elementary Nautilus (note this is a mock-up)
This is Brian here with yet another post! I know you’ve been itching for more info! We are going to answer some questions today. Or at least provide some insight. First, where is Nautilus headed in elementary OS? And what are some goals we have for it? (Other than fancy and useful effects like Coverflow!) Let’s dive right in and take a look at what we’d like to see in Nautilus elementary and what is being developed at the moment.
Nautilus is a file browser as such we want to really focus on bring out all that we think a file browser should be and stay with our philosophy of “just do“. If you look at the mock-up above to the left (click it to make it big and see all the pretty!) you’ll see that we favor a much slimmer looking Nautilus.
Nautilus elementary breadcrumbs
Now let’s take a look at a mock-up Dan recently created discussing the breadcrumb functionality of Nautilus. Search is integrated into the breadcrumbs.
Here I’ll let Dan talk about those breadcrumbs:
“Nautilus should navigate to the directory as you type a path in the text entry. In this way, you won’t type an invalid path because you can clearly see that the directory or file doesn’t exist.
When you click on a breadcrumb, anything after that breadcrumb is automatically converted to text. For example given the breadcrumb “Music>Cake>Fashion Nugget” clicking on Music would give me “Music>Cake/Fashion Nugget”. Note that the text “Cake/Fashion Nugget” Should be highlighted when you click “Music”. This is because you may want to type a completely new path right away, but you may also simply want to change “Cake” to “Fake” or some other minor change.
Finally, The shortcut CTRL + L should convert everything in the pathbar to text to simulate the change it offers currently.”
As you can see from both of these mock-ups we want to simplify Nautilus elementary so that browsing can occur quickly and through an interface that isn’t cluttered. These are mostly just visual changes, but more loftier goals are planned (being dreamed up!).
Nautilus Zeitgeist
Recently Ian “ Izo” Cylkowski created some wonderful mock-ups showcasing Zeitgeist (or Gnome Activity Journal) as part of Nautilus. This is something I know that I and Dan both would love to see! Now this goal (if it happens of course, nothing is ever concrete! So don’t hold us to this!) will take some time to occur. For now some exciting developments have been occurring with Nautilus and Zeitgeist.
This video showcases only a development mock-up and test on how things would work. This is not the final implementation. Anyway the juicy bit is the video below is a test on integrating some of Zeitgeist’s functionality into Nautilus elementary!
As you can see in the video commonly accessed files and the files recently accessed in the past days are quickly accessible! (note: More info is available at Velour’s blog here.) This is by no means the end of where we’d like to see this go and we’d like to see more integration of Gnome Activity Journal and Nautilus elementary. Perhaps a button within Nautilus elementary that converts the view to the Journal? This is just the beginning and I’ll keep the updates coming.
Let us know what you think!
Get the latest Nautilus elementary here: https://code.launchpad.net/~elementaryart/nautilus-elementary/nautilus-elementary
