ground-breaking (dare I say innovative) features for helping me do what file managers are meant to do: manage files. With the pervasive networking, high bandwidth and gigantic hard drives that are becoming commonplace today, it's getting progressively harder to sort through the data that is available on my computer. The file manager paradigms we have now were designed for a much smaller amount of data (on both the local system and over the network). Even my $HOME directory is starting to become a tangled maze of information that is taking more and more time for me to try and keep organized. And this is on a system with a relatively sane *nix style file system structure. I shudder even to think about some large windows drives that I've seen.

    Anyway, a while back on Gnotices [gnome.org], in another discussion on Nautilus, I brought up my thoughts on this subject, and mentioned that I thought having a filtering and querying mechanism somewhat like SQL (of course with a good GUI) would be great to help sort through large amounts of files. Someone said that there were at least tentative plans to include something like this in Nautilus eventually. I hope this comes to pass. Also, someone else said that the Linux file system was not well suited to doing this sort of database-like operation. Perhaps there are some gurus out there who can elaborate on this.

    I've rambled enough here, so I'd like to end by pointing out that I don't mean this to sound too harsh towards Nautilus. I've been using GNOME off and on since the .30 days, and I sincerely hope that Nautilus will be a worthwhile addition to the desktop. I feel, though, that without some serious consideration of the issues I wrote about above, Nautilus will just be a fancy version of Windows Explorer, when it could be something much better. Perhaps other /. readers have better ideas than my own, and we can discuss them here...

    ---------------------------
    "The people. Could you patent the sun?"

  • Re:hmm. (Score:2)

    by rjh ( 40933 )
    It's a kind of despair that hits with the increasing speed of the information age.

    In the 1970s a fellow named Alvin Toffler predicted that, at some point, technology would advance beyond people's ability to integrate it into their day to day lives. This phenomenon was called future shock (after the name of Toffler's book) or technoshock (the name I prefer).

    My parents don't suffer from technoshock, which I used to find interesting--until I realized that they know technology has left them by the wayside, they don't have a whelk's chance in a supernova of catching up, and they don't care. It's that last bit which keeps them from suffering.

    Geeks and hackers don't have this luxury. If we gave up caring, we'd stop being what we are. So all we can do is grab the future by the throat and hang on for dear life.

    It's hard, yeah. But take what consolation you can from the fact that everyone is in the same boat you are. I don't know a single person in the industry who doesn't find themselves overwhelmed by the rapid change of pace. Your situation is not unique.

    I hope that I convey the kind of feelings that depress those of us in the early stages of learning

    I've been programming in C++ for ten years, C for almost as long, UNIX for seven years. Trust me, friend; those feelings plague people no matter what their level of learning is. There isn't a single day that I come to work, look over my code and find some stupid bug, and kick myself for errors which, I tell myself, a college freshman would be bright enough to avoid.

    [W]hat do you do to catch up?

    ... First, stop trying so hard. That's the best advice I can give anyone who's trying their best to get current with the technology curve.

    You shouldn't have to try in order to get good skills. The more you try, the more you'll fail; the more you fail, the more desperate you'll become; and once you get desperate, you're not going to be much use to anyone.

    Stop trying and start playing. Little kids pick up computer science faster'n you can blink, mostly because they haven't yet been brainwashed into thinking that learning has to be drudgery. Grab some code which you think is interesting; go through it to study how it works. Sooner or later you'll find something that makes you say "you know, this could be changed..."

    Maybe the code is unclear; maybe there's a fencepost (off-by-one) error; maybe there's a more optimal way to solve the problem. For whatever reason, you'll find something which could be just a little better if it were changed just a little... and then change it.

    One of two things will happen. Your changes will either improve the program, or it won't. If your changes improve the program, then sit back and bask in the warm glow of "I just solved a programming problem and damn I feel good". If your changes don't improve the program, don't get frustrated. This just shows that there's some subtlety here you don't understand yet.

    [M]aybe it comes down to straight motivation and drive ... [i]f you want it bad enough, you'll do it.

    That, too. But don't forget to have fun.

    I'll get it, eventually.

    I've said this more times than I can count. :)

    Every single time--every single time--I've managed to get it. (Admittedly, getting Motif programming took me years, but I got it.) I'm certain that Linus, Miguel de Icaza, Matthias Dallheimer and Alan Cox all say "I'll get it, eventually" a lot more often than you think they do.

    Good luck. And if you need help, ask for it.

    This isn't the Free Software Band-Of-Thugs. This is the Free Software Community. Communities exist for mutual help and support. So don't be afraid to ask questions, even stupid ones. But the flip side is that if someone asks you questions--even stupid ones--answer them patiently, honestly and as clearly as you can.

    Good luck!
  • Medusa, which was developed at Eazel and will be part of GNOME 1.4 is a disk cataloger and search tool similar to slocate
    Sorry -- that name is already taken by the Python medusa module. Try again. :)

    --

  • Re:A Question (Score:3)

    by nd ( 20186 ) <nacase AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday August 17, 2000 @09:15AM (#849828) Homepage
    Yeah, I know you can come up with some drag and popup system to handle appends. But that's not the point. You can't handle every possible command, so it would be nice to have something there for people who know what they're doing. It *IS* possible to get the benefits of a GUI and the efficiency of a CLI in one if they had this.

