Re: [Usability] [RFC] Proposed AbiWord preferences dialog mockup

[John Levon <levon movementarian org>]

On Tue, Jun 03, 2003 at 04:36:00PM -0700, Dom Lachowicz wrote:

> > http://mpt.phrasewise.com/2002/03/11#a146
> 
> All I'll say about MPT is that he's
> well-intentioned...

I wish people would stop implying he invented all this stuff :)

> save button (which you still have to do at some point
> anyways if you want to persist your document).

Why ? It's the computer's job to do that (or it should be).

> also not clear to me that the desired behavior should
> happen at the application level

Certainly any implementation would be best done at a "system" level
(inside the Gnome APIs somewhere).

> Often, saving is fundamentally equivalent to putting a
> "seal of approval" on a particular revision of the
> document. Once you write a letter, it stays written,
> right? Unless you cumple up the letter and toss it in
> the garbage - the equivalent of hitting the 'X' button
> on the window bar. Otherwise it was just 'scratch
> paper.'

And guess what - if I leave that scratch paper on my desk, it stays
where it is when I leave the desk. It doesn't just vanish into the
ether.

> Saving the file is fundamentally no different
> than putting it inside of a file cabinet, folder,

Correct. However, with most applications, when you *don't* save, you
lose it. Your example above illustrates the difference quite clearly: I
have to make a positive action to get rid of a document. Not saving is
the absence of an operation, not an operation. I disagree strongly that
closing the window is equivalent in most user's minds to shredding a
document.

> This is also the de-facto behavior for any similar
> piece of software, such as MSWord or WordPerfect.
> That's not to say that we can't strive to do better,
> but it will be counter-intuitive and "non-obvious" to
> a user of MSWord how to save a document in AbiWord.
> This is a bad thing.

It would be a bad thing if you were to remove the Save function. So
don't do that.

> Finally, this sort of behavior should be well defined
> and implemented across the desktop (or better, OS and
> across OSes) as a whole.

Strongly agreed.

regards,
john