Re: gnome-utils 2.9.1 -- grand plans for gfloppy / fighting the

[James Bowes <bowes cs dal ca>]

On Tue, 2004-02-11 at 13:42 -0500, vnoel cox net wrote:
> > - What do we call it? 'Floppy Formatter' doesn't make sense for the
> > window title (since it can do more than format floppies), so I've been
> > using 'Formatter' for now. I suppose the title could change based on the
> > media type...
> 
> Maybe it all depends on how you will launch this application. If you launch it from the menu, then you get this problem of trying to find what the user want to do and on which drive. But as a user, this is not the place I would look for formatting my drive. What I'd rather see is a "Format..." option on the right-click and main menus of a drive in nautilus. That way, you would not have the "drive selection" problem - by the time the application would start, you would already know what kind of drive you're trying to format. Hence, you can get rid of the combobox and select an appropriate title.
> 
> I have no idea of how to implement this, it's just an idea.
> 

 A context menu on drives in the computer:// location in nautilus is
certainly one of the main things I'd like to see done during the 2.9 dev
cycle, and yeah, that would take a lot of the headache out. I suppose
once the program is launched, it could restrict itself to a certain kind
of media. we'd still have to check details about the drive within
gfloppy, however, to see if its a usb drive, etc... and i guess nautilus
would have to make the distinction between cd-roms, cd-r's, cd-rw's, etc

So the gfloppy command line could be like:

gfloppy [--media=media-type] [drive-name]

where both are optional, specifying a media type would only allow you to
select between those types, and specifying a drive name would only allow
you to operate on that device (and the type of that device would
over-ride whatever might have been specified on the command line).

I only worry about giving the media type because it might be possible
that we still want users to get at gfloppy from the menu. If that's not
the case, then we could simply either get rid of the media type
specification.

> > - Is it ok to alter the UI so drastically based on a combo box
> > selection?
> > 
> > - Right now the icon for the format button changes based on the media
> > type selected, should the window icon do the same? and, is this ok to
> > begin with?
> > 
> > - The 'Format' button label does not change, since that would probably
> > be bad from a usability standpoint (what with accelerators and all,
> > too). Should it be labelled something else instead?
> 
> All these issues are moot if you call the app from the drive context menu. Maybe it's a hint it's a better way to do it ;-)
> 
> Otherwise, this is a huge improvement for the formatter.
> 

Well, it will be, once the actual back-end code is there for blanking...
nautilus-cd-burner, here I come!

> Cheers
> Vincent

-- 
James Bowes <bowes cs dal ca>