Re: [jokosher-devel] Crash recovery dialog (jokosher-devel-list Digest, Vol 28, Issue 3)

["Tom Halligan" <tom halligan gmail com>]

Hi Lazlo,

I'm with you on the 'too much text' front - but I believe that until Jokosher is mostly stable, recovery options should be available in an obvious fashion.

I would suggest that 'display recovery options on startup' is an optional feature, with a default of 'on'. In the recovery dialog itself there should be a toggle option to 'Don't automatically show this dialog after a crash again.'. There should also be a menu link to open the recovery dialog at whatever time the user wants.

I think the above set-up would be the most user-friendly and flexible. I get annoyed with the crash recovery business for pretty much every program which utilises it, but I don't want to just get rid of it completely. It'd be far, far better for me to just be able to click 'Try to recover crashed projects' or something as and when I choose, rather than having the recovery tool hijack the software on startup and force me to make a decision there and then. If crashed projects aren't automatically cleaned up (ie: stored in a temp folder), then there should be no real reason why I can't choose when to recover projects for myself.

Tom

2008/12/22 <jokosher-devel-list-request gnome org>

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Today's Topics:

  1. Crash recovery dialog (Laszlo Pandy)


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Laszlo Pandy <laszlok2 gmail com>
To: Jokosher gnome <jokosher-devel-list gnome org>
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2008 16:12:33 -0500
Subject: [jokosher-devel] Crash recovery dialog
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





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