    What if I want to remove all mp3's in the current directory? Watch me do it faster with "rm *.mp3" than you can with the mouse. And like I said, you always have the option to open up an xterm and do it, but that's an unnecessary step in my opinion.

    And of course, in the "Beginner" mode of Nautilus they wouldn't have to see the shell -- perhaps Expert mode only.

  • Nautilus Developer's response... (Score:5)

    by nullity ( 115966 ) on Thursday August 17, 2000 @03:24AM (#849829) Homepage
    Nautilus could probably be 3x faster or more when its optimized (before release). We have major algorthimic slow-downs like n^2 algorithms still in the code, but they'll all go away (and its fairly easy). We're almost to the "Feature complete" milestone, and then we'll be in hardcore performance and bugfixing mode before release. Pavel Cisler, who wrote a lot of the file stuff on BeOS (which is *FAST*, like faster than ls!) is working on Nautilus and intends to give it serious speed boosts.

    -seth (seth@eazel.com)

  • Oh! Mac resource forks? What a great idea! (Score:3)

    by hatless ( 8275 ) on Thursday August 17, 2000 @05:57AM (#849831)
    id3 tags are in MP3 file because they're part of the MP3 file format spec. Ditto .xcf files. In order to attach similar metadata to other filetypes that don't already have metadata blocks, you need a scheme at the filesystem access level that manages and accesses a "shadow" filesystem or a database containing this data. In other words, something like the MacOS's resource forks, which have been around for over 15 years.

    The problem, of course, is that the internet's file-transfer protocols like HTTP, FTP, NFS, SMB and, heck, DCC transfers over IRC, have no notion of multi-"fork" files, designed as they are around the Unix/DOS/CPM/etc. file model. This is why Mac users often user Binhex or MacBinary formats to Base64 encode files they transfer over the 'net. What's actually happening is the file itself and its resource fork (where the icons, metadata and so forth are stored) are being packaged together so that the two parts can be reconsitituted when they're received on another Mac. As the Mac world has gradually strived to interoperate better with the rest of the computing world, less and less of a file is being stored in resource forks. Where once all the bitmaps and dialogs and audio samples used by a Mac database or multimedia file might have been in the resource fork, now cross-platform compatibility has cut that back to little more than a file's icon and its mimetype.

    The problem with doing this on Linux--or any Unix or on DOS and Windows, for that matter--is that the tools that read, write and move files around aren't built to accomodate multipart files, apart from limited support for things like versioning in some of the more advanced OSes.

    If you want to do something like this without changing the file formats themselves, you need to start by getting down to the filesystem level so that all read and write operations also read and write the metadata, whether to a database or to parallel invisible files, transparently.
  • The right solution to this is for each file format to encode metadata within the file, just as MP3 does with ID3. The fact that most formats don't do this is screwed up.

    --

  • That's nonsense. GUIs are not about simplifying common operations. There's NO RULE that says you have to sacrifice power when writing GUI applications. It is this very attitude that keeps me working in a CLI most of the time.
  • What you're describing *is* what the Nautilus architecture was designed to do! Bonobo means that we don't have to write into Nautilus the ability to handle all the myriad file types, but another goal of Nautilus is to display useful extended information about files before you open it. That means that anyone (and we might) could write a bonobo control that would plug into Nautilus and would extend the file-info about MP3s to show the id3 tags. We currently do that for images (an easy no-brainer using a pre-existing bonobo component), but the point is that all this stuff is easy for others to do, and we'll be polishing a lot more of this in before release.

    BTW, what you're saying about images is pretty useless. I can see probing the ID3 tags being good...and dimensions of an image. But why do you want to see the layer numbers before opening? I mean, you could write this in, but as you said before...just launch the freaking app :-)

    -seth (seth@eazel.com)
  • People don't even think of mobile phones as computers (mostly because...
    they don't go wrong     [...]

    Except when they:

    • Reboot for no reason (Nokia 21xx, Nokia 9000, Samsung SCH-3500)
    • Decide that the phone number you just typed in should be deleted just because you havn't seen fit to stroke the phone's ego for two minutes (SCH-3500 -- called 411 on the lndline, typed the number in on the moble, made the call on the landline, talked very breifly and as I was about to tell the moble what to call the number it vanished...as I was watching)
    • Go in to extreame power suck mode and eat a day's worth of batts in a half hour (Nokia 9000)
    • Had a really really crappy interface for deleting text messages (SCH-3500 -- select message, press menu, press 2 OR 3 depending on the whim of the phone, then get kicked out of text message read mode, press 3 to get back, find next message, press OK, press menu, press 2 or 3...; no way to "delete all" or "delete all below here" or "delete any older then X days"
    • Did I mention the random reboots?
    • Or the just plain poweroffs (Nokia 21xx)
    • Or the reboots? During calls?
    • Or saying there is signal, but not being able to recieve a call?
    • Or the lame ergonomic of having the outside volume control turn the ringer off (or set to one beep mode) if it gets hit a random number of times (SCH-3500 -- and yes it was unlocked, but it's just dumb, and I normally lock it so it took five calls before I figured out why it had done that!)
    • Did I say anything about the reboots? I can't recall if I did. Better mention it again.
    • The lack of any really cool features a computer would have, like "tunnel simulation mode". On a long call you can't politely end? Press the tunnel button and your signal gradually degrades and cuts off. No need to find a elevator to escape!
  • Try hitting ENTER on a JPG file and quickly viewing it, then hitting ESC to go back, get the focus back and everything..

