Weighing in and other thoughts about recent discussions

["Gerry Chu" <gerrychu bigfoot com>]

Hi everyone!

I just came back from a 2 week vacation and spent about 2 hours (still not
enough) scanning through all the 100 odd e-mails.  Along the way I had some
thoughts, and I'll weigh in on some issues.  I'll start with some new ideas,
and go on to my opinions of file dialog implementation.  This is a long
e-mail, but I guarantee it'll be worth reading.

--------------------------
NEW IDEAS:

On all OSes I've seen, the file OPEN and the file SAVE dialogs are the same,
except for the obvious difference of the "Open" and "Save" buttons.
However, those two dialogs are supposed to do radically different things.
In fact, I believe, the save dialog is just a copped version of the open
dialog because the silly people who came up with those dialogs in the first
place didn't have time to program a different save dialog (more on that
later).

Look at the user's goals: he goes into the open dialog to take a file from
the disk and put it onto the monitor, and into a save dialog to take a from
the monitor and put it on the disk: OPPOSITE intentions.

Let's examine the open dialog.  The user is presented with a listing of
files, and is supposed to make a CHOICE from the file listing: deciding
which file to load.  He can also open files in different directories and
potentially, even find a file using a find tool.  Well designed for file
opening, IMO.

However, the save dialog is mearly a file open dialog with the word "save"
swapped with the word "open."  The user is _still_ shown with the nicely
designed file listing that, as we said, presented a CHOICE for him: the
choice of which file to OPEN.  Oh! But remember, this is a SAVE dialog!  The
user is confused because he thought he is supposed to save a file, but is
still presented a choice of which file to open with the file listing.  In
other words, in a real office, do you look through all the other files in a
directory before you put a new file in?  I don't.  It's irrelevant what
other files are in a folder to my decision on where to put a new file.

Here's my solution.  Yes, there are some issues with it, but the original
problem remains. There might be other ways to solve the problem though, but
this is what I came up with: I think we would confuse new users less by
removing the file listing from save dialogs, and we'd also reduce clutter.
Perhaps we could put something more useful in its place.

Also, the user only uses the delete, rename, and new folder commands in a
save dialog and not in a open dialog because conceptually, and open dialog
is read-only, and a save dialog is write only.  For example, I only create a
new folder in a file dialog when I realize that my file I'm saving doesn't
fit into the folder categories I've created.

I've also have been playing around with the idea that file names should be
optional.  You can do a lot of things with the eazel zoom tool that allows
you to see inside of files (in the icon) without opening them.  File names
were made to give you hints about what's inside a file.  By being able to
see inside a file without opening it, there is no need for a hint to what is
in a file because the contents is already visible.  So, user creates a new
file, drags it to the desktop (or wherever).  No need for file dialogs
either.  When the destop gets too cluttered, the user has to start
categorizing items-like cleaning a desk by putting stuff in folders.
Perhaps later on, if he wants to, file names could be optionally added.  The
only problem is that there would have to be a high zoom level, and I don't
know how many documents you could fit on screen on lower resolutions and at
high zoom levels.  However, I realize GNOME is probably too far along for
such a radical change, but who knows, and if anything else, it helped expand
our horizons a bit more.

Changing the subject a bit, while I was truding though the e-mails, you know
how if you want to reply to a particular part of a message, you hit reply,
and write your reply underneath the snippet of the message you want to reply
to and then send the message?  Well, when I was reading though the e-mails,
I sometimes saw a snippet of an original message that was replied to and
often wanted to know the context of the snippet.  So, evolution team, please
add a feature where if a snippet is highlighted, you can right click it, and
in the context menu have a "View source of selection" and evolution would
open the e-mail where the message originated.  Look at the real example
below:

-----
"Michael T. Babcock" wrote:
> To start, you've got people confused, because I don't want any of the
things
> you seem to think I want.

That might be the case, but that was the way I interpreted it from your
first mail with that idea.
--------

You see that "To start..." thing? When I'm skimming, I lose a lot of info.
So I read the "things you seem to think I want" part and wonder "what things
are you talking about?"  I wish I could highlight the "To start...think I
want" snippet and have evolution show the message where the ambiguous
snippet came from.  And since all messages in evolution are indexed, it
should find the e-mail pretty fast.

But that's off topic...

-------------------------------

File dialog:

I think this should be nautilus-ized.  This means the zoom, the in-icon
preview, views, bookmarks.  And the potential clutter would be reduced with
the sidebar.  As for the Mac tree, I like it, but the fact is that if it
isn't a view in nautilus, it probably won't be in the file dialogs (prove me
wrong if possible).  If you haven't downloaded the preview, do.

AUTOCOMPLETE: perhaps it's more trouble than it's worth.  I think most
people, with their one directory of word documents, use the _mouse_ to open
files.  If you want autocomplete, use your favorite shell to open files.  I
mean, sure I use autocomplete in bash, but I switch to the mouse in gui file
dialogs.

FILTERING: also perhaps it's more trouble than it's worth.  Most people
don't type in the name of a file to open it.  They use the mouse.  They use
the mouse.  But still, suppose there's a directory with lots of files in
different file formats in it.  I want to open a file that was created in foo
and is called bar.  I could filter by extention (assuming there is a
extention) but by the time I choose the extention to filter by or type ?.foo
(or whatever was considered) I could have just scrolled to the file and
opened it.  As for filtering on the go as you type: first of all, I don't
know any regular person who opens a file by typing its name (often, you
don't even remember the name) and second, files disappearing in the file
listing looks like they're being deleted or something.

OPENING MULITPLE FILES: just ctrl click or box-highlight.  No extra buttons
or different dialog.  Again, very few people open multiple files at one
time.  I guess, a lot of the time, it's because they want to find a picture
or a file and don't remember what it was named.  With eazel icon previews,
you don't need to open 20 pictures at a time to find which one has your aunt
kim in it.  Just look at the icon.  Also, if you _still_ need to open
multiple files, they probably share some characteristic, right?  This is
tied to filtering and finding.  Filtering is finding in the current working
directory.  Select a file in open dialog, choose find, in current working
directory (probably default), that share [list of charateristics], click
start finding, pops up vFolder.  There!  Box highlight the files you want
(they're all in close proximity to each other since all the irrelevant files
are filtered out) and open!

RESIZING: yes.

HOTKEYS: sanely.

FIND BUTTON: of course, on open dialog

RECENT FOLDERS: yes

BOOKMARKS: from nautilus.  Show only accessable dirs (not on www).

RENAME, DELETE, NEW DIR: _buttons_ with _words_ on save dialog.  Never liked
menu context menus (like on GIMP).  I'll detail reasons for that in later
e-mail.

UP BUTTON: very, very useful

OPEN CWD IN NAUTILUS WINDOW: uh-huh

GRAPHICAL REPRESENTATION OF CWD: like Windows, shows the parent dir of the
parent dir of the parent dir of cwd in drop down list.

I like Jim Cape's mockup the best.  Add the optional tree view on the side
as proposed, and the above.  I also liked Jorg's idea of CVS plugin for
selected apps.

And just to get some inspiration (I'm for looking at whatever has been done
before for new ideas) take a look at the mac file dialog by our friend David
Every. http://www.mackido.com/Software/NavServices.html

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Gerry Chu