Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2004 12:50:09 -0400 From: David Malcolm dmalcolm@redhat.com Subject: Re: RFE: User-Understandable Default folders in Home Directory To: Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop fedora-desktop-list@redhat.com Message-ID: 1092243010.29641.20.camel@cassandra.boston.redhat.com Content-Type: text/plain

On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 00:57 +1000, Stewart Smith wrote:

...

a bit like what OSX has, i've been thinking that a set of default folders (with some cool icons) could help users a bit.

I do something like this on my own folders at home, using emblems.

I broadly like your idea (with some caveats concerning Evolution, see below), though in the blue-sky future perhaps we'll all be using Storage to organise our stuff, rather than this 20th century directory-based technology :-) (see http://www.gnome.org/~seth/storage/ )

Woow! Is this in for gnome 3 or something? It would certainly require a tour, but HOLY ****! Gnome starts to look better than looking glass (any chance of this being shipped with fc3?)

Usefull to. And the evo integration looks nice :p

...

I've put this up at : https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=129564

simply so it's kinda 1/2 officially tracked, and in the future, people with the same idea can (easily) find some track of discussion....

I propose adding the following to the /etc/skel for new users, with funky icons on the folders to help increasing the clarity of where things are and some hints on helping them organise things.

Note that with the introduction of things like ~/Contacts/, ~/Mail/ and ~/Settings, this gives the user a clear picture of where things are, and what things are important to back up (if they so choose).

Some users may just see their mail as important, and not care about contacts or music. Others may see Contacts, Mail, Settings and Documents as important and can just (easily! with nautilus-cd-burner) write these to CD for backup.

~/Contacts - where evolution stores contacts, with human-readable file names (e.g. "Firstname Lastname.vcf" or something).

Currently Evolution 1.5.* stores its data (contacts, calendar, email etc) below the ~/.evolution directory and in GConf, and makes various assumptions about the layout of the ~/.evolution directory. Evolution could be changed to follow this proposal for "local contacts" (as opposed to contacts found on e.g. a shared corporate LDAP database), but it'd be non-trivial.

What? How do i transfer my mail that is currently in my evo folder? I dont want to loose it!

Only thing kept in .evolution before was passwords and mailservers etc...

And there is another thing: Saving local mail in a non-hidden folder make shure its not deleted when somebody runs "rm -rf .*" in your homedir - such as I did to my users when upgrading from rh9 to fc1 and fc1 to fc2. I think bookmarks also should be saved that way.

A better way of accessing the contact information might be to use evolution-data-server API; this should handle nasty details such as file locking for you.

If what you're really looking for is a sane way for home users to backup this data, I think a specialised tool could be written that knows about the various kinds of data that are stored on your computer (configuration settings, contents of home directory etc) and can display them in a good UI, tell you how big the backup is going to be etc, and maybe create ISO files ready to be burned to CD for you.

...

~/Desktop - same as it is now, the contents of the users desktop. ~/Documents - a suggested location for documents (and the default save location for applications such as OpenOffice) ~/Mail - where Evolution stores it's mail.

Again, Evolution makes all kinds of assumptions about the layout of its mail directory; it's not something I'd want to expose to end users. Thankfully with Evo 1.5.* this is now in ~/.evolution, rather than ~/evolution as it used to be before, so it's not quite as in-your-face as before.

...

~/Movies - for the kick-ass iMovie type thing that we so need.

Yes please!

...

~/Music - Music Player's place to put music!

Looks like the storage guys liked divX...

Good idea IMHO

...

~/Photos - Gthumb's place to go, and the digital camera tool!

Also a good idea IMHO

...

~/Web Pages - ==public_html (and shared by apache, if installed).

Nice idea. Though you'd have to have some extra control panel applets to do things like turning apache on/off etc and punch through the firewall, or people could get confused.

...

I have no real expectation taht this will make Core3 in any complete way, but is a good talking point and UI suggestion. This will make it easier for users.

Another point: Webbrowsing. Today FC uses moz - which has a nice engine etc. But Epiphany is still better integrated with Gnome (and no difference when talking HTML engine): Why not use this as the standard web-browser instead?

Only prob. as far as i can see, is that neither moz or epiphany has a user-friendly way to select which printer you want to use. Whic is... BAD!