    Go to the "command" menu and try "Extension File Edit." The file is a little convoluted in places (if you don't know regexes) but it is fairly easy to get up to speed.

    I added/changed a bunch of filetypes so that hitting <enter> will open a file in my app of choice (for images I use KuickShow, which is very similar to ACDSee).

    Example:

    shell/.mp3
    Open=xmms %f &
    View=xmms %f &
    Icon=sound.xpm

    I recommend adding "&" to the end of each command line so that it runs in the background, allowing you to use mc while the viewer is open.

    You can also have it prompt you for arguments or whatever easily:

    # Makefile
    regex/[Mm]akefile
    Open=make -f %f %{Enter parameters}
    Icon=makefile.xpm

    I recommend checking out "Menu File Edit" as well. This file sets up the <F2> menu, which is useful for quickly creating tar.gz files (make a release) and for copying files to remote hosts. You'll have to edit it to use ssh, simply change "rcp" to "scp."

  • A pipe GUI (Score:3)

    by smage ( 104746 ) on Wednesday August 16, 2000 @11:23PM (#849848)
    There's an OS program for the Mac called FilterTop that basically promised to bring the Unix concepts of pipes to the Mac in the form of tiny filters that were strung together by the app. Info is at About FilterTop [topsoft.org]

    There are also several screenshots and some nice blurbs that should make things a lot clearer. Something you can't see from the static shots is a simple yet elegant animation - as information flows between filters, the little connector lines fill up. I personally think this is an excellent GUI representation of the entire "pipe" concept, and would probably make a good starting point for someone who wanted to make a similar utility for Linix/*nix

  • In Windows, CTRL-Doubleclick on a folder in single-window mode to open it up in a new window.
  • The whole spirit of linux and unix are tools that are more powerful because they can easily be used by and with other programs.

    The problem when big companies step in with major 'solutions' is that the solution could just as well be layered over any OS. If Nautilus isn't based in X, and is another layer, then there doesn't seem to be a compelling reason why it couldn't have been done on MacOS, Windows, or BeOS, except that only open source solutions provide a platform they wouldn't have to pay exhorbitant license fees to augment.

    I haven't seen enough to say for sure, but so far it looks like 'bringing Linux to the masses' is just a marketing spin to make sense of creating an experimental interface system on top of a minority OS.

    Kevin Fox
  • Peanuts grow from roots, in a branching structure. So, make the file metaphor a branching peanut roots, with files/nodes as nuts! In fact, you would have to open the shell to access the file/nut! Further, you would have to bash them to get at the nut/file! And you could use xcdroast on 'em so that they keep for a long time! You could then archive a bunch of nuts together to make a brittle nut. Encrypting a nut makes butter out of it. And of course you could butter your brittle and make a new brittle-butter-nut.

    But then, males would download more nuts from the Internet to claim that they have more and bigger nuts than anyone else. Hmm, have to think about that one...

    --

  • It's pretty, but that's about it. Definitely a case of form over function.

    The "preview your files while you're browsing them" sounds like a cool idea, but when you actually get to use it, it really doesn't do anything except slow the whole experience right down. And on this 300MHz laptop, it's SLOW.

    I assume it has a built-in web browser, since it requires Mozilla (which is not in itself a bad idea), but since it doesn't appear to support proxies yet, I can't use that. Ho hum. Hey, Eazel: if you want to impress people, get your software working well, THEN work on the eye candy.

    Tried it out, deleted it 10 minutes later.
  • At Linux World SUN was demoing Nautilus in their booth running on Solaris, with a bonobo aware copy of Star Office.

    Honestly this is 0.1 release it is still pretty early. And the core team works only on Linux.

    If there are any people out there who are interested in ports, please DO! Join the nautilus mailing list [eazel.com] and come by #nautilus on irc.gnome.org. We will very happily take your patches.
  • Hasn't anyone here used Directory Opus 4.x for the Amiga? That must surely be the most popular file manager ever, and certainly the most usable. I have never found another file manager that has ever come close to it, and frankly, that surprises me. I for one am far from thrilled with these one-window icon based browsers. Or icon based anything, for that matter. In my experience, almost without exception productivity decreases as eye candy is added and bloat increases. Why does everyone imitate MS and try to make their tools impressive instead of usable? Simplicity combined with aesthetics is the way to go, IMHO. Nautilus just doesn't do anything for me. It saddens me to see so much programming effort go into tools that have a flawed premise -- and I'm not just talking Nautilus here, just look at the number of completely unusable file managers out there. Please, let's see a good, flexible multiple pane file manager with text based views soon. I just wish I had the time to do it myself.

