There was an IRC meeting yesterday regarding the Nautilus UI and a lot of design as well as functionality changes were proposed. Some of these are already confirmed as TO DO such as:
Look:
- editable toolbar
- new default toolbar layout (Back (icon only), Forward (icon only), View Selector (icon-based), <spring>, Search Box)
- replace search button with a search box
- combined stop/refresh button and place this button next to the pathbar
- improve the appearance of GtkPathBar - Nautilus will get a GTK breadcrumb widget just like Nautilus Elementary
- new file selection visuals
- refine the status bar
- more!
Functionality:
- sort downloads folder by date modified
- order items in trash according to date deleted and include a date deleted column (right now you can get this functionaly and some more using a Nautilus addon).
But that's not all, there are also some proposed items such as:
- new design for the Places sidebar (revamped Nautilus Elementary sidebar anyone? :D)
- undo functionallity (there's already a patch for this, it's really weird it wasn't introduced upstream so far)
- use a zoom slider for changing the view (again something already implemented in Nautilus Elementary)
- and something a lot of us really miss: reintroduce a button to toggle text entry in the path bar (this was removed in Nautilus 2.29 or 2.30 - I'm not sure in which).
There are no mockups so far as this has just been discussed but more info / mockups should be available soon.
