“Eazel’s 0.5 Preview2 Release of Nautilus and the services
that will be offered through it provide a feature-complete glimpse
of good things to come. However, Eazel must optimize performance
and add support for more platforms before its “graphical shell” can
become the default file manager in GNOME 1.4, expected Q1
2001.”
“Nautilus is especially flexible in the way it handles file
type/ application associations. For example, default behavior is to
open *.jpg files in the built-in file viewer, while creating
application launch buttons in the left panel for all installed
applications associated with the given file type (associations are
set up in the GNOME Control Center’s File Types and Applications
area, which Nautilus politely offers to open for you when
appropriate). However, the user can easily change default behavior
so that *.jpg files open with Gimp or perhaps Electric Eyes when
clicked. Alternatively, the user could right-click on the image and
choose to open the file with any of the known applications for its
type. Thus, out of the box Nautilus offers flexible file
type/application associations, and with a little configuration can
be made to behave just as the user wishes. This is a significant
advance over application associations in both the Macintosh and
Windows interfaces.”
“One interesting feature of Nautilus that is complete but not
enabled by default is the option to use Nautilus to paint the GNOME
desktop. This makes desktop icons behave just as they would inside
Nautilus. That is, icons consist of thumbnails for graphic files
and the first few words of each of the first few lines of text
files. Greater or lesser amounts of file metadata are displayed as
the zoom level is adjusted from 25% to 400%. Desktop icons also
benefit from Nautilus’ superior application/file-type association
features.”