  • hmm. (Score:3)

    by matman ( 71405 ) on Wednesday August 16, 2000 @09:10PM (#849861)
    If you ask me, I'm not sure I want to have huge icons, inline rendering of images, crazy mp3 player integration, and all that stuff. Now, something really cool, would be some sort of xml based info reporting scheme that let something like a file browser ask the program that handles the mime type of a file to give it some info about the file. Something like, mpeginfo filename.mp3 returning bitrate, length, id3 tags, etc. Or imageInfo image.xcf returning the number of layers, colour (rgb/indexed/etc), dimensions, compression ratio, etc. Then integrating that info with the file browser. I'd be into that :)

    I doubt that I explained myself too well :) But I hope that people get the idea. It would amount to adding a new field for mime types - something like 'info program' or something. Then, for each mime type, a simple info gathering program could be written based on available libs. Should be fairly easy to do. I wouldnt mind seeing the rendered image, etc, if I click 'more info' or something, but the varying dimensions of images could make viewing look 'unbalanced'.
  • Just look at the X/Motif popup menu handling.

  • uneasy about installations... (Score:3)

    by double_h ( 21284 ) on Thursday August 17, 2000 @06:08AM (#849864) Homepage

    I haven't had a chance to install and look at Nautilus yet, but looking at the Nautilus web page struck me as an example of trend I really don't like. The installation instructions at http://download.eazel.com/download.html tell you to download the tarball, su to root, cd to /, and type 'tar -zxf (tarball). Not only is this a sloppy way to install software, it's also *dangerous*. One of the first things I learned as a Unix admin is "never do anything as root that you don't fully understand", and while nobody is ever 100% scrupulous about this (we've all typed 'make install' without reading the sources), there should still be an effort made for 'safe computing' - an option to run a new program safely from the user's home directory, for instance.

    I spotted an even more unsettling example of this phenomenon on the Helix Gnome website the other day. The recommended install process consists of su-ing to root, then typing 'lynx -source http://url.com/ | sh'. Umm, sure, what better way to make the install process user friendly than by having you download a shell script from the net and run it as root, sight unseen.

    What the hell is wrong with these people?

    I agree that if Linux is going to gain popularity as a desktop platform, it needs to be made easier to use for non-technical people. But real thought needs to be given to those things that make Unix a better desktop than Windows -- mainly security and stability. Unix/Linux has held out remarkably well against the plagues of viruses, trojans, and so forth which cause problems in the Windows world. Encouraging practices like installers that unnecessarily require root access are a huge step backwards.

  • id3 tags are in MP3 file because they're part of the MP3 file format spec.

    NO! This claim is completely wrong. Please don't go around spreading such misinformation.

    A brief glance at even the id3 site's own history page [id3.org] shows that id3 tags were created by a freelance programmer independently of the MPEG audio standard.

    I hate id3 tags and do everything possible to strip them out of my own mp3 files. Yes, metadata is a thorny problem, but violating the MPEG audio standard and pretending the result is still an mp3 file is a cure worse than the disease.

    I also have practical reasons for avoiding the id3 tag: most of the music I listen to is not of Western origin, and does not fit well into the Title/Artist/Genre classification system of the id3 one-trick-pony. And I'm not even getting into the problems that id3 and support programs have dealing with multi-byte charsets.

    To keep this post vaguely on topic, I should point out that Eazel is working on ways to handle and present metadata without the need to break standard file format specifications. For example, take a look at the album screenshot [eazel.com] with metadata consisting of the CD cover picture. I guarantee you that the CD cover picture is not embedded into the individual mp3 files.

  • Mozilla isn't going to be in the code-base or anything. Its a freaking component. And you can trivially use the GtkHTML component instead (you don't even need to download Mozilla, actually), or any other component. Or you can install *no* components (which will be shared GNOME and application wide) and browse from a standalone browser only. Bonobo (our component model) means flexibility and choice.

  • We look forward to your feedback - Eazel (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17, 2000 @03:40AM (#849869)
    If you've actually tried the preview and you have any kind of feedback about Nautilus, whether bug reports, feature requests, wishlist items, etc, let us know!

    You can reach the Nautilus developers on or #nautilus on irc.gnome.org. Or you can post bug reports or feature requests directly into bugzilla.eazel.com.

    This is our first preview release so it is our first change to get feedback from the community. We want to know about everything you guys think can be done better.

    I'm also goint to look over these comments and see if I can bring problems that users are having to the team's attention.

    - Maciej Stachowiak

    P.S. I wonder if this will get moderated up - actually being a developer of a product doesn't seem to count as very Informative these days!

  • SFW. (Score:3)

    by WasterDave ( 20047 ) <davep@z e d k e p.com> on Wednesday August 16, 2000 @09:26PM (#849870)
    So, let me get this straight...

    The pioneers of Apple, NeXT etc. throw away the rulebook and decide to revolutionise the way we use computers using Linux and X as the base.

    And we get... a file browser. Can I even bring myself to say it? Yes: Explorer, guys. It looks like windows explorer. Immeasurably dissapointing.

    I tell you, mobile phones, PDA's, they *own* the future. People don't even think of mobile phones as computers (mostly because they don't go wrong).

    *sigh* Glad I stayed away from client side.

