The GNOME Development Release 2.5.0 which will lead to 2.6 is ready for testing. It is available from ftp.gnome.org and mirrors. This version includes the new spatial Nautilus, the new GTK+ fileselector (however applications don’t use it yet) and among the proposed new apps for inclusion are Ximian Evolution and RhythmBox. A stable Quick Lounge and gThumb would be great to be included too.
GNOME Development Release 2.5.0 is Out
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Hmmm, I click F11 on Windowmaker, it shows me a list of all open programmes, the desktop they’re on, and status – minimized, hidden etc. I just have to select the app. I don’t know if you could have anything simpler than that.
In 2.4, in left column, open history.. just like tabs
what still keeps me from using gnome is that u dont have a “keep on top” future in metacity. Is there any plan to include it in gnome2.6 ???
soory … i summitted it 2 time, I didn’t want to do that.
have edit/context menu options called “move to” and “copy to”.
then you get a save dialogue that allows you to specify the new location either graphically or absolute path based like in the cli.
then the spacial naut can just automatically close the old windows since you can do all operations from the new window that you would possibly need.
it makes it fast, and powerful.
“”This whole spatial thing is way above your heads. I say this cause all you are focusing on is this: it opens more than one window. “”
Nice to see arrogance isn’t dead.
The whole idea of the spatial file manager in the nautilus form is that each folder is a separate window and the position of the folders and the files they contain are invariant from one session to the next. That’s it, that’s the whole thing, so people are quite right to concentrate on spatial file managers opening more than one window because all the file managers I’ve used recently DO maintain the position of folder contents. Since desktop space is limited (I’m typing this on 800×600) window clutter is an important issue.
In any case the window positions themselves provide practically no useful spatial reference, because any desktop user is constantly using a multitude of windows with massively varying content. Over anything but a short period of time window position is irrelevant as an indication of content, simply because of the number of windows the user is exposed to, and that doesn’t even address the fact that a lot of people like to use their file managers with the windows maximised or that constantly being forced to switch attention from one window to another is downright annoying.
I think it would be better if they spent their time coming up with a visual aid that provides better memory recall than the folder/file approach. A simple example would be to display a full tree diagram, then the user woudld be able to remember folders by their position on the tree diagram (For example if I want MP3s I remember they’re on the left around 2/3rds of the way down the tree). The tree diagram is insufficient to describe a real file hierarchy efficiently, but it serves to show the point. If someone REALLY wants spatial memory to assist file management then they are going to have to change the way the file hierarchy is represented and navigated. Without that a “spatial” file manager has no more or less intuitive value than a “browser” file manager.
what still keeps me from using gnome is that u dont have a “keep on top” future in metacity. Is there any plan to include it in gnome2.6 ???
According to the Metacity changelog, “always on top” is available from version 2.5.3 thru keybinding. (2.6 is the latest stable version of Metacity)
I think it would be better if they spent their time coming up with a visual aid that provides better memory recall than the folder/file approach. A simple example would be to display a full tree diagram, then the user woudld be able to remember folders by their position on the tree diagram
For some folders I would like a nice, pretty background for the folder. A light, blue music note in my MP3 folder, pen and paper in my documents folder,..
For some folders I would like a nice, pretty background for the folder. A light, blue music note in my MP3 folder, pen and paper in my documents folder,..
use windows xp
For some folders I would like a nice, pretty background for the folder. A light, blue music note in my MP3 folder, pen and paper in my documents folder,..
Dave Camp played around with watermarking windows with whatever emblem that folder has. Check out
http://primates.ximian.com/~dave/screenshots/Screenshot-EmblemWater…
For some folders I would like a nice, pretty background for the folder. A light, blue music note in my MP3 folder, pen and paper in my documents folder,..
use windows xp
:
i want something thats does it WELL and efficentily. XP is anything but that.
also i want to avoid having to patch my system every 6 minutes because redmond programmers are too braindead from doing whippits.
i want an OS that is GOOD, a desktop env that is GOOD. xp does not qualify as good, its a cobbled piece of crap that is slow on every single machine i have seen it on.
The reason why spatial can be very godo for some people is the following.
Imagine you are me (hehe) and you have some folders with only two files in them, and some folders with hundreds of files. Sometimes nesting files deeper in heirarchies is too damn inconvenient, I would have to think of more arbitrary ways to classify them and so on. So I just give up and throw them in one folder. Now I have this folders inside another folder like /home/me. The folder ‘me’ only has a few files and folders visible, and I prefer it to be small and not take up too much screen space. I really hate scrolling, time consuming, and I am really prone to overshooting and generally wasting time. A large windows is (obviously) good for scrolling, and a small windows is not.
So in short I would like my ‘me’ folder window to be small when I nevigate to it, and would like maximum screen space for ‘misc’ because I have hundreds of files there.
At this point some people might say what I need is to sort my files better, but this calls for some fairly intensive housekeeping, and i do that for, say my music, by hand, but that is rather easy to sort, only laborious. Plus I do not really interact with mp3s like I do with other files.
For me, the biggest benefit of the spatial model would be that I could set option for say, the music folder, and have it remember the options I chose by simply resizing and moving it. If it also remembers which panes I had open, say preview panes for that folder, or the view, thumbnail, filmstrip and so on. The spatial model brings all this together in one convenient package. Navigational model is good for other things, and probably is what works best from the CLI and so on.
For some folders I would like a nice, pretty background for the folder. A light, blue music note in my MP3 folder, pen and paper in my documents folder,..
nautilus has done this for a while, right click on a folder, choose properties and then the emblems tab to set an emblem, background colors can be done too
what still keeps me from using gnome is that u dont have a “keep on top” future in metacity. Is there any plan to include it in gnome2.6 ???
According to the Metacity changelog, “always on top” is available from version 2.5.3 thru keybinding. (2.6 is the latest stable version of Metacity)
Another alternative, which IMHO is much better and more intuitive than “always on top”, is to tell the window manager not to automatically bring windows to the front. Windows stay where they are in the stack unless you move them, and you can bring them to the front or push them to the back, whatever is appropriate. It eliminates the need for an “always on top” option. When I first tried Metacity it was very bad at this and was one of the reasons I never started using it. It may be better now, I don’t know. Most window managers are very configurable and have no problem with a setup like this. I personally find this behavior very intuitive and can’t live without it. It makes “always on top” feel like such a kludge.