Re: Recently Used Files Proposal

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Hi,

On Sat, 2005-06-04 at 08:43 +0000, DANIELLLANO wrote:

> > > That's it. Very simple, very common. Currently, I can open one menu
> > > (Places->Recent Documents) and 'solve' that user problem.
> >
> > What if you have more than one document with the same name?
> 
> That's a user problem. He shouldn't have more than one document with the
> same name.

Oh, yes:  this solves every problem.

We ship the new Gtk release, and we also ship a guy named Boris who will
beat the crap out of you if you call two files with the same name.

I'd say that's perfect.

> > What if one is a copy you keep on a network share?
> 
> What's the problem there?

That that network share might be read-only; or it might be not available
at the moment.  How do you know if that file is the right file you wish
to open?

> > What if you want to open a document you edited some time ago (but not
> > too long), and it went out of the menu?
> 
> Then it's not a Recent Document.

And if it is? Maybe it was opened an hour ago, and in the meantime
you've openend another fourteen documents just for taking a reference
from each one to put into that document.

Right now, the Recent Documents menu item is based on timestamp, but
clamped on the list' size; this is *very* sub-optimal.  We define the
list on a delta based on the frequency of save/open actions, instead of
the time passed - which is what "recent" means.

> > But users also don't save their documents with meaningful names;
> 
> That's their problem. Maybe
> http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/GtkFileChooserDialog.html
> should have a quick help or tooltip on how to correctly name files, if
> you don't want to get mad later looking for them.

Maybe we should name the files ourselves, and get rid of the entry
altogether; this would solve every problem.

Please: are you seriously advocating that we put a tutorial in each
file-related dialog?

Kind regards,
 Emmanuele

-- 
Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>
Web site: http://log.emmanuelebassi.net