On Sat, Aug 05, 2000 at 01:40:51PM +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> Whilst I was hoping for some debate and discussion on FS UI's and such, it's
> always good to solve a few troubles along the way... :)
Nautilus looks as though it has some really nice features. It
didn't take long for Mac OS-X's "thumbnail for document icon"
idea to propagate, did it?
I still haven't seen a FS UI that was nicer and more "complete"
than Acorn's RISC-OS, which appeared on their Archimedes line of
PCs somewhere around 1987 or so. The big thing about that environment
was that there was no such thing as a file save dialog box, or a
file open dialog box. Everything worked by drag and drop, on the
theory: why invent an inferior version of the file system view just
for this purpose, when the user probably already has that open in
a window on their desktop?
So, to open a file, you would either double-click on it's icon (to
start it's default application), or drag it to an active instance
of that or another application. To save a file, you did get a
little dialog window, but it just contained a single icon, representing
the file, and you could drag that to a directory viewer to execute
the save. If you dropped the "save" icon into another application,
then that initiated an inter-application dialog to transfer the
contents in the way most suited to the target application, rather
than touching the disk at all.
There's an X-based re-implementation of this, ROX, at rox.sourceforge.net,
but I haven't had time to muck about with it.
--
Andrew
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