Open... vs Open Location...

[iain <iain prettypeople org>]

Now that there are a few programs using gnome-vfs for their file
loading/saving the menu item "Open Location..." seems to be cropping up,
which usually shows a dialog with an entry so you can type in a URI,
whereas the Open just shows a file requester. GEdit, XMMS and GSt-Player
are examples of this, and Mozilla has "Open Web Location..." and "Open
File..." which again do pretty much the same thing, especially when the
open web location has the browse button and says "Enter the web location
(url), or specify the local file you would like to open"

This menu item never sat right in my mind because it requires the user
to know how the two are different, when in reality they are not.
/home/iain/blah.mpg is just as much a location as
http://www.gnome.org/blah.mpg

So I started thinking about how we could combine the two into one. The
first idea was a fairly obvious gnome file entry that can take either a
remote uri or a local file and has the browse button to open a file
selector. This is pretty much the same as the mozilla open web location
dialog, but without the "this is supposed to be for remote locations"
implications. - a bad glade mockup is at
http://www.prettypeople.org/~iain/open-dialog-1.png
The text would be rewritten so it doesn't suck, but thats the general
idea. Issues with this - it adds an extra click to get to the most
common case - selecting a local file.

Idea 2 - 
http://www.prettypeople.org/~iain/open-dialog-2.png
Basically rip out the file selector bits out of the file selector and
put them in the first dialog :) Removing that extra click. Looks ugly
still, but I blame that on my glade/gimp abilities.

Am I way off base here and the "Open..". and "Open Location..." items
actually are the best way to do it, or do other people think we can do
it better?

iain

As a parting note, I'd say we could probably do the same thing for
saving locally and saving remotely, but I've not seen any program that
supports remote saving yet.
-- 
"I think all GNOME people are fans of KDE, they just won't come out of
the closet because they are scared of the license." - /. post