Re: File actions (was: Device icon action)

["John (J5) Palmieri" <johnp redhat com>]

On Tue, 2005-08-09 at 15:11 -0400, Joe Shaw wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am going to steer this thread in my own direction. :)
> 
> On Tue, 2005-08-09 at 01:53 -0700, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > > Maybe a View Audio Files or View Video Files option in the right click
> > > context menu?
> > 
> > Default context menu item == "Play" (or whatever action makes sense), with
> > the "Open" item still there, but not default.
> 
> We need a solution for describing actions other than "Open" for many
> file types.  In Beagle, for files we want to have "Open" and also
> "Reveal in file manager" that would cause the file to be selected in a
> new Nautilus window.  For media files, "Open" and "Enqueue."  For IMs,
> open the log and also IM the individual.  And so on...  Right now we're
> hard coding a lot of these items, but that's not a tenable solution.
> 
> We could perhaps overload the MIME system for this, but that makes me
> feel a little dirty.  How do other people feel about the problem?  Any
> other suggestions?

I was talking to Colin about this.  While it is geared more towards
devices we were thinking instead of overloading the mime system for
devices HAL exports capabilities - why not register applications that
can handle certain capabilities?  This way in the UI of
gnome-volume-manager (it really should be renamed to
gnome-device-manager now) there is no free form text entry but a nice
drop-down of applications that can handle audio burning capabilities for
example.  We could expand this to "virtual devices" such as your IM
example (not saying we use HAL for this BTW).  So there would be a
contact file that would export an im-contact capability if it contained
im contact data or e-mail-contact, etc.  Just an idea.

-- 
John (J5) Palmieri <johnp redhat com>