Re: [Usability] The new shrinked/expanded save as dialog

[BJörn Lindqvist <bjourne gmail com>]

When I initially wrote my complaint about the expanding save as dialog
I didn't know that the behaviour was basically cloned from how OS X
does it. I don't have access to any macs, but if anyone has it would
be interesting to hear exactly how it works there. I found some info
about it here http://arstechnica.com/reviews/01q2/macos-x-final/macos-x-12.html:

"Much of the benefit or annoyance of these dialogs [shrinked/expanded
save as] is at the discretion of the application. Good applications
remember the previous state of these dialogs. So if you always use the
expanded version, you don't have to keep expanding it every time you
save a file. Likewise, the location that was last used to save in a
particular application should be remembered and reused. Applications
that do all of this are much more pleasant to use.

Applications that don't behave in this way are extremely frustrating
to use, especially if you want to use the expanded form all the
time..."

But remembering the state, expanded or shrinked, is not good enough,
even on an application by application basis. Because inevitably the
dialog will "miss" and the user will be forced to use the expanded
version of the dialog. Therefore the "save as" dialog would always
open in expanded mode after a while because no one manually shrinks
it. For it to be useful the dialog has to open shrinked and it has to
guess which directories you are likely to save in and it has to guess
right most of the time.

--
mvh Björn