Re: [Usability]File Types Design

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Sat, 2003-02-15 at 16:55, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 15, 2003 at 04:12:22PM -0800, Seth Nickell wrote: 
> > 1) A secondary use case that is much less frequent, is some people will
> > change several common file types when dropped onto a new computer.
> ...
> > 2) The idea of being "in the Open With menu" is not made explicit. This
> > reduces some of the interface complexity, but may also fail to provide
> > the user with sufficient motivation to understand why they would want to
> > "Add Application" when they don't want it to be the default.
> 
> You could probably address both of these by having a tab in the
> properties for an application (= launcher in the menu?) that lets you
> change which files the application will be used to open.
> 
> That way if I want to do an operation like "use gimp to open all image
> files" I can open properties for the gimp or the gimp launcher or
> wherever it makes sense, and select from the list there.
> 
> Of course the list of file types I can choose to use gimp for will
> only include file types gimp can handle, it won't include the list of
> all file types.
> 
> If you do that I still think "Preferred applications" isn't good for
> much.

I agree.

-Seth