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

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad cs toronto edu>]

Hi,

I'm not getting into this discussion, just to say that "Save As"
is not necessary because you cannot create a new document.  If
you do "New" and the "Save" in any application, it works just
like "Save As".  But "Save As" is needed for when you modify an
existing document and then you decide that you want to keep the
original and save the changes under another name.  I cannot see
how you can do this by avoiding "Save As".

behdad


On Tue, 27 Jan 2004, Daniel Borgmann wrote:

> 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
>
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