Re: properties dialog relationship to displayed selection

["Calum Benson" <calum benson sun com>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mathieu Lacage" <mathieu_lacage myrealbox com>

> I think the first versions of nautilus  (that is, 1.x) were based on
> such a property dialog: it would update if you changed the selection.
> However, as you mentioned, it made it impossible to have two property
> windows open at the same time for comparison purposes. I personally
> wonder about the use of such a feature: what would you like to compare ?
> Could you give a simple reasonable use scenario ?

You're right, there aren't many obvious ones, perhaps I'm getting too
academic about this :)  I could maybe imagine wanting to compare the Notesin
two different files, or copy and paste a custom icon (or its filename at
least) from one to the other-- not that you'd *need* to have both of them
open at once just to copy and paste of course.  But that's about it really,
and they're fairly contrived examples.

> As a side note, I was thinking today about a recursive property dialog
> vs the current one. It would allow you to set a permission recursively
> on the subfolders of a folder. I wonder what the UI would look like: do
> you have any suggestion about this ? Would it make sense only in the
> permissions tab as a toggle button  (recursive or non-recursive mode) ?

Hmm, Windows XP doesn't bother with the checkbox, if you change the
permissions on a folder, it just pops up an alert saying "do you want to
apply the change to the contents of the folder too" or something like that.
Wouldn't really work in our instant apply model though, dunno off-hand how
OSX handles it.

A checkbox or toggle button would potentially be the most flexible for the
user, but assuming the dialog was still instant apply, it would have to
remember the previous permissions of all the files in all the subfolders to
reset them all if you decided to click it again... which if nothing else
could take a good few seconds to apply for folders with lots of files or
subfolders.  But if you updated the GUI instantly and tried to change all
the permissions in the background, you run the risk of files having the
wrong permissions for a while after the user thinks they've changed them.
So it could turn out that a simple "apply to all folder contents now"-type
button works better, even though that doesn't give you the option to reverse
the damage...

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems