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
Great! The mockups are wonderful.
I agree. The mockups are great. Only thing I’d add is that I’d like to see tags in an optional sidebar – similar to f-spot or digikam, but obviously for all files – not just photies. I think the integration with zeitgeist and inclusion of timeline in nautilus is terrific, but integration with tracker [or similar tool] to enable sorting using tags would be the icing on the cake for me. What do people think?
Hello, do you know about autojump¹ ? The website explain it well but, realy, you should try it.
It’s a bash/zsh script that allow you to go to the folder you often use. There’s autocompletion but must time, one letter is enough. It’s very _very_ usefull. If almost never use « cd » in the console since I discover this.
Having such a tool in the nautilus path bar would be realy great. More than the standard autocompletion, in fact.
The only problem is that autojump need to « learn » the common path. So you must have gone to a place at least one time for autojump to run.
One last thing : I realy love elementary, but the scrollbar is way to wide. Since the mouse scroll exist, we don’t need such a wide scrollbar.
[1] http://wiki.github.com/joelthelion/autojump/
It looks super, as always. When will I recieve your version of nautilus in an update in Lucid?
Repo is enabled!
we’re working on porting it to Lucid
porting what on lucid ? Autojump ?
Lucid porting ! awesome ! can’t wait !
+1 for tags.
It’s great you take your time fixing these graphical usability problems with nautilus, but there is another usability problem with nautilus: It’s not using policykit. This is making it hard doing administrative tasks like changing an icon which isn’t in the home folder. I’ve tried doing such things in OS X and it works like it should, you get asked to type the password when you’re doing an administrative task.
Actually, it’s a problem i gvfs. There’s a bug filed here, but it doesn’t seem to be a lot of progress: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=561443
Am I the only one that doesn’t like the Close, Minimize and Maximize buttons in the top left corner of the windows as a standard? I realize Elementary is imitating the Mac OSX UI paradigm but what’s the logical justification for this placement? (not arguing, just curious)
I prefer the Window-style of placing these buttons in the top-right.
haha, okay so elementary is not out to imitate Mac OS. Are we going to reach some of the same conclusions as a company that spends millions usability testing? Yea, probably. But have never in any way ever done anything simply because “OS X does it like that”.
I can see why a lot of people would be used to them on the top right. But from personal experience and from others, once you get used to it, it just feels better. One user writes, “I spend a lot of time web browsing, my cursor is on the left side of the screen, fiddling with my bookmarks. Besides, the tabs run from the left. The menus are all on the left. The buttons all are on the left, and my Ubuntu menu and shortcuts are all on the left. Putting the window buttons on the left just makes visual sense to me.” And it makes visual sense to me as well. So that is the reason
Guys, I just started using the Nautilus Elementary PPA on my Ubuntu system. Great work! As for the OSX-Finder complaints, if any of these people have ever actually USED the Finder (I use it every day at work), they’d know that there’s a big difference between it and Nautilus.
I’m not even using your window theme, but the in-window tweaks you’ve made are excellent. The view switcher and the efficient use of space is much appreciated.
Also, did you guys fix the ‘Emblems’ list so that it’s a nicely arranged grid that’s easy to scan? Just noticed this and it’s great.