Re: [Usability]preferred applications dialog

[Mathew Johnston <johnston capsaicin ca>]

>   I tried to make the preferred apps dialog a bit nicer, so I made the
> following »improvements« (as I think they are improvements, but you may
> not ;).

I'll bite :) I think that the dialogue does look nice, but I think that
we can improve it still. The use of toggle buttons is cute, but I think
that their cuteness is outweighed by the fact that they are never used
anywhere else in the system. Also, if I click the "no" button, and it
turns to "yes", does that mean that clicking "yes" will turn the feature
on or off? Am I clicking, "yes" to turn on the feature, or am I
clicking, "yes", to switch it to, "no"? See what I mean? While
checkboxes may not fit aestheticly, they are the standard and are well
understood.

The left hand configuration item selector is also non-standard. Do we
have a standard for this? I mean, do we use a tree view? Do we use a
notebook view? Do we do like Galeon and have a slider panel thing with
icons for each configuration item? I sort of like the way that Galeon in
Gnome 1.4 does it, actually.

Then there's the whole issue of preferred applications at all. Why do we
have preferred applications? Shouldn't we just have protocol handlers? 

I like the concept of centralized application registration. Applications
would say, "I can open these mime types even via URL where the scheme is
HTTP or FTP, I can edit these mime types if the scheme is file or if the
file is local". Then, anywhere that you'd have to choose an app, the
system would know which ones make sense. We would need to architect this
such that different actions could have different command lines, etc. We
would NEED to have a manual application registration UI, so that users
could even register scripts and stuff. There's a lot more detail to go
into such a concept, but that's the gist. 

Thanks,
Mat.