[Usability] Getting rid of Open and Save entirely?

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

Getting rid of Open and Save entirely was
Re: [Usability] Re: Suggestion for the actual UI of GTK+'s New FileSelector

On Fri, 9 Jan 2004, Daniel Borgmann wrote:

> > There is, at least, one technical problem: the open/save file dialog
> > should work with GTK-only app, with or without GNOME, and, thus, with or
> > without Nautilus (AFAIK).
>
>
> My opinion (though certainly questionable) is, that we don't even need
> File->Open. Besides other problems, it also breaks every try to make

Assuming for a second (and only a second) that you are absolutely right
.
.
.
we still need a better File Open and Save As dialogs for legacy
applications.

Taking the longer term view is interesting but this discussion could go on
for weeks and still get nowhere so for the time being please hold off on
the discussion of getting rid of Open and Save.

However I would very much like to see a version of something like Gedit in
fact ANYTHING* without Open and Save before wholesale changes in the
desktop and toolkit get made.

(* besides Sticky Note, think bigger)

> window. But then you have to ask yourself, why you use the application
> to open the document in the first place and not the file manager.

Well in older versions of Mac OS you never could be sure if the file
manager would open the file in the program you wanted especially if you
have five difffernt graphics programs (same goes for Linux) so you need to
open the application first and then choose the file to ensure it got
opened correctly.  And incidentally file type detection in programs was
usualy more rigourous and careful in applications, while the file manager
needs to be faster and will try to exploit tricks like the file
extensions, the applications have to be accurate and properly parse and
open the documents.  I recall documents refusing to open until I chose
File Open, from exactly the same program.

> Because of this, I'd suggest to make the new file dialogs as simple and
> straight forward as possible, _without_ turning them into mini file
> managers.

This I agree with.
There might even be a convenient middle ground where we could have a
as simple an Open Dialog as Mac OS X has with an option to get More...
which could use the file manager.

There is so much talk about using a Filemanager instead of FOSA (File Open
Save As) Dialogs I must ask has anyone done it yet?  This idea seems so
popular I would be very surprised if none of Nautilus, gnome-desktop or
GTK hackers have tried it out yet! Are there patches available that will
allow you to invoke Nautilus intead of the open dialog and have the file
you choose be opened properly in the current Application from which you
choose Open?

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/