Re: Recently Used Files Proposal

["Emmanuele Bassi" <ebassi gmail com>]

Sorry, I'm moving from Milan to London, and my internet connection is
still sketchy at best.

The rationale for the widgetry is better explained here:

  http://live.gnome.org/RecentFilesAndBookmarks

anyway.

The email you are replying to is a year old, and is part of my
preliminary draft for the recent files design.  In the last year I've
detailed the rationales and the design of the entire architecture and
UI; now that the stuff has been merged is a little late for going
through the design process once again, methinks.

On 4/25/06, Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-06-02 at 10:19 +0200, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> [snip]
> > On the UI side, we should have a GtkRecentChooserDialog and a
> > GtkRecentChooserWidget, for which I have prepared a mockup at the GUADEC
> > Hackfest; you might see it here:
> >
> > http://www.emmanuelebassi.net/images/shots/recent-items-viewer.png
>
> Who is going to use these? Isn't everyone just going to use the menu? Is
> this equivalent to anything that exists in applications today?

Gimp is already using a widget like this for their document history.
Also, the rationale is that the menu is useful for showing <15 recent
documents (as per HIG) so we need a way to display the whole (or a
subset of the) history of recently used documents.

Gimmie, for instance, has a list view, AFAIR.

The panel should show a "More..." item on the Places > Recent Documents menu.

> If this is intended to be used in some system-wide utility then maybe
> the code should be moved out of GTK+.

I really don't understand the rationale for this.  Then the whole
recent documents system could be moved out of the GTK.

> > I've considered the option of making a menu, but I decided that we
> > should avoid it for latency reasons; applications might just have a
> > "Open recently used..." item which launches the dialog (many
> > applications already use a submenu, there's no difference for the user's
> > point of view), or we could add the ability to show recently used
> > resources into the GtkFileChooser, near where we put the bookmarks.
>
> Aah, have you changed your mind about this? I haven't seen much
> discussion of this change of a de-facto UI convention. Not that I
> personally know what's better.

The design has been changed.

See the wiki for more discussions about it.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

--
It is against the grain of modern education to teach children to program.
What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing
thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self-critical?
                -- Alan Perlis