Nautilus vs. Mac
I found this list of Eazel Nautilus functionality items that they say Mac and Windows don’t have. Here’s my breakdown of it.
* Zooming in every view, from 25% up to 400%
Why? Wouldn’t setting a font size to 16 be enough?
* Icons can be arbitrary sizes and are individually resizable
Again, why? I could see a slight advantage to setting an important file’s icon to bigger than another. less-important file, but that still seems only slightly useful. Also, the Mac can do something similar: You can add ‘Label’ to your list view windows, and then sort by that. So if you label 5 files as ‘Essential,’ they’ll show up at the top, together. No clunky larger icons necessary.
* Icons based on document content, including embedded text for text files
What OS doesn’t do this? When was the last time you saved a Photoshop file and it got an icon that wasn’t Photoshop-related? Even PS JPEGs get a little JPEG marker on the icon. And the ‘text of a text-file inside the icon’ thing is ridiculous. If you don’t know what the file contains by what you named it, you’re an idiot.
* Emblems, which are little satellite images expressing file attributes, including user-assigned attributes
I can’t tell how this would work, so I dunno. Seems overly complicated for an icon, though.
* Sound previewing by hovering over the icon
I can hear the cacophony of mousing over multiple files in a window… no thanks.
* Extensible, componentized viewers (ie, you can read a text or other type of file right in Nautilus without launching a separate app)
Should the OS be what you use to write text? Is it really that hard to open SimpleText?
* Extensible, componentized directory views (a little hard to explain, offering type-specific views that put the functionality at the user’s fingertips – the best current example in Nautilus is the “view as music” feature)
Can’t you just do this in Audion or iTunes? Why does the OS have to do it?
* Annotations, where users can write and retrieve notes about any file or directory
‘Get Info,’ anyone?
* Attribute-based searching – ie, show me all the files I marked important
Sherlock can search by ‘File label is essential.’
* “Text services” where selected text is used to parameterize a web request
Huh?
* Drag and drop customization, including a cute way to specify gradient washes simply by dragging a color near an edge multiple user levels where the software reconfigures itself to support users with different appetites for complexity
Not sure about all of that, but OS X has that drag-n-droppable customization that Jobs showed at MWSF.
Overall, as far as I can tell, nothing groundbreaking.. Things they said no other OS can do are either not worth it or can be done by the Mac OS, and mostly Windows, too.
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4 Replies to “Nautilus vs. Mac”
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1) No. Let’s just take a theoretical resolution of 2048×1600 — OS 9 would be pretty unusable. A better solution, though, would be a GUI that was vector based instead of bitmap based, thus infinitely scalable in any direction, which is what OS X seems to do with it’s “PDF rendering layer,” which is the most revolutionary thing about it IMHO. That and dragging Mac users out of 1988.
2) Why not?
3) Computer OS’s should be usable by idiots. I had one user who had over 20 Word docs called “Document.” She was an idiot. But after 20 years of personal computers, I now know there’s no chance that we can “train” everyone not to be idiots. We need idiot-proof OS’s.
4) might be nice for an MP3 collection…
5) True, but do I need to open Word and all of its OOP components just to check the opening paragraphs of a dozen different files? How about Illustrator? See #4… the ability to quickly view any document from the Finder/Explorer window at a glance would be a great boon.
6) I dunno
7) Agreed, although I would prefer something like “Stickies” that “stuck” inside of a folder window. Or a variation on Windows’ “View as web page” feature that was actually useful for something.
8) whatever.
9) agreed.
10) weird.
As far as “Emblems” go, I think examples are the little arrows that indicate an icon is an alias (on both Mac and Windows), or the padlock that shows a file is locked. MacOS also has a previously mentioned ability to express user-defined attributes: labels. Associating such attributes (important, marked for destruction, whatever) with an emblem does hold a slight advantage over mutually exclusive labels, but labels are easier to see. Regardless, nothing groundbreaking.