    Dave :(
  • Its revolutionary because now we have an option to use an opensource, auditable, quick to fix piece of software. It resembles something familiar to some and will attract people to it, not everyone. And if everyone DOES hate it, who cares?

    ---
  • here [eazel.com].

    Enjoy!

  • ... nothing in particular stopping you from doing all this yourself, with Easel, is there?

  • Re:hmm. (Score:3)

    by Joe Rumsey ( 2194 ) on Wednesday August 16, 2000 @11:41PM (#849886)
    I wish I hadn't posted to this thread, so that I could moderate this up as insightful.

    I have an app I want to write that probably 5 other people will have implemented by the time I get the chance to start, some 3-4 months from now. Then it'll be too late to matter. (Not saying what it is, I might be wrong. I will say I intend to write a GUI Linux version and a windows command-line version just to piss everyone in the whole world off ;-)

    I don't think ideas are a dime a dozen. Crappy ideas, maybe. But the really powerful ideas don't take much to implement. Napster is pretty easy to implement, especially the way they've done it (unlinked servers - linked would be much better). It was the idea that mattered, and they got there first. Web browsers are hard to implement now, but it wasn't so tough in the early days when there wasn't anything but text, links, and pictures to render. And that's all it took to make the web take off. Most improvements since have been incremental, it's just the sum of those improvements that makes it difficult to start over.

    What's hard to come by is time. You either need to be able to not get paid for your time: you're a student (and not studying as hard as you should be ;), or willing to sacrifice a whole lot of free time, or just rich. Or else you need to get funding somehow. Someone else (one of those damn students, probably) will find a way to implement something first, or at least better, if it's a good idea and you don't do it right away.

    Anyway, I don't think there's "catching up" needed in most cases. Once you've got a certain level of skill, it's just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Keep looking and you'll find something no one else has done, or something you know you can do better than anyone's done before.

    So, here's an idea for you: Distributed instant messaging. Why has no one done it yet? Or if they have, where is the "+1 Informative" linked reply to this comment to prove me wrong? (Or a "+1 Funny" link to sendmail.com)

  • Cooper to world: Fuck the filesystem! (Score:5)

    by Tripp Lilley ( 8787 ) on Thursday August 17, 2000 @12:24AM (#849887) Homepage

    I'm following in the footsteps of an earlier poster in saying that I'm disappointed to see Apple and NeXT's best and brightest come up with... a file browser. I'm just as disappointed as I was five years ago when I signed up to be one of the first fifteen-hundred BeBox developers, after I discovered what their idea of "revolutionizing" the operating system was.

    To quote Alan Cooper, from About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design:

    Even though the file system is an internal facility that shouldn't--by all rights--even affect the user, it creates a large problem because the influence of the file system on the interface of most programs is very deep. The most intractable problems facing user interface designers usually concern the file system and its demands. It affects our menus, our dialogs, even the procedural framework of our programs, and this influence is likely to continue indefinitely unless we make a concerted effort to stop it.
    Currently, most software treats the file system in much the same way that the operating system shell does (Explorer, File Manager). This is tantamount to you dealing with your car the same way your mechanic does. Even though this approach is tragically bad, it is an established, de facto standard and there is considerable resistance to improving it.

    Fundamentally, I'm a bit tired of hearing about how everyone's "revolutionizing" everything, when they're really not. Look: revolution [m-w.com] and revolutioniz e [m-w.com] both imply "sudden, radical, or complete change". The American colonies didn't fight the Revolutionary War to install a local king. The French Revolution wasn't so they could hire a newer, prettier cake-eater.

    The file system, fundamentally, is an implementation detail. It's an artifact of how "things have always been done". It's a drag on doing real, substantive improvement to the way computers work for people. There are millions of people out there who have never used a computer, and have yet to learn. They don't need to learn what a filesystem is, or to navigate it. They need to be able to find and use the information and tools that are important to them, period.

    If we truly want to revolutionize the user interface, the user experience, etc., then we really need to start with a more fundamental re-thinking of how things work. Some of the ideas Miguel de Icaza outlined in his Let's Make Unix Not Suck [helixcode.com] talk/paper are a good starting place. The universal presence of an ORB, lots of small tools cooperating via the ORB interactively, are all good kicks in the pants of the Unix mindset. But, fundamentally, that's nothing more than what Redmond is doing with COM*, etc. There's more work to be done. There's ripping out the filesystem as a mechanism for data storage and retrieval, and replacing it with a dynamic semantic network [framerd.org], allowing information storage and retrieval (don't confuse data and information). There's moving away from skins and into real, powerful, direct-manipulation user interfaces. For those of you that remember OS/2 and IBM's System Object Model, there was some very, very powerful technology underneath all of that! Hell, you still can't reliably drag a document over top of the printer and have it "do the right thing" in Windows or Linux like you could in OS/2. And that was CORBA all over the place, too, so there was plenty of room for those services to make their way out over the network.

    Don't even get me started on package management and installation management, or system administration. Suffice it to say that very little of our technology is designed to help us achieve our goals. It's a lot of work, but this community has boundless energy, and the opportunity and environment to do things that are truly revolutionary. We revolutionized the development model, now let's revolutionize the technology.

