Re: Aurora Feature Idea

[Joshua Prismon <josh@xxxxxxx>]

David W Hyatt wrote:

> It occurred to me that it would be preposterously cool if Aurora
> supported various archive formats like .zip, .tar, etc. etc.

> For example, a .zip file could appear as a folder in your workspace.
> You could open the folder and view the contents of the archive.  You
> could delete files from the archive, drag files into the archive, drag
> files out of the archive, etc. etc.

> I guess I'm talking about implementing WinZip in Aurora... ;)

But even more so then that, what about a plug in structure, where
you could do a extension to Aurora to display a hierachal structure,
and then some kind of plug in, that could generate html as a front
end. 

For Instance, say that you have a plug-in, that creates a tree
entitled "Control Panels" and clicking on a panel, such as "Misc 
Options" It would pull up a html document (perhaps very spiffy looking)
that would let you set options for netscape/the system/etc...

There are a couple of things here. 

	-) A Way to map a node (say \Files\c:\documents\a.zip) to
	a "Manager" (for lack of a better term) which in turn would
	export XML? Code for Aurora, so that it can map it further, 
	and seemlessly. The Manager would also generate some simple
	(or perhaps complex) code that would be like:

<img src = "Netscape Zip v .01" > 
<a href = "zip://files://c:\\docuements\\a.zip\file_1.txt"> File_1.txt
</a>

<img src = "folder.gif">
<a href = "zip://files://c:\\docuements\\a.zip\b\"> Directory b </a>

Under Aurora, it would automaticly map the folder structure of the
zip/tar/gz file to the aurora tree structure. 

The Key ideas here, would be that there is a way to seemlessly take
any structure, convert it into a tree, graph it into the aurora tree,
and have a html front end to it. 

Supose, for instance, some developer wanted to write a regestry
viewer/editor into the aurora tree. It would present a (rather large)
tree to Aurora, and generate some kind of HTML front end to Netscape. 

Another feature I would like to see in Aurora would be a queue. For
example, under ftp, we could have a front end for ftp that would have

ftp ftp.netscape.com
 | 
 | - file1.zip
 | - file2.zip
 | - file3.zip
 |
 | - folder1
    |- a.zip
    |- b.zip

How do we manage if we want to bulk download b.zip & file[1..2].zip
but not file3, and not any other folders? What we could do is a little
box called "queue" which we could drag to, that would allow a delayed
one at a time (or 4 at a time) transfer, or that would allow for
downloading at a specific time. 

Anyways, thoose are my thoughts...