URIs Considered Harmful...
Many people, specifically the Nautilus maintainers, but including me, consider the use of URIs in GNOME something which should be hidden from the user.
For example, to access the CD burning tools in Nautilus, you can navigate to burn:///. This is ugly and has zero discoverability, i.e. the user has to be told that it exists. The same for network:///, fonts:/// and applications:///. These are all magic URIs, once the user knows they exist, they should be able to remember them, but the point is that shouldn't have to. A good example of this is the integration of magicdev with nautilus-cd-burner, instead of having to go to burn:/// (or selecting "CD Creator" in GNOME 2.4) to open the correct location, magicdev will open it automatically when a blank CD is inserted on the assumption that you are likey to want to burn something to it. Joe User can just use it, and Lee T. Hacker remembers the URI.
Thats all well and good, and often-covered material. However, URIs have one thing going for them: at least they are not UUIDs. I found this gem in the Windows 2000 Resource Kit:
To open a new Explorer window which displays My Documents, use this as the command line:
%SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /e,::{450D8FBA-AD25-11D0-98A8-0800361B1103}
Check out that snappy UUID...
The sidebar is such wasted space, and yet, it has the potential to be so simple and easy to use.
Imagine the simplicity of making sidebars work like they do in Evolution. Except in the nautilus sidebar, you would have shortcuts. Common things that a user might need, such as Applications, Fonts, CD Writer, Network, etc.
To take that a step further, allow the user to drag into the sidebar commonly used directories.
Also consider what XFCE does with XFFM and the books feature. I think Gnome could really benefit from using the Book feature from XFFM, and putting it in Nautilus some how.
Sorry, just dreaming.
P.S. If you respond, or something, send me an email to, please. I am not at my home computer, so bookmarking this page is really, well, not an option. But I would like to follow up if you want.
