Re: [Usability]gnome-file-dialog UI update

["Liam R. E. Quin" <liam holoweb net>]

On Sun, 2002-11-17 at 21:09, John F Dixon Iv wrote:
> Mathew Johnston wrote:
[...]
> If gedit can do something meaningful with a gif, then i wouldn't object 
> to it. But, the way it is now, opening a gif is not allowed at all by 
> gedit. (gedit will not open the file at all)

When the keepers of the open look spec finally worked on open/save, they
played around with having such "invalid" entries still in the file list,
but greyed out.

Irritatingly, this meant you couldn't select them, even if you knew
what you were doing.

MS Windows' "show all files" option was slightly better, except that
"all" didn't include "hidden" entries, so it was a lie.

Dragging an image file onto the gedit icon ought (I claim) to open the
image in the default image handler -- e.g. eog, ee or gimp.  If you
wanted to do something more specific with the file, you needed to say
what, e.g. by right-clicking on its icon or using "open with".

I still think most of these file dialogues, displaying little scrollable
lists of filenames, or icons, are a hack -- you should be able to drag
icons from and to the file system directly, in the metaphor, and that
probably means little nautilus windows, and drag and drop targets on
menu bars or elsewhere.

Ankh

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
Author, Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley August 2000
Co-author: The XML Specification Guide, Wiley 1999; Mastering XML, Sybex 2001