Re: [Deskbar] deskbar 2.20 impressions

["Jose daLuz" <jdaluz gmail com>]

On 10/26/07, Sebastian Pölsterl <marduk k-d-w org> wrote:

My problem is that the user can activate an action in two different ways:
1) Just clicking on a match (default action)
2) Displaying the list of actions and selecting an action there

But most of the time the match has a different icon than all the
actions. The action's icon is displayed in history, because 1) silently
activates the default action. Would the actions have the same icon as
the match, the icon would be useless for the actions, because it doesn't
give any additional information. The only thing that might be useful is
that the icon of the default action has the icon of match, but I'm not
sure if this would only cause even more confusion.

I can't speak for anyone else, but for me the problem is finding the history entry I want in a long list, not trying to determine the specific action for an entry. I use the deskbar history most often for websites or files I go back to over and over, and the action is almost always the same for these items.

I find the action icon does not always fully describe the action - for music
files, for instance, I get a default open, open with VLC, open with
Movie Player, open with Banshee, all of which have the same action
icon. Same with text files, multiple editors all with the same icon. I
would suggest the match icon is more meaningful and makes locating the
history item easier.

One way of handling this might be to include an actions icon at the end of each history entry. So you click on the history entry and get whatever the original action was, or you click on the arrow and get the same actions dialog that you get with the original results.

While I'm on the subject of finding a particular entry in the history list, what do you think about the idea of making the most recent history item clicked on go to the top of the list? So history items you use all the time would always be at the top, less frequent or one-time entries would fall to the bottom, with a maximum number of entries so old items would eventually drop off the list completely?
-- 
Joe daLuz