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

["Laszlo Pandy" <laszlok2 gmail com>]

2008/12/23 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.'.

I usually shy away from creating a new option for each new feature,
but we already have this "dont show this again on startup" for the
welcome dialog. Could we incorporate the list of recoverable projects
into the welcome dialog somehow? We already have a list of recent
projects there.

> There should also be a menu link to open the recovery dialog at
> whatever time the user wants.
>

How would this be different than the recent projects list in the file
menu? To help the user remember which ones crashes we could possibly
have an icon next to each one which indicates it was not saved
properly. But I don't think of it as an entirely separate thing. I
don't see as much difference between opening a project, and opening a
more recent backup of the project instead.

> 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.
>

I think that if we store all backups permanently in the temp folder
most users will not clean it out (and we shouldn't expect them to).
Having many projects sitting around in this folder will make th dialog
showing all the recoverable projects less useful, when they really
only care about the more recent one. If you saw in the screen shot,
they only way to identify backups is by their timestamp, which quickly
gets confusing.

I would prefer to store the backup with the original project file and
ask the user when they open that particular project: Do you want to
restore? If they select no, we delete the backup. If they select yes
we open the project and they can use save as from the menu to save
this copy somewhere else. Although deleting their backup data when
they select no isn't too good (we should provide a way to get it back
if they do this by accident), I think this is better than saving all
the backups permanently.

Thoughts?
Laszlo

> 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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