I was the primary coder of the actual Nautilus icon view during the time that Eazel maintained the code. It is probably lost to time, but there was a C++ version of Nautilus that was developed by the Eazel team. This version was not accepted by the GNOME team and the decision was made to develop Nautilus using C in the same fashion as the rest of the GNOME code.
Icon views became my life for a while as I then did most of the work on the Finder icon view for several releases of OS X.
Looking at the screenshots of the latest Nautilus icon view, it looks remarkably similar to the version that I was working on. In 1999 we had icon image previews, file metadata displayed under the filename, the ability to preview video and audio files within the icon and more. It took us a few releases of Finder to get some of the features from Nautilus (and the BeOS Tracker) integrated. At the same time, the Nautilus icon view continued to degrade and undergo all sorts of turmoil. I hope it will be happy again soon!
