Preferences for the Drive Mount Applet
In my previous article, I outlined the thought process behind the redesign of the drive mount applet. Although it ended up without any preferences, I don’t necessarily think that it doesn’t need any preferences.
A number of people commented on the last entry requesting a particular preference: the ability to hide certain drives in the drive list. Some of the options include:
- Let the user select which individual drives to display
- Let the user select which classes of drive to display (floppy, cdrom, camera, music player, etc).
- Select whether to display drives only when they are mounted, or only when they are mountable (this applies to drives which contain removable media).
Of these choices, the first is probably the simplest to understand, so might be the best choice. It could be represented in the UI as a list of the available drives with a checkbox next to each. In order to not hide new drives by default, it would probably be best to maintain a list of drives to hide rather than drives to show.
It does bring up the question of how to identify what a “drive” is. On my Ubuntu system, the first USB mass storage device I plug in usually gets the same mount point. If we identify drives by their mount point, hiding that mount point will effectively hide all of those drives. Perhaps the HAL UDI would be appropriate here.
The third choice is also interesting: why display an icon for a removable media drive if there is no media in the drive? This sort of feature could probably be implemented independently of the previously discussed choice. It is also the sort of change that probably needs to be addressed in gnome-vfs and HAL though. Fixing it at that level would also provide the same benefit to other GnomeVFSVolumeMonitor using apps, such as Nautilus.