Re: Follow up about X clipboard

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Sun, 2004-04-25 at 14:53, Jerry Haltom wrote:
> It's been about 4 days now since I sent my first mail outlining ONE idea
> for persisting state with the X clipboard. A lot of responses were
> received. The majority of them, of course, were negative. I will sum up
> these negative reasons and offer counter arguments for them.
> 
> 
> 1. Non-deterministic shutdown of applications is confusing.
> 
> The basis for this argument is that when a user closes the last window
> of an application, they expect that process to terminate... as in no
> longer be running. The main problem I see with this argument is that
> users today have absolutely no concept of what a "process" is anyways.
> They have no need to know this concept. A user sees a window, with some
> data in it, they do not understand that this window is backed by a OS
> concept called a process. Thus, it is not confusing for users at all.
> For technical users however, the argument has merit. We understand what
> a process is, and naturally we expect that process to end when a window
> is closed. This however isn't a technical argument, but more one of
> expectations on our part. It's something we can get over, being
> technical.

What about a 90% solution here?  Resource-hungry programs like GIMP or a
full-featured sound or video editor are not the kinds or programs where
users are likely to open a file, quickly look at something and copy it,
and then close.  These are the sorts of applications that users leave
open and work in all day.  The disappearing clipboard isn't likely to
create an annoyance very often with programs like these.  (Although, in
the few cases when it does, it's probably a bigger annoyance.)

It is annoying with small transient applications.  You open gucharmap,
find a character, copy, close, and try to paste.  You view the help for
some application, copy something, close Yelp, and try to paste.  (Yeah,
yeah, Yelp doesn't actaully have Copy hooked up.)  I think people would
have far fewer objections to gucharmap hanging around than Gnumeric.

This sort of leaves it up to the application developer to decide how
people are using the application.  If it's a relatively small app, and
users are likely to do a quick open-copy-close, then go ahead and hang
around for a while if you've got the clipboard.

It's not a complete solution, but it might just be "good enough".

--
Shaun