Re: [Usability]Preferred Applications Design

[Reinout van Schouwen <reinout cs vu nl>]

Hello Seth,

Christian and me had a discussion on irc about this... An aggregate reply
to some of the posts in this thread:

> http://www.gnome.org/~seth/Preferred-Apps-Mockup.png

This looks nice and compact, more so than Sven's, but a few remarks:
- Shouldn't a custom entry display the name of the custom app instead of
'Custom...'? (why the parentheses?)
- does an Edit button magically appear when selecting Custom? That would
be confusing. Perhaps it should be grayed out for pre-selections.
- Why a 'word processor' and 'spreadsheet' category, but no
'presentations', 'media player' or [insert favorite category here]?
- how about categories for which no suitable apps are installed?

> 1) Long term, the preferred applications system needs to either
> complement or replace the file types system. Having both is confusing.

What exactly do you mean by 'the file types system'? A preferred
applications system doesn't allow the user to specify a different app for
one specific file of a certain type, and I think that should remain
possible.

> 2) We need to show the same names/icons as the user sees in the
> Applications menu (consistency)

Agreed, but in your screenshot the applications menu itself is obviously
inconsistent. Compare:

Text Editor: Text Editor
Web browser: Mozilla
Word Processor: AbiWord Word Processor

instead of

Text Editor: gEdit Text Editor
Web browser: Mozilla Web browser
Word Processor: AbiWord Word Processor

> 1) Not "infinitely extendable" like a List would be.

Yes, this leads me to conclude that a Preferred Apps system is
unsustainable in the long run.

Havoc made a good suggestion in another post in this thread:

hp> You could probably address both of these by having a tab in the
hp> properties for an application (= launcher in the menu?) that lets you
hp> change which files the application will be used to open.

I think this is the way to go. Before designing such a page however we
should answer the question whether such an association would change the
global default for certain types, or just add itself to the 'open with...'
submenu, or both;
-  If global, should this also change the app for a file which has had a
   specific association with a certain app beforehand?

> 3) How do we find out what category apps are in? Using the keywords
> stuff from the .desktop entries?

Can apps be in multiple categories or would this break the category
system?

bye,

-- 
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