[NTLUG:Discuss] New UI?

[Christopher Browne]

On Fri, 16 Mar 2001 19:48:23 CST, the world broke into rejoicing as
Greg Edwards <greg at nas-inet.com>  said:
> Anyone know anything about this UI?
> http://www.internetweek.com/story/INW20010315S0005

Eazel is a company founded by some of the early Apple Mac designers,
building a program called "Nautilus."

Nautilus is a Gnome Desktop program that provides:
  a) A "file manager" and
  b) A "desktop interface"

I've tried it out; it's still pretty early, and not _fully_ functional.

I wasn't terribly thrilled with it.  

[There's an "evil" thing about it; it goes off and scans your system for
devices, and on my main system, that would mean exploring the pseudo-SCSI
bus, which would ultimately lead to that falling down, resulting in
my whole system going unstable and unresponsive.  An ordinary program
that essentially makes the whole system quite forcibly hang...  Evil...
Resulted in my deinstalling it...]

At any rate, the hope is that this provides a "desktop metaphor" where
users can drag objects from file folders onto their desktop, do the
classic "drag'n'drop," with something of the style of how HP NewWave
did this.

There's some sort of linkage to "document processing methods" whereby
Nautilus will display icons that may even contain dumps of what is in
the document.  A JPEG would automagically display a thumbnail.  A
spreadsheet might display a "thumbnail" of the contents.  That sort
of thing.

The explicit intent is for this to provide "friendly desktop stuff" for
the oncoming waves of unsophisticated Windows users.

It's not clear how successful an experiment it will be.  

I wouldn't read _too_ much into the business reorganization; consider
that:
  -> Tech stocks have been doing really badly, losing investor
     confidence, which is probably the _true_ way things are going
     poorly at Eazel.
  -> Note that the people laid off were _SALES AND MARKETING_.
     If they were laying off developers, that would be a quite 
     different thing...

Something bizarre is definitely taking place; I'd think it has more
to do with the business climate than it does with the choices being
made at Eazel...
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