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

[Jan Morén <jan moren lucs lu se>]

A few thoughts on the autosave idea:

fre 2004-05-21 klockan 03.50 skrev Alan Horkan:
[snip]

> 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.

You get a lot of strange semantics to deal with. For a complex app like
gnumeric, for instance, you either need to keep "Save As" or make the
equivalent operation (make a copy, and continuing editing the copy)
_really_ obvious. Juggling a tree of several variants when doing
something complicated is not that uncommon - and needs more than just
reliable rollback. Also, you will still need a Save operation in many
apps anyway, as you frequently want to save a file in a different format
than the default (Ok, call it "Export"if you want but we all know it is
"Save as" with a format list).

Also, you have a problem with applications like Gimp. You sometimes want
to open several different images, but only edit one of them (the others
are just used as sources). If you _do_ accidentally make an edit on one
of them - easy enough to happen - you very much would like to know about
it before you exit the app and make the error permanent.



> > 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).

I see several problems:

* How do you handle stuff like WP formats? Nautilus will need to handle
literally many hundreds of formats. 

* The user will expect Nautilus to be able to create formats used by
non-Gnome apps as well - using a very different way to work depending on
whether you happen to want to edit in a Gnome app or in a non-Gnome app
will create a lot of frustration.

* Nautilus will _absolutely_ need to stay right on top of any new
versions of anything that creates or edits files that Nautilus is in
charge of creating. It probably means some kind of plpug-in system with
each app responsible for installing a plug-in for nautilus to use.



> 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.

You need to save just about at the keystroke level. But even if you go
to a far more leisurely once-a-minute schedule, this will still drive
laptop users nuts. Constant kicking of the HDD is a sure way to deplete
battery life (and ruin the sense of absolute quiet you otherwise can
get). I don't really see how to solve this beyond having automatic save
easily disabled and normal save functionality reinstated.


-- 
 
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
 
Tel.    +46-046 222 8588             Dr. Janne Morén (mr)
Home:   +46-046 211 4973             Dept. of Cognitive Science
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