Caffeine, as far as previewing goes, the OS can not possibly ever hope to open every kind of document. It can handle a few common ones (text, mp3s, most image formats), but it can’t handle Illustrator without specific support for Illustrator. Similarly, it can’t open .doc files without specific support for them. This means EVERY application has to include an OS plugin that adds document previewing. These would either create unnecessary overhead (memory and startup time) or need to be loaded dynamically, which means that you’re basically booting a slightly trimmer version of the app every time you look at one of its files. Incidently, MacOS already has a ‘preview’ ability in the ‘open file’ dialog, which makes much more sense from a practical standpoint.
As far as the “Text services” where selected text is used to parameterize a web request, it means that you can select, say “http://www.asdf.com/” appearing in a document somewhere and activate it to launch your browser and access http://www.asdf.com. MacOS already supports this, too, on an application-specific level. While support isn’t universal, it isn’t that useful, either. You save only a fraction of a second over copying it, pressing the key to open your browser (thanks to the yummy keyboard control panel), and pasting it in.
Drag-and-drop-to-make-a-gradient-wash is, um, silly. Drag and drop has nothing to do with gradient washes.
MacOS and Windows both have multiple user support. I haven’t used it much, but presumably it differentiates preferences on a per-user level, so the only thing preventing “user complexity levels” is the fact that no application I know of except the Finder supports them.
As was said, nothing groundbreaking. A few minor improvments, but they are tiny compared to more important issues like overall speed, visual appeal, etc.
1) No. Let’s just take a theoretical resolution of 2048×1600 — OS 9 would be pretty unusable. A better solution, though, would be a GUI that was vector based instead of bitmap based, thus infinitely scalable in any direction, which is what OS X seems to do with it’s “PDF rendering layer,” which is the most revolutionary thing about it IMHO. That and dragging Mac users out of 1988.
2) Why not?
3) Computer OS’s should be usable by idiots. I had one user who had over 20 Word docs called “Document.” She was an idiot. But after 20 years of personal computers, I now know there’s no chance that we can “train” everyone not to be idiots. We need idiot-proof OS’s.
4) might be nice for an MP3 collection…
5) True, but do I need to open Word and all of its OOP components just to check the opening paragraphs of a dozen different files? How about Illustrator? See #4… the ability to quickly view any document from the Finder/Explorer window at a glance would be a great boon.
6) I dunno
7) Agreed, although I would prefer something like “Stickies” that “stuck” inside of a folder window. Or a variation on Windows’ “View as web page” feature that was actually useful for something.
8) whatever.
9) agreed.
10) weird.
As far as “Emblems” go, I think examples are the little arrows that indicate an icon is an alias (on both Mac and Windows), or the padlock that shows a file is locked. MacOS also has a previously mentioned ability to express user-defined attributes: labels. Associating such attributes (important, marked for destruction, whatever) with an emblem does hold a slight advantage over mutually exclusive labels, but labels are easier to see. Regardless, nothing groundbreaking.
Caffeine, as far as previewing goes, the OS can not possibly ever hope to open every kind of document. It can handle a few common ones (text, mp3s, most image formats), but it can’t handle Illustrator without specific support for Illustrator. Similarly, it can’t open .doc files without specific support for them. This means EVERY application has to include an OS plugin that adds document previewing. These would either create unnecessary overhead (memory and startup time) or need to be loaded dynamically, which means that you’re basically booting a slightly trimmer version of the app every time you look at one of its files. Incidently, MacOS already has a ‘preview’ ability in the ‘open file’ dialog, which makes much more sense from a practical standpoint.
As far as the “Text services” where selected text is used to parameterize a web request, it means that you can select, say “http://www.asdf.com/” appearing in a document somewhere and activate it to launch your browser and access http://www.asdf.com. MacOS already supports this, too, on an application-specific level. While support isn’t universal, it isn’t that useful, either. You save only a fraction of a second over copying it, pressing the key to open your browser (thanks to the yummy keyboard control panel), and pasting it in.
Drag-and-drop-to-make-a-gradient-wash is, um, silly. Drag and drop has nothing to do with gradient washes.
MacOS and Windows both have multiple user support. I haven’t used it much, but presumably it differentiates preferences on a per-user level, so the only thing preventing “user complexity levels” is the fact that no application I know of except the Finder supports them.
As was said, nothing groundbreaking. A few minor improvments, but they are tiny compared to more important issues like overall speed, visual appeal, etc.