Re: Connect to Server dialog

[Seth Nickell <snickell redhat com>]

On Tue, 2004-07-13 at 16:07 +0100, Calum Benson wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-07-08 at 20:13, Seth Nickell wrote: 
> > Yo. Purty pitchures attached.
> 
> Neat... here's a few questions/comments, which I'm sure you've argued
> about yourselves while doing the design :)
> 
> - I'm not sure how comfortable Joe User would be with the term
> "Protocol"-- maybe something like "Type" would be simpler (or "Server
> Type", but the "Server" part is kind of implicit from the title and
> primary text)?

Yeah, totally. I'm not sure how this thing turned into a production
(*cough* bryan *cough*), the wording was sort of intended to be
placeholders. "Server Type" seems to fit best. As for the actual dialog
name, Bryan & I discussed this more and have reached consensus on "Open
Remote Folder...". Its a little weird that a "side effect" of this is
putting it on the desktop, but I don't think it'll cause problems...
it'll just be a quick convenience for some people later.

> - Personally I'd kind of expect the username field to come either first
> or last, somehow... protocol, server and folder just seem to be too
> logically related to have the username field split them up. (And since I
> can't really decide what username I'm going to use until I've chosen the
> other stuff, last would seem more natural.)

To some degree this is shaped by technical constraints.

1) You can't browse for folders until you've entered a user name
2) The dialog isn't really intended to be static based on the server
type. So if you select FTP, it should have a checkbox for "Anonymous".
Or if you select, say, AFS, it should have a "Use current Kerberos
credentials" checkbox (or something, terribly phrased I know). The
username is one of the things impacted by this. Ideally, we'd like to
have password here too, since username & password are almost always a
pair...but that could also be protocol specific (e.g. with sftp if you
have S/KEY installed you don't need a password).

The "Server Type" "Server" and "Folder" fields are closely related to
"what resource do I want", so it would be nice to keep them next to each
other... so I'm a little unhappy w/ putting username in the middle. But
because of (1) it seems necessary to do this rather than put username at
the bottom.

-Seth