[Bug 44563] auto arrange icons on desktop by source/type

[Martin Flack]

Public bug reported:

In general usage of my desktop I get various icons on my desktop that
naturally come from various sources or are of certain types.

Also, over time my desktop becomes cluttered, and sometimes icons that
appear dynamically actually appear under or over other ones which
exasperates this.

I imagined a cool feature today that involved a sort of self-organizing
desktop. I believe this would be novel and useful.

Here's the idea. It requires organizing icons nicely as they appear
similar to "Clean Up By Name" but using appearance timestamp instead of
name. It also revolves around the four corners of the desktop screen
being anchors for different types of icons and for new icons to
naturally appear in the correct corner, organized like this:

Origin Top Left: Home, Computer, anything pre-placed by the OS
Origin Top Right: Icons appearing in response to inserted CD/DVD's, USB sticks, etc.
Origin Bottom Left: Files created by local applications like OO documents
Origin Bottom Right: Files downloaded within Firefox or other Internet apps

I've offered a very simple type of logic - the top represents objects
appearing from the system and the bottom represents objects appearing
because of the user; the left is loosely "internal" or "made here" and
the right is loosely "external" or "made elsewhere"

I'm not suggesting an actual visual demarcation, or a boundary which
prevents the icons being dragged out of their "spot". What I'm
suggesting is more like an organic growth, whenever nautilus realizes it
has to add another icon to the desktop, choose the corner based on type,
and then add the icon to that corner and then possibly resort the icons
just in that corner as if by a mini-"Clean Up By Name" feature had been
run there (although remember actually I'd like them to not be sorted
alphabetically but to grow by placement timestamp).

** Affects: nautilus (Ubuntu)
       Severity: Normal
       Priority: (none set)
         Status: Unconfirmed

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auto arrange icons on desktop by source/type
https://launchpad.net/bugs/44563