Re: [Usability] An extended default applications dialog

[Christian Neumair <chris gnome-de org>]

Am Samstag, den 13.01.2007, 11:59 +0100 schrieb Christian Neumair:
> Am Donnerstag, den 11.01.2007, 20:50 +0000 schrieb Matt Medland:
> > I'm proposing that mime-type association be centralised in the
> > Preferences>Preferred Applications area, since that seems the natural
> > place that anyone would go to. This would, potentially, be useful for
> > everyone.
> > 
> > The spec is here:
> > 
> > https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/enhanced-preferred-apps
> > 
> > and any comments or criticism would be appreciated.
> 
> I'm extremely in favor of the "MIME type categories" proposed in some
> comments on the spec page, i.e. we'd have certain categories like
> "Audio", "Images", "Plain Text", "Text Documents", "Spreadsheet" etc.
> 
> Each category would provide a listing of MIME types that each
> application has to support to be elegible for that category.
> 
> The GUI must also allow to determine exceptions for particular MIME
> types that are part of the category, else we're not flexible enough to
> deal the requirements with specialized setups. The specialized MIME
> selection allows to select all applications that can be used for the
> MIME type in question.

This is what I have in mind technically:

The idea is to get rid of many of the "defaults.list" entries
(/usr/share/applications/defaults.list), and associate category
information with each MIME type. Applications could then register
against categories, and are just stored in defaults.list (i.e. against
special MIME types) when they are specialized or override the default
handler. Specialized applications would for instance be your favorite
Macromedia Flash Image Extraction Frobnicator.

I'm currently hard-coding categories and MIME types in a python script,
but we might end up with .desktop files that contain:

[Category]
DisplayName=Foo
Name=foo
MimeTypes=foo/bar;...;

Note that we'd standardize the valid "Name" fields.



I'm attaching a little not yet demo application I wrote in python that
can be used to play with the GUI. You can easily download it and run it.

* Pro: Simple default application selection

* Con: Many MIME types per category would make the "Details" entry very
long. Either use a specialized dialog, or just list exceptions.
Exceptions have the advantage that they do not list duplicate
information.

* Con: We use a combo box cell renderer in the tree view. Users might
not be used to it.

* Con: The current layout will make it impossible to have many MIME
categories although it looks good. We'll hopefully find a solution,
either tab based, or by having a layout like


Default Foo Application:    [ Application Combo ] [ Details ]
Default Bar Application:    [ Application Combo ] [ Details ]
Default FooBar Application: [ Application Combo ] [ Details ]


Please run the attached python script and give some feedback! :)


-- 
Christian Neumair <chris gnome-de org>