  • It's a preview for god's sake! (Score:4)

    by localman ( 111171 ) on Wednesday August 16, 2000 @11:43PM (#849888) Homepage
    I'm pretty shocked by all the negativity here. Guess I shouldn't be, this is slashdot after all...

    Nonetheless, I'm pretty impressed with this thing for a preview release of version 1 software. It looks like it may surpass the Mac and Windows file browsers fairly soon...

    Oh wait, I forgot, the idea of anyone using a decent GUI filemanager on Linux is just plain painful to the CLI folks. I guess all GUI development should stop so that those people aren't annoyed by the very existence of other ways of using a computer.

    BTW, I love CLI, but when I want a GUI, I just use it and don't fret over the lost masculinity.

    Hey eazel folks... keep up the good work!

  • People don't even think of mobile phones as computers (mostly because...

    they don't go wrong

    they only have 4 - 5 lines of text display

    they're slow

    they have little (or no) user accessible storage space

    Though I agree that cell phones are pdas are the future, it's not a future that mutually exclusive of "desktop computing as we know it."

  • Ok so Mozilla [mozilla.org] is going to support an SVG rendering engine which makes a pretty good target for the display layer. The conceptual model is the tough part; graphical navigation of a unix or DOS filesystem is an inherently mixed metaphor, the underlying system is textual so you are basically restricted to a document tree display. A better, or at least "more graphical" way of doing it would be to represent the local area(define local as you like) of your network as a scenegraph consisting of a set of nodes and the links between them. Restrict the types of nodes to a simplified object hierarchy.
    • Object
      • Person
      • place
      • Thing
      • file
      • stream
      • device

    That users can subclass and that can support simple messaging(a well defined interface is inherited from Object and used by all nodes on the scene).

    WHY? well the advantages are obvious aren't they? In this age of always(we wish)on networking it would make sense to represent the most commonly dealt with domain objects as clearly as possible. Bruce Tognazzini [asktog.com] made the suggestion that people ought to be first class elements of any net oriented UI. And of course if you have people they have places to go things to do people they do them with, things they need to do them, places where they can work undisturbed, places where they can choose things or make things, places to meet other people, etc, etc. until you reach a place that... well you don't really want to go there now do you?

    The neat thing is that it's possible to do almost all of the messy parts in the XML layer, for which there are numerous commodity tools and libraries. It should (in theory) be crossplatform (assuming platforms are compatible to standard).
    My major worry right now is whether most of the SVG clients are going to support in-picture-links as that would be the way to implement most of the method calls on objects. Greatest possible thing would be to be able to write the methods in scheme ;-)

  • > Eazel's Nautilaus suffers from GNOME's achille heel. Have you seen the requirements to install this *file manager*?
    Did you forgot that Nautilus is a file manager FOR The GNOME Desktop? Therefore I think it's perfectly reasonable that it depends on GNOME libraries...

    > Helix GNOME. Plain GNOME is not good enough. No sirree. And you can forget about GNOME 1.0. Fat chance of that working.
    Helix GNOME is plain GNOME. It's just bunch of pre-compiled packages for several distributions. There's absolutely no magick in it. It's just a way to distribute GNOME.A bit like Debian, RedHat and SuSe are ways to distribute Linux.
    And what's wrong with GNOME version 1.2.4 that Helix GNOME is based on? It's the latest stable version, you know. AFAIK binaries compiled against GNOME 1.0 libraries will work perfectly fine with GNOME 1.2 libs.

    > Mozilla. Oh dear god... Enough said here. I'll be penalized for saying this, but Mozilla on Linux is really looking sad these days. It does not even work on glibc 2.0 even if you hand compile it. Trust me. Very sad.
    You don't like it, you don't use it. It's that simple.
    Besides why on earth are you bitching Mozilla here? I thought this was about Nautilus and GNOME. Though you are (or will be) able to mix GNOME and Mozilla...
    And why is it so terrible if Mozilla doesn't work with glibc 2.0? Now that Debian 2.2 is released, how many new glibc 2.0 based distros are there anyway?

  • Egads! Save the poor penguin! (Score:5)

    by / ( 33804 ) on Wednesday August 16, 2000 @09:32PM (#849897)
    Does anyone else get the idea when looking at Eazel's logo [eazel.com] that the poor penguin is about to be squashed under the weight of the precipitously balanced puzzle piece? I hope it's not an allegory for Eazel's products' stability or performance.
  • It's not obvious and a lot more fuss than just left clicking on it, which was my main point. In any case, your trick doesn't work on fat drives (which is where I store my mp3). So, it is THAT useless.

  • A Question (Score:3)

    by nd ( 20186 ) <nacase AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday August 17, 2000 @06:23AM (#849900) Homepage
    I haven't tried the preview release yet because I'm at work and can't, but hopefully someone familiar enough with Nautilus can answer this.

    Is there any support or capability to do complex shell operations in Nautilus? For example, in the CLI you can append two text files by typing:

    % cat file1 >> file2

    This is great -- appending files with very little effort, something probably not possible in Windows Explorer. Now, what I'm wondering is, how could this be done in Nautilus? Rather than trying to think up of some GUI analogy for this _specific_ operation, I think it would be best to have some kind of "shell command prompt" sitting below the GUI file listing -- where commands entered would execute with respect to the current directory in Nautilus. The listing would usually need to be refreshed after execution, too.

