[Usability] The basic problem of creating new documents

[Daniel Borgmann <spark-mailinglists web de>]

Hello,

I'm currently writing a "spatial", document centric text editor and the
author of gtodo is considering to make his application document centric,
too. While discussing about it, we figured that we both have the problem
that users can't really create new documents of a certain type in an
object oriented way. The currently popular method is to open the
application, put some content into the empty buffer and then select
"Save As..." to actually store the document somewhere on the disk. I
hope I'm not alone in my judgment, that this is crack... At the very
least it breaks the object metaphor and would force me to add a "Save
As..." function, which I don't want. Imagine you'd have to do this to
create a new folder.

Nautilus 2.5 includes a "Create Document"  functionality which is very
very nice, but unfortunately it doesn't solve this problem for us. Our
first thought was to put document templates into this list (for example
for an empty task list), but Alex Larsson made it clear in previous
mails that this list is not meant to be filled by anyone but the user.
I'd also agree that it would not be a nice solution to put all kind of
empty document types in there. 
The "Empty File" item unfortunately doesn't help either. In fact, it
creates a document that can not be understood or opened by Nautilus in
any way, so I question it's usefulness for "real users". It only works
if you put a file extension behind it, forcing users to actually know
about those file extensions. 

So I wondered, what is the opinion of the usability guys about this?
Would you agree that such a possibility to create new documents is
needed? And does anyone have good suggestions how it could be done? One
thought that came to my mind was exchanging the "Empty File" option with
"Empty Document...", which would then open a dialog allowing the user to
chose from certain known filetypes (like "Task List", "Spreadsheet" or
"Text File"). Nautilus would then create an empty document that can be
understood by Nautilus as a file of this mime type, either through
extension, sniffing or whatever other possibilities there are. This
could be seen as the document based equivalent to the Applications
menu. 

Hopefully, this will spark some discussion. :)


Daniel