I must’ve seen this mock-up before, but I forgot about it. If I remembered, that might have saved me the trouble of mocking up Tap from scratch. (Now that I look back at Tap again, I agree that my mock-up was unnecessarily complex and unwieldy.)
This mockup comes from a group of Gnome enthusiasts: Garrett LeSage, Allan Day, Hylke Bons, Máirín Duffy, Lapo Calamandrei, Andy Fitzsimon, and others. The blog post that this mockup comes from discusses the possible evolution of Nautilus (which has been transformed into today’s much heavier Nautilus 3).
There’s one particular UI element that I really like about it, though, and, sadly, it hasn’t been implemented in Nautilus 3: the Actions bar. This bar would “show relevant actions for the selected item”.
While that’s not necessarily revolutionary (this functionality being hidden under a right-click menu for years), having this functionality up front could potentially lead application developers to integrate better with this toolbar, which could make the experience of moving between file browser and application more fluent (as I talked about in a previous post).
