Hylke’s Home

Sunday, November 2nd, 2008

Cluttered nautilus sidebar

I think the screenshot and mockup explain themselves. (Not actually using Clutter ;) )

Nautilus sidebar mockup




What people think...


  1.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 14:10
    baze  

    loos pretty much like what apple did in leopard, but i like it :). however, they also made the categories collapseable to hide certain stuff.
    nevertheless, +1 from me.

  2.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 14:17
    Pierre  

    You’re my hero of the week :-)

    Thanks :-)

  3.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 14:20
    Pierre  
  4.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 14:24
    Hylke  

    Thanks Pierre for pointing to that. :)

  5.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 14:25
    TonyH  

    cool :Q__

  6.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 14:32
    Pacho Ramos  

    It looks nice :-D
    Thanks!

  7.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 14:46
    Matt  

    Looks nice. I wonder if the ‘Places’ dropdown/header could see some attention as well. Its not very pretty…

  8.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 14:54
    Julien  

    It looks really nice, but I wonder why Clutter is necessary, why not just Gtk ?

  9.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 15:03

    Very nice! Hopefully something along this line will be implemented.

  10.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 15:11
    dudus  

    It looks nice, but make sure that gray background and font color is not hardcoded. It should get that colors from theme preferences.

  11.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 15:12
    anonim  

    Now, if you can also fix the ugly separation bar… Banshee’s looks far better IMO

  12.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 15:13
    dudus  

    it’s funny how you managed to get it a lot less cluttered using clutter library.

  13.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 15:15
    Hylke  

    Well it’s not going to use clutter. It’s just that the sidebar right now is “cluttered”. Sorry for the confusion. :)

  14.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 15:28
    Julien  

    My mistake, my English is not so good, so I didn’t understand. (I’m feeling a bit ashamed :p.)

    Anyway, I’m looking forward to have that on my computer, good job.

  15.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 15:34
    Marcus  

    Beautiful!

  16.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 15:52
    Michael  

    Very, very nice. I really hope we can have something like that for 2.26.

  17.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 15:59
    Julien  

    I think I’m not the only one who misunderstood ;).

  18.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 16:10

    Pretty.. definitely worth investigating

  19.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 16:16
    rawsausage  

    Wonderful! I want that yesterday!

  20.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 16:22

    I see that you managed to translate all of Nautilus, or is there more?

    Seriously, that looks nice. Like others said, just about as good as Finder.

  21.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 16:27
    Nil Gradisnik  

    Very nice, I’ve been thinking about this some time ago. Reminds me about the old experimental Beagle UI - Holmes a bit. :) Someone should definitely make this happen in nautilus.

  22.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 16:35
    Mats  

    Oh, that is improvement!

    By the way, will ‘custom’ bookmarks, like Music, Documents etc. go in ‘Personal’ ?

  23.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 16:38
    Hylke  

    Mats: Good question. I wanted to add those but there was no space left in the mockup. I think either your suggestion or a group called “Bookmarks” or “Favorites” will work.

  24.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 16:46

    wow! that will be possible soon? i think that the weight of the division bar have to be reduced (even removed!). I mean the bar wich separe both windows…
    Well , first comment here!
    Regards!!

  25.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 16:57
    ukw  

    It looks really great !
    (but yes the title is confusing)

  26.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 17:36
    Asimov  

    I don’t even have words to express my feeling…
    Hylke, you’re a genious !!!
    Nautilus and GTK guys : code code code ! NOW !!

  27.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 18:24
    no  

    maybe you guys could just install leopard instead?

  28.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 18:28
    Livio  

    Amazing mockup. You’re ideas are great, Hylke.

    Aren’t you working for Novell/Red Hat/whoever? You should. With your ideas you would earn much money without doing much :) .

  29.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 18:28

    Why not use a treeview and use frames and buttons instead? Using a treeview would give the collapse thing for free while being consistent with other apps and not reinventing the wheel.

  30.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 18:39
    Hylke  

    Steve F.: That could also work. Just wanted to play around with some ideas. :)

  31.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 18:48
    Leo S  

    Of course the new mockup looks nice, but it looks nice because there are less items there. Your image of the old one has 13 and a bit items displayed, while the new one has only 8. Of course the new one will look cleaner.

