Re: [Usability]MM's new Gnome file dialogs

[Reinout van Schouwen <reinout cs vu nl>]

On 9 Oct 2002, Sven Herzberg wrote:

> We should have a label showing »File« between the folder-view and the
> file options. This severes two purposes:

okay, I can agree with this idea...

> We should leave out »Show navigation« but make the dialogs a bit wider

as far as I understand this button brings forward navigation buttons and a
location bar. This cannot be reached by making the dialogs wider.

>    a: »History«, a per-application setting showing the last (let's say)
>       10 used files.

per-application is a bad idea; it emphasizes application-centric thinking
instead of task/document-centric thinking. I'd rather see a sidebar that
is called for instance "Quick access" which contains:

a) the last n opened files, regardless if it was opened from within an
application or by double-clicking it in Nautilus and
b) an automagically compiled list of often used directories (Galeon "My
Portal"-style). This would eliminate the need for favorites or bookmarks.

>       the user) but they should show:
>        * Home
>        * Desktop

What if Home and Desktop are the same?

>    e: »Emblems«: a list of known emblems where the user can select
>       between must have, doesn't matter and mustn't have an emblem. This

I'm sorry, but I think this is "crack" (this sounds rather unfriendly but
I'm using common terminology here). Emblems, if used, are to indicate some
kind of "specialness" of a file. Hence, in 99 out of 100 cases there will
be many more files in a directory without emblems than with. Having an
option to filter out a few "special" files is completely unnecessary
IMNSHO.

OTOH, I could imagine that there would be one more column header to the
left of 'Filename' that would sort on icon; where sort order is specified
by (type of) Emblem. This could be realized without extra use of screen
space.

> »Favorites«: Favorites should (as I said, everthings MHO) also become a

See above, and I'd like to note that there are good reasons not to use the
word 'Favorite' instead of 'Bookmark' (one is that you might want to
bookmark a place that you don't particularly like).

> Emblems Part 2: For the save file dialog I'd like to see the icon-button
> behave like the open button from gedit's new toolbar (it has a drop-down
> list). The list should show emblems which can be added/removed by

Hmm, I fear then that here is a case of a control that behaves in a
non-standard way. I'm not sure the advantages are enough to outweigh the
HIG recommendation:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/controls.html

> choosing from the menu. There can also be a »Change file Icon« as the
> first element, which supports nautilus-style file icons.

To change the default chosen icon within the Save dialog, the only
acceptable solution I can think of is to make the icon-area sensitive to
an icon/image that is dropped on it.

regards,

-- 

Reinout van Schouwen			Artificial Intelligence student
email: reinout cs vu nl			mobile phone: +31-6-44360778
GPG public key http://www.cs.vu.nl/~reinout/reinout.asc