Something About File Managers

[Dave Vincenty]

Derek Broughton wrote:
> Dave Vincenty wrote:
>> nepal wrote:
>>     
>>>   http://dot.kde.org/1172721427/
> See, I don't quite agree with that article
Here's what I got out of it.

The KDE developers don't like looking at functions that make them think 
of file managers when browsing the Web, nor functions that make them 
think of Web browsers when managing their filesystem(s).  It's a strange 
and unexplainable quirk, much like taking what a commercial developer 
might call an "alpha release" or a "release candidate" and declaring it 
the grand unveiling of KDE 4.0.0 (...which is NOT "KDE 4", and shame on 
you who expected things like "stability" or "usability" from a x.0.0 
release!  What, did you think this was OpenOffice or Mozilla or something?)

Of course, the up arrow is useful.  For instance, if you're looking at 
www.example.com/animals/kittens/takingacraponyourcarpet and you realize 
suddenly that you've gone too far down into the directory structure, the 
up arrow will take you straight to kittens/index.html, from which you 
can continue your browsing, or go up all the way to 
www.example.com/index.html.  That's great.  And I actually have 
bookmarks that don't point to the Web... like to /fakewin, a directory 
that I created in order to trick Wine into thinking I have a C: drive, 
or to ftp://thedavefactor.com, so I can handle my remote files.  (Note:  
thedavefactor.com is currently a Drupal install with nothing of interest 
in it.)

And... the "breadcrumb" system is just plain silly.  If I can click on a 
button that represents a directory, I can delete and/or retype that part 
of the address bar.  In fact, why not have buttons like this:

[www.example.com] [animals] [kittens]

...and let the user click on the directory they want?

Websites with browsable directories already have something like this, 
but with text links instead of buttons.

So, basically, I don't feel much better about the fate of Konqueror, but 
I kind of almost see where KDE is coming from with this.  As far as I 
can tell, they think Konqueror has slowly evolved from an excellent file 
manager with a web browsing feature to a mediocre web browser with a 
file managing feature.  Although I don't know why this is, the Dolphin 
developers will be working on file managing and the Konqueror developers 
will be working on web browsing, and hopefully, when some time has 
passed, KDE will be better off in some form or another.

I don't really know, though.


~~~ dave ~~~

---
What kind of a program name is "Dolphin" anyway?