    Now assuming that you do actually want all 13 of those items displayed, the new look will just take a lot more space. Space that is not necessarily available on lower resolutions.

    And another thing, the old screenshot has lots of names like “MemoryStick-station” which are not so nice, while the new one has entries like “Hard Drive”. While that looks better on a mockup it’s certainly not how it would look in real life. People have more than one hard drive, so labeling something as “hard drive” is not representing reality.

    I’m not saying this mockup is bad, but like most mockups, it misrepresents the final look by cutting down complexity and renaming things to look “cleaner” in ways that don’t work in the real world.

  32.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 18:49

    Do it.

  33.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 18:52
    Hylke  

    Leo S: your points are valid, but they are all issues that can be fixed. You are right that the mockup takes more space, but it does make things easier to find.

  34.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 19:17
    mike  

    Great, such thinks are cool :))

  35.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 19:45

    Beautiful! I like the idea of giving this titled sections; the meaningless divider lines have never made sense.
    Now get that sidebar to appear in Spatial mode and I will be eternally grateful.

    (Yes, I realize it’s a mockup so far. No pressure).

  36.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 19:45
    Dennis Fisher  

    Hmm, perhaps it would be possible to code it such that if a scrollbar becomes required, the category names disappear and are replaced with much thinner separators to divide the groups?

  37.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 19:50
    Johannes  

    Nice! +1 from me (+2 for making the categories collapsable somehow.)

  38.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 19:58
    Peteris Krisjanis  

    I wouldn’t say I’m fully sold on this. Old sidebar wasn’t that cluttered, first, second I agree collapsible three view would be nicer, and copying Leopard isn’t cool anymore, because Apple screwed their interface badly now. Nautilus looks so good now just because of less “clutter” and more functionality. Let’s improve functionality, not increase clutter (no offense about Clutter, it is really nice library :)).

    For now, I’m (as user) looking for smaller reject buttons and clearer separation for partition/devices groups (yep, it would be nice for user to see where is that damn camera mounted on). I hope you will find some good middle ground for it :)

  39.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 22:55
    Leo S  

    @Hylke Don’t get me wrong, the new mockup looks way better, I’m just saying it’s just about impossible to compare the two without haveing the same entries in both. Ie, would it still look nice with that many entries, with some of them having names that are less clean than “hard drive”?

  40.  Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 23:17
    Mats  

    @Hylke: Yeah, that sounds reasonable.

    If you add collapsed treeviews, though, you will need two mouseclicks to reach the target.

    You could limit the bookmarks section to e.g four (most popular) items, and a “more” button for the rest…

  41.  Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 00:43
    Mads  

    +1

    Looks really great! Would love to see that in the next release.

  42.  Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 01:08

    Nice for those people who use Nautilus in browser mode I suppose. Personally, I’d rather like to see something like this in “Computer” before pimping the sidebar!

  43.  Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 01:48
    jegHegy  

    Gorgeous!

  44.  Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 10:32
    me  

    Your mockup is missing the root filesystem, which is kind of important.

    @Mats: How about you just store 4 bookmarks in your bookmarks section if you don’t want to see more than 4?

  45.  Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 15:21
    KiL  

    Looks nice, but that’s yet another usability improvement, that’s almost a 1:1 copy of what’s been done on OS X.

    Sometimes I wonder if the Linux usability folks shouldn’t just get OS X and be done with it. I’d rather like to see some new research and new approaches in this sector than seeing people parroting each and every usability aspect of OS X. Yes, Apple have done their homework and excel in usability, but I think here Linux could excel even more and show new approaches, be bold, risk things and revolutionise things.

  46.  Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 16:44

    Very nice!

    @Matt
    Yeah, I agree. It’s also not very noticeable. The way it is now.

  47.  Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 16:50
    Hylke  

    KiL: categorizing places doesn’t seem like something that is defining for OS X, Windows does it too. It’s a good solution for reorganizing the current list.

