Re: [Usability] user levels, etc.

[David Moles <david moles vykor com>]

On 2001.11.19 08:35 Tuomas Kuosmanen wrote:
> 
> What is the MIME stuff in Nautilus then? I mean, in windows you just do
> "[x] Always use this program to open this kind of file". I think it
> makes much sense to just have the mime handling accessible from the file
> manager. Seth had some ideas about this but I forget now and I need to
> get to the office :-)
> 
> Less likely to make sense to open gnomecc and find the mime stuff there
> (Should the user know what MIME is, and what MIME type a file is anyway
> to for example make "freeamp*" always open OGG and MP3 files?)

It looks like the current solution is to have Nautilus open the control
panel for you. I think it's fairly counterintuitive, but it's probably
not worth doing anything about until the control center rewrite is done,
and anyway it's better than making the user find it themselves.

Actually I think the general idea is not that bad; it's that between
the control center implementation and the language in the Nautilus dialog
box that opens the capplet for you, it's confusing (the dialog tries to
be helpful and educational, but, IMHO, gives the user too much to think
about). Better if it didn't give them the impression they were going "out
of Nautilus" and into something else.

One thing that might make that capplet nicer would be to list the plain-
language names of the file types before the MIME types, so what the user
sees is "MP3 music file" instead of "application/x-mpeg" or whatever it is
(and if anything goes off the right edge of the screen, it's not the plain-
language name). Might be worth a try.

For what it's worth, the "stable" branch on Red Carpet seems to be back
to the old control center (as you pointed out, Luis). I'm not sure if the
new one ever really was in there, or if it got sucked in in the course of
upgrading something else -- I've noticed that Red Carpet now has a habit,
probably intended to be helpful, of sucking stuff in from the unstable
branch when it needs to. I think it would be better if stuff in the stable
branch only depended on stuff in the stable branch, though.

--D