Hi all, Me and a few others had some good design discussions with the Elementary developers last Friday. See below for an outline of where I think we stand on a range of feature initiatives. Further comments and discussion are welcome.
The short version is (I think) this: in terms of design, undo/redo and Zeitgeist integration are areas where both projects can definitely try and collaborate in the future. There are also possibilities around sharing code for a Places sidepane, toolbar editor and the view switcher, though there has already been a bit of divergence there. I'd like to thank the Elementary developers for the time and effort they've put into talking this through. It's great that the communication channels are open now. We should definitely keep talking. Here's the discussion feature by feature: * Breadcrumb bar: both projects want to have a breadcrumb bar. We seem to differ on what we want from this though. Elementary have ambitions to integrate search functionality within theirs [1]. I personally don't think this would be a good way for Nautilus to go: a separate search box would be more discoverable. This approach has already been advocated by Garrett [2] and is in Bugzilla [3]. * Places sidepane: Elementary have created a Places sidepane with headings. This is something that Nautilus also wants to do, though we have different ideas about how it should be done [4] (our design lacks expanders, has different headings and a different section order). * Zoom slider: this is something that Elementary have implemented. I don't think this would be right for Nautilus, and I haven't heard many arguments to the contrary. * Editable toolbars: Elementary have incorporated Midori's toolbar editor, which isn't the standard one used in other GNOME apps. So, though we're aiming to have editable toolbars in Nautilus, the work done by the Elementary devs isn't very useful for us. * View switcher: Elementary have a kind of grouped toggle button for this, which could be nice to have in Nautilus, but the implementation is a bit problematic. kitkat from the elementary crew has recommended that we should steer clear of their implementation. Maybe we could work together to do something a bit more solid in the future? * Zeitgeist integration: this is something we could collaborate on, since both projects seem to have similar aims. It would be nice to have Places entries like 'Today', 'Yesterday', and 'This Week' in Nautilus [4]. Elementary have already done some work in this area [5]. * Undo/Redo functionality: Elementary currently have this working and they've pointed us to the latest code [6]. It would be great if we could draw on this work. Let me know if I've misrepresented anything. ;) Allan [1] http://danrabbit.deviantart.com/art/Nautilus-Pathbar-Breakdown-155760035?q=gallery:DanRabbit/2418059&qo=6 [2] http://linuxart.com/log/archives/2009/07/24/nautilus-streamlined/ [3] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=615549 [4] http://live.gnome.org/Nautilus/UIRoadmap/Places [5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbHsO2GL9lM&feature=player_embedded [6] http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~elementaryart/nautilus-elementary/nautilus-elementary-2.30/diff/60 -- GoogleTalk: allanpday AT gmail DOT com IRC: aday on irc.gnome.org Blog: http://afaikblog.wordpress.com/ -- nautilus-list mailing list nautilus-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/nautilus-list