    “Sometimes I wonder if the Linux usability folks shouldn’t just get OS X and be done with it.”

    I wish people would just judge the solution instead of saying “we should do it because this an other DE has it” or “we shouldn’t do this because an other DE has it”.

    I see it more as every car has a steering wheel. :)

  48.  Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 16:58
    Mats  

    @me: what I meant was to limit the bookmarks if they require too much space.

    Leo S:
    “Now assuming that you do actually want all 13 of those items displayed, the new look will just take a lot more space. Space that is not necessarily available on lower resolutions.”

    In my opinion, that is a valid point, and this should be kept in mind when designing the sidebar.

    It could either be a key in gconf, or limited by space available.

    @Kil: Follow the brainstorming towards Gnome 3.0. Looks like innovation will happen there.

  49.  Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 20:13
    Alex  

    All of the supposed advantages could be obtained by reorganizing the order of the current list. The headings just waste space (nearly 30% space lost)

  50.  Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 01:23

    Lovely

  51.  Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 02:00
    Hylke  

    Alex: I don’t agree.

  52.  Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 09:06
    Brad Jensen  

    I made a mock-up like this last year. :P

    You still need an eject button next to some of your stuff, and instead of having buttons on the left it would be better to have a fully clickable bar to click on, like this (made last year):

    http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/5591/intrepidibexop2.jpg

    My mock-up doesn’t really have indents, nor does it have any eject buttons, but the full bars are clickable, rather than just a button.

    Also, I think there should be an arrow next to the left of each category, so people can hide them.

  53.  Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 22:23
    Abbas Khan  

    Please do not tempt us with these amazing pictures, i know gnome would never consider doing something that actually makes nautilus look this much drastically better (yes I’m very optimistic ;P). I am a happy gnome user, don’t get me wrong…. but seriously, they do hate change… even if it improves things…

  54.  Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 16:58
    Hylke  

    Abbas Khan: You are right that the GNOME project is pretty conservative, but I think the GNOME 3.0 will give us a good chance. :)

  55.  Sunday, November 9th, 2008 at 04:33

    This looks pretty great - something like this should really be put in Gnome 2.26 or 2.28… I don’t want to wait for 3.0!

  56.  Sunday, November 9th, 2008 at 17:11
    Stijn  

    Sometimes something so obvious is staring you right on the face and you don’t even see it. Nice, out-of-the-box thinking.

  57.  Saturday, December 27th, 2008 at 21:53
    Dylan McCall  

    A bit old now, but I was just reminded of this pretty mockup. The most striking thing here for me is not that it looks pretty via background colours or spacing, but how you have simplified and humanized removable devices. Instead of having “SD/MMC Card, 2GB Volume, 6GB Volume”, Nautilus could work closely with HAL / DeviceKit and have simple entries there like “Camera”, “Camera memory card”, and “Music player”.

    Clicking on those devices could open up an interface in which the user chooses a specific volume provided by the device, but in most cases that is unnecessary.

  58.  Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 20:23
    John  

    This mockup looks good.

  59.  Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 23:14
    Arch  

    very nice! +1 for me too!

  60.  Saturday, January 10th, 2009 at 01:46

    Awesome!

  61.  Friday, December 4th, 2009 at 20:57
    David  

    gvfs developers will insist that “Hard Drive” be labeled “80GB MAXTOR EXT4: Filesystem”, so that users will have an easier time identifying which hard drive it is ;)

Websites that link to this post

  1. Clutter nella barra laterale di Nautilus! « pollycoke :)
  2. Nação Livre » Blog Archive » Lindo mockup na sidebar do nautilus
  3. Xfce News » Topics raised at UDS
  4. Categories a la barra lateral del Nautilus | SomGNU
  5. A new sidebar for Nautilus | SomGNU
  6. A discusión la barra lateral de Nautilus al estilo Finder de Mac OS X » Actualidad - Espacio Linux Portal GNU/Linux en español
  7. Quick filechooser/Nautilus sidebar mockup « Kalle Persson

Leave your thoughts

Due to spam I check every comment myself,
so it may take a little longer for your comment to appear.


© 2006—2010  Hylke Bons   
-->