Re: [Usability] GNOME3: Handling/Opening Documents (Website for Contributing Ideas?)

[Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues <lookkas gmail com>]

Wow. Some real good stuff here, let's discuss a little bit:

2005/4/19, Samuel Abels <newsgroups debain org>:
> * Add better interaction of the document's icon with the application:
>    - The icon should be a thumbnailed preview of the actual document.
>      (This is actually possible today.)

Yes, we just need to add thumbnail generators for most apps that
handle different types of content. However, Except for images, I can't
see why this should be terribly useful, since document previews would
give you a clue about the document *only* if the size of the thumbnail
is quite large. We should think on limitations of our current hardware
(small screens and resolutions).

>    - When the mouse hovers over the document, it should automagically
>      zoom in a little. (Ok, also may be possible with Gnome 2.x)
>    - When the icon is clicked, make it display a small progressbar,
>      optimally one that is attached to the icon.

This seems to be really nice, even if we don't implement the full
proposal, because gives useful feedback to the user. Imho really
doable for gnome 2.X.

>    - When the application is loaded, the document zooms to real size and
>      the toolbar is attached. There is no real window border and the
>      controls are kept to a minimum. Basically, the application IS the
>      paper.
>    - Consequently, when the application is closed, it zooms out and
>      becomes an icon again.

But if we don't have window borders, how we can close the window ? ;)
Yeah, just  kidding... Just noting that it (maybe) would be harder to
figure out where to "quit" your work with the document.

> * The above is implicitely also a plea for "Instant Save". If the
> document IS the paper, it needs to save changes immediately. That of
> course also means that a history needs to be saved elsewhere, so that
> when an application crashes the history is not lost. Instant save has
> also the advantage to let you get rid of the "Save" (and "Save all")
> button, so even less clutter for the GUI.

Really really nice, but we must think about the hardware overhead
(mostly HD acess) this would add, because every action would need to
be commited to disk. This would make power consumption higher,
specially on laptop computers, because disk acess are intensive at
power usage. Maybe someone can think on some smart mechanism to avoid
excessive disk acess.

Overall, those are great ideas. My main concern is that they seems to
be targetted to high end / nonexistant-yet hardware, because this
whole new model is graphically too intensive (unless we use the
super-duper enlightenment foundation libraries;)). My opinion is that
we can perfectly get a high degree of usability on our UIs making
things simpler and lowering the hardware requirements (and not the
other way around), extending the lifecycle of our computers. If I
missed the point behind your suggestions, please forgive me.

This doesn't mean that we should go like crazy ripping of everything
and getting back to twm with xterms :). I'm just saying that fair use
of hardware should be a priority, while maintaining usability. In
fact, making things simpler and more organized, we can do more stuff
with less hardware requirements.

Cheers 

Lucas