    There's endless possibilities to this, like selecting the file icon and having it paste to the text input box, or having it pass the selected files as parameters. I can't be the first/only one who has thought of this, and I would be suprised if Nautilus didn't already support something like this. Basically, this type of thing would be preffered over opening a new xterm, cd'ing to the right directory, and doing what you want.

    So is it already there with a certain option enabled, or does the capability exist through some customization/component building?
  • I should note that all those Es look awfully suspicious too. Could be a sign that they are funded by a large number of venture capitalists bent on expanding the use of the letter E and then copyrighting that letter.

    I'm reminded of an old NFB film where a king decided that he didn't like the letter "E" and would have his men beat anybody who used the letter.

    It's a fuzzy memory from when I was a kid, but the point stuck in my mind permanently.

    Anybody know the film I'm talking about? It's animated...

  • We need a new analogy. (Score:3)

    by enneff ( 135842 ) on Wednesday August 16, 2000 @09:35PM (#849904) Homepage
    IMO the whole 'folders' full of 'documents' doesn't quite do it for me. This analogy simply doesn't work in relation to a UNIX file system.

    Someone needs to think of a really clever way of visualising the directory structure so that it makes sense both logically and metaphorically, hence more intuitive.

    Icons and windows must die, we need a genius to create a new analogy!

  • Re:SFW. (Score:3)

    by ngzodfrog ( 223407 ) on Wednesday August 16, 2000 @09:36PM (#849907)
    mobile phones *own* the future? do you have cancer coverage in you life insurance?
  • I'd encourage you to look at Nautilus. It is not a wrapper program. The difference in Nautilus is the use of *fine grained* components. That is what is powerful, not the use of big blocks like Mozilla (which we can and do do as well). For example, why write 40 image renderers? Nautilus uses the eye of gnome component to not only view things in window when you click on them (heavy big component use) but to render the thumbnails you see in windows. It wouldn't have made sense to rewrite this functionality...bonobo is sort of library APIs on steroids in the ways we're using it.
  • Lessee, it would want to make symbolic and hard links obvious, so you can see at a glance where the "duplication" is.

    And it'd be nice to do something different with devices - representing them as files is fine for console work, but when you've got a gui, try representing it as a device. Not exactly sure how - something that would make linking them to various "streams" a drag and drop kind of process. Perhaps components that can be hooked together, i dunno...

    hmmm, i can see where this could take some thought...

    "What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is"

  • Maybe Slashdot needs a new kind of discussion where posters review product releases. How about a reverse Slashdot Interview that asks US to review a new product by day and time X, and at that time post the article to which we can post reviews or comments?

    There will of course be no way to eliminate trolls, but the mod system will at least have some more-informed posts to chew on.

    Does slashdot have a suggestion box? Time to hunt...
  • I havent downloaded it yet (cant) But I'm pretty sure the tarball isn't just Nautilus. Nautilus depends on a bunch of different things like GnomeVFS, Bonobo, etc. The tarball contains all its dependencies, making the package bigger. Hey, it's better than downloading all the packages separately and installing them by hand, don't you think?

    -Brandon
  • ANyone try looking at Eazel's own webpages in Eazel??

    Most of them are OK, but the screenshots page flashes more than a Pokemon episode. Unlike the other pages, this one was crafted in Adobe GoLive, without IMAGE width and height attributes.. as the images expand the page reflows until you think to yourself it's time to wake up the gim.. I mean bring out Netscape.

    I emailed their webmaster 2 weeks ago about this, but I'd guess since the page was done by a clueless person who needs GoLive, that person must be a manager and the webmaster is afraid to approach them or edit their code w/o permission. Heh... Dilbertisms at a Linux company. (Course, I'm stretching circumstancial evidence here, but the fact is their product and Mozilla look like shit when viewing http://screenshots.eazel.com/aug-02-2000/index.htm l)

  • Because when Bonobo components start being written (when GNOME 1.4 is released in a few months and the library starts shipping with dists), bonobo will stop being transparent to the user. It'll make a wealth of new, easy to write components become available. Its said that you say that it doesn't focus on the user since Eazel employs some of the best user interface experts (can you say Macintosh? NeXT?). We're definitely user focused, sometimes I think we're too user focused ;-)

    Obviously you don't understand how MIME types work on Linux. It sounds like you use a lot of Windows, because currently there is no heavily used MIME-type to application mapping. That's done by the filemanager. So *DUH* of course we're going to be giving you some defaults for that - nothing currently exists. And you'll be able to launch your MP3 files with whatever you want, Nautilus just lets you view them differently, its not an MP3 app.
  • Just one of the many people who have put this question out there...but.

    Does ANYONE actually try software/read articles/whatever before posting here? Seems like over half of the responses in this topic are inane, given that the poster wouldn't have even posted had they gone ahead and tried the software.

    At any rate, the software is quite cool, and also customizable (and pretty). As everyone should know, its not a finished product, so take what you see with a grain of salt.

    Anyway, keep up the good work...its nice to see a large # of options out there.

