[jokosher-devel] Crash recovery dialog

[Laszlo Pandy <laszlok2 gmail com>]

Hopefully everyone has tried out, or at least had a chance to see the
crash recovery feature we put into 0.10. The feature automatically saves
any open Jokosher projects every few minutes. 

On startup, Jokosher checks to see if there are any projects saved in
~/.jokosher/backups, and displays a dialog if there are:
http://blog.mikeasoft.com/2008/08/10/improved-crash-protection-for-jokosher/

Here are my thoughts about this dialog:
a) There is too much text at the top.
b) It is designed to be able to show multiple projects that can be
recovered. This is only the case if you crash Jokosher multiple times in
and decline to recover each time, or you have multiple instances of
Jokosher open and your system crashes. I am not sure these are the most
common cases.

My question is, is it best to prompt the user to restore any of the
crashed projects? The other option is to not have a dialog at all but
prompt for restore when the user opens that particular project. This is
the way Word and OpenOffice work. They don't have a single place to keep
track of all the recoverable files, but when you open a file it checks
for filename~ or filename.bak and checks if it can be recovered.

The reason I am putting this on the mailing list is because I require
discussion on this issue. *Please respond* and at least tell me if have
or will ever run multiple Jokosher instances at once, even if you don't
have any other opinions. I would like to know if restoring multiple
projects is a common use case, and would like to hear any other insights
people have.

I hope this mail doesn't have the opposite-bikeshed problem many of the
previous ones did where no one wants to give any opinions.

Thanks for everyone's help on this.
Laszlo