In Response to the flames (Score 5)

Hi,

I am currently contributing to Nautilus, but am not an Eazel employee. I thought I'd just speak out about some of the claims against Nautilus and address some of the concerns that people have been bringing up.

First of all - the screenshots are 75% JPEG format. i.e. they't not the best of quality - so it may not look as good as in reality. A better choice would have been 100% JPEG or PNG format

Secondly - please take into account that this isn't even alpha-level software. Eazel Inc. is still experimenting with icons and stuff. They decided to give SVG icons a shot. They are playing around with different UI concepts. Nothing is final yet. Let them 'explore' different icons and stuff. Please do not say 'oh these screenshots suck, therefore Nautilus sucks, therefore Eazel sucks'. Also note, that the you can change the 'icons' to anything you want, I think that also includes the toolbar icons.

Third - Nautilus is a 'graphical shell' much like Konqueror for KDE is a 'graphical shell' much like 'EFM' is a 'graphical shell'. Although Nautilus is more like Konqueror than EFM. Nautilus is not exaztly like Konqueror, but it is very similiar.

Fourth - The thing that Eazel is marketing to make things easier for the user are the SERVICES that its going to provide. These are not found in any screenshots and have largely not been talked about. These services will be able to be accessed through Nautilus (I think this is how Eazel plans to make revenue). This is what is touted to make Linux so much easier for new people. I think some of these services will include remote file storage, backups, an apt-like system for RPM. These will all be tied into Nautilus I believe (if you're not subscribed to Eazel's services you should be able to easily switch them off). The services are of course not 100% certain, and I may be wrong since I do not work for Eazel.

Finally, I would just like to say please don't judge Nautilus from a few meazley screenshots. These hackers are GENUINELY trying to make a contribution to the open source community. They are experimenting with new ideas and new concepts. Nothing is definate at this point. I mean there hasn't even been a 0.0 or 0.1 release yet. Nautilus is VERY buggy, VERY unstable at this point in time. Please do not expect so much from it. Eventually Eazel and the Nautilus crew will be a stage or point to be able to release snapshots and releases to illicit user feedback. In fact, feedback is encouraged even now if you wish. But please make it USEFUL feedback not things like 'this sUxs, it l00ks like winbl0ws'.

I would like to thank all the people who have provided constructive feedback. I am sure that the people at Eazel have been reviewing it and taking it into account. (for example, others have previously complained about the SVG icons looking bad - and it is still under consideration wether they will be used in Nautilus 1.0 or not)

Sincerely,
Ali Abdin

P.S. Nautilus will not really embed the entire mozilla. It will embed the the 'gtkmozembed' widget. It is basically the HTML component that mozilla uses for rendering. Also there is a 'gtkhtml' widget for light-weight HTML rendering (the help stuff in Nautilus will be using this I believe) - but for a general web-browsing experience I think people will be using mozilla