[Nautilus-list] Re: MIME type capplet UI

["John Sullivan" <sullivan eazel com>]

Hi Ryan,

My comments are interspersed below. I'm cc:ing nautilus-list on this also.

on 9/18/00 5:17 PM, Ryan Muldoon at rpmuldoon students wisc edu wrote:

> John,
> 
> 
> I took a look at your UI proposal on Nautilus-List's
> archives.  I fully agree with what you suggested so
> far.  However, I have a few other ideas to make the capplet more
> useful.  Currently, I find the MIME type list potentially scary
> looking for newer users.  I have no problems using it, but
> people using linux for the first time seem to find it
> daunting.  What I would suggest is the following:
> 
> 1. Use drag and drop as one method to add filetypes to the
> list.  Then at least some of the information would be completed
> by the user automatically.

I like the idea in concept but I don't think it actually helps in practice.
If the user dragged and dropped an item with a known type onto the capplet,
then the type is already known and there's nothing to automatically add. But
if the user drops an item with an unknown type on the capplet, then (by
definition) the capplet doesn't know what type it is, and can't add anything
useful automatically. Or am I missing something?

> 2. Show what icon is currently associated with the filetypes.

The File Types and Programs capplet is supposed to do this already. However,
we recently realized that the set of icons it knows about is accidentally
far smaller than it should be, so most of the entries have no icons. We have
a bug report about this now (bug 3154).
 
> 3. When a user tries to open a file that doesn't have a MIME
> type association yet, and Nautilus offers an "open with..."
> dialog, it should offer to add the MIME type to the list for the
> user. (ala "always open with this program" in windows")

This can't work quite as you suggest, for the same reasons as in item #1
above (if Nautilus doesn't know about the file's type, it can't add the MIME
type to the list, because it doesn't know what the MIME type is). However,
Nautilus could make an effort to walk the user through the process of
defining a new MIME type in this case.
 
> 4. Have gnome-druid or something similar as an option for
> helping users add mime types, in order to offer as much help as
> possible in describing what each part means.

This could be either in the capplet as a "walk me through it" optional UI,
or perhaps in Nautilus when the user tries to view/open an item of unknown
type (as in item #3 above). My initial thought is that a druid-type UI on
top of the control center UI would be a bad match, but a druid-type UI in
Nautilus for this case might work very well. I've written up a bug report
about this issue (bug 3156), but no promises about addressing it for our
first release, as we have more work than time already.
 
> Hopefully these suggestions are helpful in some way.

Sure, keep 'em coming. Sending them to nautilus-list or writing bug reports
yourself is usually better than sending them straight to me, but I'll answer
when I can.

John