The future (or lack thereof) of Desktop Icons (Was: [Bug 156428] dragging to desktop creates a link without notifying user)

[Marco Martin]

On Wednesday 23 January 2008 21:51:42 Christopher Blauvelt wrote:
> There seems to be a lot of ideas floating around out there on what the
> future of Icons on the Desktop is going to be.  I've heard the following:
> - Have the alignment algorithms include all applets.  This is now easily
> done with the new alignment algorithms which allow icons of any size.
> - Have a folder view applet.  I'm not exactly sure what this is supposed to
> do.  What features are implied by such an applet.
maybe something as powerful as a filemanager (maybe even a dolphinview?) that  
would point to ~/Desktop as default but configurable to display any folder in 
the system?
> - Adding device icons to the desktop.  I would like to see a device
> dependant applet for different devices.  ie. A blank CD-R will open up a
> "folder view" applet which allow files to be dropped and when you're done
> press the burn button.
maybe some kind of a rework of the device notifier applet? i think if all the 
device icons are in a single applet it would be nicer,as for the burning 
applet i don't know, wouldn't be a duplication of a burning program that 
would be only a crippled version?
> - The ability to minimize Applets.  This could be done with a button on the
> applet handle.  The resulting icon could be changed dynamically by the
> applet depending on conditions.  Examples are the weather applet could
> change the icon depending on updated weather conditions, etc
> - Iconify applets when the view is zoomed out.
or it could simply be when the applet is rescaled under a certain size?

Cheers,
Marco Martin
>
> What other ideas or plans are out there?  My intent here is to get a
> general plan so that we can tell people who file bugs like this what the
> roadmap looks like.
>
> Chris