![]() I don’t want the ability to stick windows on other windows, only against the corners of the monitor, because if that’s enabled, window movement is very jerky because you get windows stuck all the time among them. Metacity’s default isn’t.Īnother thing I would like to see is the ability to “glue” the windows at the edges of the monitor (like WinAMP does it, really smooth). Headers and titles are usually bolder and bigger. The current default metacity font is very small to give the user the notion of “header” or a “title”. Also, I would like to see Metacity have the “use system’s font” ability on its pref panel instead of just in the Gconf Editor, plus I find it important to be enabled by default. A gConf key to enable this (or on Metacity’s pref panel) might be a good idea as it is a feature that can be useful sometimes, mostly to programmers. I don’t personally use that feature but I know others who do. ![]() Older Unix and Linux users love viewports and Metacity has taken this ability away. First impressions do count and looks too. I am not talking about yet another mediocre theme like most on, but something “wow,” something that can draw new users like a magnet and be clean and professional at the same time. Gnome needs to enter the 21st century and create a new theme and also modify GTK+ to support new features that take theming to the next level. It is also simple (I love simplicity), but it does have a great design behind it (see: it is not hideous like Keramik is). KDE’s new Plastik theme is truly marvelous. Most of the time I find myself using the “Default” Gnome theme, which is simple, fast and up to the point, but it also shows its age. On OSX I can’t bear to use it over the default Finder. I will wait for 2.6 for a final verdict as to how well this spatial thing can work. Obviously, the usability of the spatial version of Nautilus still needs lots of work and better integration with the non-spatial version. Nautilus’ New Spatial Mode While it is still beta quality at best, the fact that there’s no way to see which folder I’m in at a glance is really bothersome and makes it difficult to be productive with it. BeOS Tracker supports addons with a clean API and PathFinder too, and we have word that Apple will do so as well for Finder.Īpparently scripts are not the way to go, but a well formed API for this and some GUI apps as in the mockup can extend the usefulness of Nautilus significantly. Applications like File-Roller add their own menu entries on the Nautilus context menu instead of doing it the right way and placing their entries on an addons submenu, keeping the root submenu clean and without changing too much (depending if something is selected or not). The second problem is that third party Gnome developers haven’t realized the importance of creating addons and so all we have are a bunch of bash and perl scripts instead of invoking a well formed API for this sort of job and writing something with a GUI front end (e.g. Addons are a lifesaver and a great feature overall, because they extend the file manager’s abilities “for free”. So the problem is now even worse than before, as less and less people even get to know that Nautilus has such support for addons. “Open Terminal Here” or “Bulk Rename” or “Compress It”) it has now completely taken out that context submenu if no scripts are installed on the user’s scripts folder. Instead of shipping with 2-3 important addons (e.g. However, the problem here is that the Gnome Project makes no real usage of this ability. It also has a MIME backend and so certain actions only happen to the correct files. There was a big discussion about this a few months ago in a gnome mailing list but here is a recap: Nautilus supports script addons that apply certain actions on the selected files or on the currently open folder. NOTE: I wrote this article days ago but since then a few of the following wishes have being granted already(!) or they are going to according to the Gnome roadmap. Please tell us about your own Gnome wish list in the comment section provided. So here is my personal wish-list for a future version of Gnome. ![]() A reader emailed me a few days ago asking me to do the same for other OSes and DEs. Later I learned that quite a few Apple engineers read the article and so it felt good that the time spent writing the article was not just a voice in the void. A few weeks ago we published an article titled “ The Great Mac OS X 10.4 Wish List“, detailing a few personal wishes for the next version of OSX. ![]()
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