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

[Daniel Borgmann <spark-mailinglists web de>]

On Tue, 2004-01-27 at 22:43 +0000, Alan Horkan wrote:
> Please dont crosspost.

Ok... Adding the nautilus list was an after-thought, as I realized that
this basically is a Nautilus feature request and it would be nice to
discuss this with both usability and nautilus hackers. Probably a bad
idea.


> 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).

That's (almost) exactly what I do, but it doesn't change the basic fact
that a document has to exist before it can be opened and edited...


> 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.

I don't like this very much to be honest. First of all it's no real
improvement, it still breaks the object metaphor as the user has to
start the _application_ first and work on a virtual buffer, which will
then magically transform to a document somewhere on the hard disk. It
also doesn't seem very practical to me, because I'd rather create a new
document right at the place where I'm currently working at (just like
I'd create another sub-folder).
Of course this is indeed a possibility, I could add a "New Text
Document" item in the applications menu which would just create an empty
document on the desktop or somewhere else. It just wouldn't be very
elegant or comfortable. :/

Daniel