Re: Recently used applications

[mike <mike redtux demon co uk>]

On Tue, 2002-10-29 at 00:52, Dave Bordoley wrote:
> On Mon, 2002-10-28 at 19:33, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > Was the feature not wanted, or the placement of the menu?
> > 
> >   (I think the placement of both the recent docs and recent apps menus is
> >   kind of a hard problem with our current menus, but both are very useful.)
> > 
> 
> see bug 93350
> 
> Pretty much agreed we didn't want the feature, calum and I discussed
> this in the bug, open to reconsideration if needed though. 
> 
> The rationale for recent documents is that it moves the interface
> towards a more document centered approach, hence users can think about
> the objects they want to manipulate rather than the tools they want to
> use to manipulate them with. This feature is a real step forward.

There is a general point to make on this, especially as we have not got
mime-types working right, and that is you are not neccesarily going to
want to open the same document with the same application.

As an example I will give a case from the windows world.

There is a text file format known as csv (comma seperated version) very
commonly used for data interchange.

In MS office this defaults to opening in excel, because  it is nicely
arranged in columns, however you will often want to open it in
word/notepad to have a look at the data directly. (not having open with
in these situations was one of my biggest bugbears with windows)

A mistake to avoid repeating

> Recent applications on the other hand would be an arbitrary category of
> applications that have no relation to each other than they have been
> recently used. IMO, having such category just shows inadequacies in the
> existing menu categories (if there are any, i don't know if theres a
> problem in gnome, but in windows i suspect this is the reason for the
> feature). 
> 
> dave
> 
> 
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