Re: templates patch ...

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

Hey Michael,

On Fri, 2008-06-27 at 15:47 +0100, Michael Meeks wrote:
> 	Are you implacably opposed ?

I'm worried that people end up with menus like these

 Create Document -> OpenOffice Writer ODF document
                    Abiword ODF document
                    KOffice ODF document

times the number of formats, times the number of different document
types. Then you have KWrite, Kate, GEdit, Emacs, VIM, Eclipse and god
knows what other tools that are going to dump files there. Which is a
typical use case on many campus setups where the workstation is
typically an "everything" install because it's setup to serve a diverse
set of users (for example Boston University does this). 

So I don't think this feature you're suggesting is going to help anyone,
see e.g. how bad this works on Windows. This is why I'm opposed to the
feature.

One can also argue that it's still not discoverable how to launch the
word processor. Well, on my desktop it's in the Applications->Office
menu. I think with GNOME main menu on SUSE you either have it in the
favorites menu or it's easily accessible by searching for "word
processor".

Back to the problem at hand, you want to make it easy for your father to
create OpenOffice documents. Typically when people use a full fledged
word processor they create documents of a given type. Hence why we have
the Templates feature. Does OpenOffice save templates to ~/Templates? If
so, is this feature implemented in a way that compel users to use it? If
not, is this something that the OpenOffice team is interested in working
on?

Another avenue to investigate is extending xdg-user-dirs so it can
create more than just directories; e.g. it could create and manage
payloads in ~/Templates just like it does with directories. I think
that's a more compelling feature as it allows users to manage these
instead of leaving the user with a lot of useless items in the "Create
Document" menu. 

In other words, what I'm trying to say with the last two paragraphs, I
think it would be useful to try and work with the Templates system
instead of brutally bypassing it. Of course, I'm not a Nautilus
maintainer but I thought I'd post my opinion anyway.

Thanks,
David