Re: [Usability] Re: Spatial nautilus - fantastic - but what about the rest?

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

> I think that a "really good and obvious way" is to simply not "save" a
> document after creating it with an application first, but create it
> directly in the file manager ("create new document") and then only edit

This (auto-save, zero-save) has been suggested many times before and I
believe people were having problems with a finding a way for this "create
new document" to work that they were happy with.

If your main menu is task based then running the application is
effectively the mechanism for "creating a new document".

For quite a long a while people have been saying that there is no need
real need for 'Save' and indeed it could be removed by automatically
saving documents when they are created.  Just as you dont have to save
every new email you recieve (it automatically gets added to your inbox)
similarly any newly created files could be added to your home directory
(or desktop, if you prefer).

It would be interesting if someone patched Gedit to do something like
this.  It would be particularly intersting if someone was more ambitious
and patched an applications with a complex file structure like Abiword or
Gnumeric.

> Obviously this will open some interesting technical challenges, but
> nothing that seems unresolvable for me.


> It would also require much more sophisticated "create new document"
> functionality inside of Nautilus (=the Desktop).

Yup, as I said people have tried but have not come up with a satisfactory
obvious and intuitive way to do this create new document (and the task
based menu is about as close as it gets).

> While this might be too radical of a change, it seems to me that it
> would be easy to provide a smooth transition path by improving this kind
> of usage for all document editing applications, while still providing
> the "traditional" way to launch the application first and then use the
> save as dialog.

the advantages of a standard 'Save' is that if anything goes wrong it is
the users fault for not saving, but when you do save it is absolutely
reliable and you know you have done it.

if you are going to implement an autosave, then the ability to rollback
changes becomes more important.

With an Auto Save system changes made the document need to be saved
incrementally and frequently, so that it doesn't take too long when it is
all finished and if you pull the plug (for example, but bugs, crashes, and
other problems aren't going away either) on the machine there wont be data
loss.  at the same time the frequent saving cannot be slow enough that
users will notice, or so frequent that users will notice.  not all
document structures lend themselves to incremental saving.

sorry if I am not being clear or going into enough detail, but searching
the usability archives and the desktop devel list will turn up a lot more
opinions on how to go about this.

> Notice that the above is not just theoretical rambling, as it's already
> possible to work this way using simple text files and I have been doing
> this for quite a while now. I just wish it would be better supported and
> possible with more sophisticated types of documents.

although the idea has been suggested many times it has not been
implemented very often (at least not beyond programs much beyond the
complexity of a simple text editor and with file formats that can be saved
regularly without the user noticing) and not many people have shown an
interest in implementing it.

for there to be progress on this there need to be implementations,
so that people can get used to the idea and make sure it works
reliably and that there is not something they didn't think of.

Once it has been added to a few applications and shown to work and
work well, then other applications can be encouraged to follow (just as
the gradual change to Instant Apply worked).

Best of luck.

Sincerely

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