Re: File Dialog

[Vladimir Vukicevic <vladimir ximian com>]

On Thu, Apr 12, 2001 at 04:02:25PM -0700, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> 
> Here it is, and for those people who don't know that we had a UI Design
> site, that URL as well.
> http://developer.gnome.org/gnome-ui/hitsquad/filedialog.html
> http://developer.gnome.org/gnome-ui/
>

It might be worthwhile to look at the Mac OS X approach to this as well.
I, for one, prefer the OSX approach, since it makes things simple from
a user view.  Some screenshots:

http://primates.ximian.com/~vladimir/save0.png
http://primates.ximian.com/~vladimir/save1.png
http://primates.ximian.com/~vladimir/save2.png

I would think that a user simply wants to save to a specific folder most
of the time, and that the folder is in general going to be in their Documents
folder or some subdir thereof, perhaps one of the recent ones.  A dialog
like this makes it simple and clear what the purpose of the dialog is --
if the user really wants a file manager inside this dialog (and I admit,
it can be useful), you can click on a button and get the extra browse view,
along with the useful "Add to Favorites(sic)" button...

This type of interface also makes it easy to add storage plugins, like
the WebDAV iDisk in the screenshot, or maybe saving to a tar file... if the
save dialog was contextual based on the file type of the data that's
about to be saved, things like "Save MP3" could have "Save to Rio 300" if
one is plugged in and the like.

Anyway, just my thoughts.. in general, I think the file dialog should be more
focused on "saving" instead of throwing the user into a mini file-manager.

	- Vlad


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