RE: About the new download behaviour

[Marco Pesenti Gritti <marco gnome org>]

On Fri, 2003-12-12 at 02:00, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> ons 2003-12-10 klockan 09.43 skrev Michele Campeotto:
> > On Fri, 2003-12-05 at 19:54, mpeseng tin it wrote:
> 
> OK. So if I understand correctly (which I think I do know after an hour
> or two with 'xan' on IRC) the thing here is that you want "Click" to be
> "Open".
> 
> Here the first of my problems come in, it's currently "Open" with
> fallback to "Save". Imho this is inconsitent since the user won't know
> when clicking the link if the file will be opened or saved depending on
> whether it's a webpage (opened in browser), or a file that can be
> handled by an installed application (pdf file) or a file that can not be
> handled by an installed application (Microsoft project file for
> example).
> 
> So as I see it, falling back to save is not a good solution since if I
> don't have an application that can view the file it's a pretty good
> chance that I don't want the file. If I don't want the file I'm left
> with having to clean up after something I didn't do, I tried to open the
> file, not download it.
> 
> Filed this as: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=129161

Interesting problem. I see two possible solutions:

1 Open download folder in nautilus and select the downloaded file. That
way you can fastly remove the file or assign it to an application (well,
with planned new mime nautilus stuff). It would also give the user a
clue about why the file has not been opened.
2 Show a dialog saying that the file cannot be opened by any application
and asking the user if he wants to save it on disk.

What do you think ?

> Currently I'm not entirely sure that open in an external application
> without asking is the best, but I think I might change on that after
> using it and it's probably best for most people. The problem I see is
> that it can possibly take a long time to open the application (for
> example OO.o) which can be a problem if the user accidently pressed a
> link, or expected another HTML page.

What exactly you feel like a problem here ? I guess the what's up
problem could be solved by startup feedback. In general I think that
crazy startup times like for openoffice are an usability problem in
itself ...

What worries me are accidentally pressed links, they can be a problem in
many ways. The fact that Apple adopted that beahvior give me a bit more
confidence (guess they did tests) but, yeah, I'm not really sure on how
much this is going to be a problem (much depend on web pages, probably
only large tests could show how much this is a problem ...).
What about to see if we can get a recomendation from usability team
about it ?

> The other problem I have is the one I mentioned in my other mail, these
> two issues probably sounded like the same problem which they aren't
> really but I mixed them up because I didn't see your view of changing
> click to "Open".
> 
> The other problem is to not be able to save where I want. I think this
> can be solved by just adding a "Save link as" to the context menu.
> Though I don't really see a point in having the "Save link" without
> showing the file selector. As long as the file selector remembers where
> it last saved it will only be another click for a user saving everything
> in the same place, with the benefit that:
> 
> 1) The user can rename the file while remember what it is.
> 2) Put it in some structured manner.

I agree on this.

> Filed this as: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=129163
> 
> Also added a better explaination on why I think 1 and 2 are important in
> the bug report.
> 
> Thanks for listening,

No, thanks for caring :) I love when negative feedback is constructive
like this.

Marco