Re: [Usability]File Types Design

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sat, Feb 15, 2003 at 04:12:22PM -0800, Seth Nickell wrote: 
> 1) A secondary use case that is much less frequent, is some people will
> change several common file types when dropped onto a new computer.
...
> 2) The idea of being "in the Open With menu" is not made explicit. This
> reduces some of the interface complexity, but may also fail to provide
> the user with sufficient motivation to understand why they would want to
> "Add Application" when they don't want it to be the default.

You could probably address both of these by having a tab in the
properties for an application (= launcher in the menu?) that lets you
change which files the application will be used to open.

That way if I want to do an operation like "use gimp to open all image
files" I can open properties for the gimp or the gimp launcher or
wherever it makes sense, and select from the list there.

Of course the list of file types I can choose to use gimp for will
only include file types gimp can handle, it won't include the list of
all file types.

If you do that I still think "Preferred applications" isn't good for
much.

Havoc