Re: [Usability] The basic problem of creating new documents

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

Please dont crosspost.

Ask one list and when some sort of conclusion has been reached then try
asking the other.  In my not so humble opinion anything else is
inefficient confusing and makes things more difficult for everyone.

On Tue, 27 Jan 2004, Daniel Borgmann wrote:

> Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2004 23:21:08 +0100
> From: Daniel Borgmann <spark-mailinglists web de>
> To: usability gnome org, nautilus-list gnome org
> Subject: [Usability] The basic problem of creating new documents
>
> 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

Instead of selecting Save As you could do what some people on this list
have been pushing for and get rid of Save entirely.  Seeing as you are
overhauling your software it seems like an ideal opportunity to take this
direction and show the naysayers (like me) that autosave can be done in a
reliable and unobtrusive manner (never lose any data and dont be too
slow).

As soon as a few words have been typed they should automatically be saved
to a default location such as ~/Documents/
with a default name such as "Note 1", "Note 2" ... "Note $N+1", or perhaps
"Note 1 - the first few words of the document"
(I know some users who always put a title first thing in their document,
might be interesting to encourage that habit)

Hope you get the idea.

Sincerely

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