3D File-System Browser Revived: Interact With Your Files In 3D
The 3dfsb v1.0 release for this 3D file-system browser adds support for a lot of audio/video files via GStreamer, better file-type identification, higher resolution textures, a new laser-gun tool to zap files away for deleting them, and various other changes.
The original 3D file-system browser (tdfsb) has been dormant for 7~13 years while recently it was forked by Tom Van Braeckel to take over maintenance of the project. Tom Van Braeckel wrote in an email to Phoronix about his work on this open-source file manager and to share the v1.0 announcement.
Tom explained, "The code was, and still is, fairly rough. It's all in one big .c file and comments were few and far between. That's completely understandable, historically speaking. Although I didn't hear from the original author, I imagine that it started out as some kind of a research/educational project to get to know the various libraries it uses. And that's exactly why I picked it up: to deepen and refresh my GStreamer, OpenGL, SDL and 3D geometry knowledge. Yes, indeed: 3D geometry, of which you need a lot of when rendering 3D worlds! All in all, it's been very educational, and I hope we can keep improving this cool program further."
Some of the other changes with 3dfsb v1.0 include faster navigation, an uncapped frame-rate, uncapped texture sizes, support for previewing video input devices via V4L2, and other enhancements.
The code for this 3D file-system browser can be viewed on GitHub. The code to this 3D file browser is under the GNU GPLv2. This file browser should work on Linux, BeOS/Haiku, and FreeBSD operating systems. The 3D experience is dependent on SDL, OpenGL, GStreamer, and libmagic.
Update [11:19AM EST]: It's also worth bringing up a project with similar aim which was Sun's Project Looking Glass and powered by Java but that Java 3D desktop has been canned for many years now.
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