  • Re:hmm. (Score:4)

    by Electric Angst ( 138229 ) on Wednesday August 16, 2000 @09:56PM (#849934)
    It would amount to adding a new field for mime types - something like 'info program' or something

    You know, I had a similar idea recently about integrating that kind of feature into Gnutella. I mean, give the type of info Napster gives about mp3s about all sorts of files. This would be a great spam killer, and improve the quality of the network.

    The interesting thing, though, is that after thinking of that idea, I realized that Gnutella was open source. If I wanted to add a feature like that, I was free to. Then, a kind of meloncoly set in. I have three years of high school Pascal under my belt, a little C, and I just recently finished the "Hello, World!" phaze of Java. (From a book which I hope will take me much farther.) I don't have the experience to add something like that to a program. I will, perhaps, in a few years, but by that time who's to say if that feature will already be added, or if gnutella will be replaced by something better totally. It's a kind of despair that hits with the increasing speed of the information age. Being one step back used to mean you had to work twice as hard to catch up, now, as things progress exponentially faster, you begin to wonder if it's even worth it. Ideas, even insightful ones, are a dime a dozen, it's implemintation that strikes gold.

    I know I'm rambling, and things are getting off-topic, but I hope that I convey the kind of feelings that depress those of us in the early stages of learning, particularly those who started late in the game. I guess what I want to know is, what do you do to catch up? What's going to get those who always wanted to program but never got around to it off their asses and with skills that will become an asset to the various open source projects out there?

    Who knows, maybe it comes down to straight motivation and drive. If you want it bad enough, you'll do it. I want it bad enough, and while it may take time, I'll get it, eventually.


    --
  • I'm all for the G.N.O.M.E project, but I think that with Nautilus, integration is being taken much too far with Mozilla. It's almost as if Mozilla is to linux as IE is to windows. Integration is now forcing everything into one application, which makes everything that much more complicated, bloated, and stuffy.

  • Re:SFW. (Score:5)

    by plastik55 ( 218435 ) on Wednesday August 16, 2000 @09:59PM (#849939) Homepage
    Undoubtedly I'm writing a (-1, Flamebait)... You're right, except they dudn't use Linux OR X as the base, which is probably why they're able to actually do revolutionary things.

    Those in the Linux camp are fine with revolutionizing interface, as long as it doesn't interfere with legacy (read: awful) programs. As a result no useful interface work gets done except for half-assed attempts to emulate Mac and Windows. But you can skin everything!!! Don't get me wrong: I use Linux and the CLI 99% of the time and have been doing so for two years now. But whenever I boot MacOS into a window on my machine I get all nostalgic for the days when I could navigate to any file, anywhere, in seconds, using only the keyboard. That's because Apple has worked out reasonable and memorable keyboard shortcuts, like:

    • Cmd-downarrow to open a folder, Cmd-uparrow to go to the parent folder. If you're in a tree view, Cmd-rightarrow and Cmd-leftarrow expand and collapse the directory subtree.
    • The concept of selecting a file. so I can rename (hit Return), open (Cmd-O), or do other things to it without typing the filename again.
    • I can select a file by typing the first few letters. I can also select using the arrowkeys.

    Thus if I have three JPG images in a directory named:

    • FSMHSusNM131_N2.jpg
    • FSMusNM131_G8.jpg
    • FSMHSusNM132_N5.jpg
    (and I do,) then I can select any one of these using at most two keypresses and two arrowkeys. On Linux, If I were to do anything to the third file, I would have to type FSMH(tab)2(tab) while squinting to see what was different about the filenames.

    Or use a graphical filemanager. But like most Linux wanna-be-cool software, the GUI software for Linux provides all of the look, none of the keyboard shortcuts.

    So it's useless for ANYONE who wants to get work done quickly.

    True, CLI has its advantages. But for me the speedups only come when I'm so frustrated with the limitations that I start scripting my own solutions. Which I could just as easily do on a GUI machine.

    Usability is not a foreign concept, people... why do so few people get it?

  • Why a single-window browser? (Score:3)

    by ambclams ( 171322 ) on Wednesday August 16, 2000 @10:00PM (#849942) Homepage
    It looks as though Eazel, like many other interfaces, makes use of a single-window file browser. Personally, I prefer a multi-window browser such as the current Mac Finder, in which opening a folder normally causes a new window to appear with the folder's contents in it rather than displaying the contents in the same window.

    This design seems to be common in other interfaces, including Apple's new Finder in OS X, and it does seem to have its advantages - reducing screen clutter, for one. However, I find multi-window interfaces more useful to me; for example, when working with groups of files in different directories, or moving files around into different folders, it seems easier when opening a folder creates a new window.

    It's worth noting that I've been a Mac user for years, and my opinion may be derived at least in part from my growing accustomed to this way of working. I'm open to the idea that a single-window browser may be a more effective interface, though I'm not especially fond of it at the moment.

    The only Linux box I use regularly is a relatively slow system used primarily for server-type functions; I don't run X often, so I'm far from an expert on graphical interfaces to Linux. However, I'm curious as to whether there are any interfaces that use the same sort of multi-window design that the Mac Finder does, and why the single-window file browser seems to be more common these days.

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