I once made a mock-up of this that I submitted to Neil, the awnsome guy behind awn. He was interested, but as he is very busy, I doubt that he will be able to work on it anytime soon. So, fingers crossed, I am attaching my mock-up to this mail in the hope that it sparkles interest/discussion.
Now, why do we need this you say? Excerpts from the idea I suggested initially: "I'm constantly switching between eye-candy (nautilus with image thumbnails) and performance (nautilus with only icons), and I realized the reason I switch back to "thumbnails" is that I need to differentiate a handful files from each other, with similar names, when I'm working on a project." I want the best of both worlds: unobtrusive "no preview" image icons, but thumbnailing on demand without needing to enable/disable it system-wide all the time. With compositing (as the mock-up kind of suggests), I think we could make this really fast in the sense that there may be no need for thumbnailing at all, because we could just throw the image directly at the graphics processor unit, and the compositing/GL/whatever would take care of scaling it in real-time (since it's only one image at a time anyway). I think that would be nice to look at, blazingly fast, and downright cool. Sadly I'm just a designer, and in no position to implement this myself.
<<attachment: nautilus composited thumbnails mockup.jpg>>
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