From: Alexander W. <a.w...@ph...> - 2006-03-31 08:53:11
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Hi! Recently I happend to have some iBook on my Desktop so I had a bit a closer look at it. Actually in my opinion ROX does very, very well in competing with the Finder. :) Anyway I found that the column view of the Mac Finder is pretty handy and would be very nice to have in ROX, too. What it does? It splits the current window in two columns. In the left hand pane the current directory contents is listed with small icons like ROX list view but without all the detail-columns. On startup the right hand side is empty. Upon selecting an item in the left hand pane it's contents is displayed on the right hand side. Be it a directory you just get it's contents. Now you can select in the right hand side another dir. Now the right hand pane moves to the left side and is displayed there and on the right hand side you get the content of the stuff you just selected. By that one can easily browse a whole tree. Selecting a file or an application in the right hand pane now again moves the right pane to the left and displays it's details. Actually like the "Properties" window of Rox, but not as a new window but just within the pane. I found this a pretty handy way to browse the file system, especially combined with some back/forward buttons. And I found it even better than GWorkpalce'/NeXTStep's version of this functionality. Another point I found while fiddeling with the Mac was, that the Finder added quite some files to my USB-stick. As I'll have to exchange data there from time to time I don't want to delete them as it surely reuses them later on. But they fly arround and IMHO it would be a handy addition to rox to have some list that treats certain files as "hidden". (I was always annoyed that the hidden state on unix is not an attribute, this is IMHO a design flawn, but well, can't be changed.) Maybe some userconfigurable list in the $CHOICESPATH would be a good idea. Adding something like "file=finder.dat" to that list making them just all hidden would be nice. The same for "dir=Trash". There should be a button though to disable this feature temporarily. Last but not least, there is a functionality I happend to have some time ago on OS/2 as well: moving the mouse to a certain edge of the screen firing up a program. This comes in handy e.g. for the screensaver. Additionally moveing to a new box there ran a Beagle daemon accross my files. Actually this was pretty annoying as it touched them all and added some extended attributes which I had to remove after killing the monkey. Anyway, there seem to be people who like Beagle I guess, and for those I'd suggest that there is the possibility to disable the "has extended attributes" notifyer that rox adds to all files. scp: In some older verision of ROX it was once possible to drag&drop at least a singel file from a remote rox to a local one. Why has this gone? That came in very handy from time to time... -- Kind regards, Alexander Wagner |