Re: [Usability] gedit's Save A Copy

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Sat, 2005-02-19 at 22:20 +0100, Paolo Borelli wrote:
> Murray Cumming wrote:
> 
> >gedit 2.9 has a new feature - a "Save Copy" menu item, under "Save As".
> >It saves a copy of the document (I guess the current state, but maybe
> >the saved state), but afterwards you will be editing the original
> >instead of the new location.
> >
> >I think it's meant as a way to upload files to external servers without
> >using nautilus.
> >
> >This seems both dangerously confusing and not consistent with other
> >applications. It's a plugin, so I personally wish it was turned it off
> >by default, even after the UI freeze.
> >
> >  
> >
> The plugin is meant to to "save a copy" (who would have guessed :) ), of 
> the current document to a local or remote location. I can understand how 
> can you say that this can be confusing (just for the fact that it adds 
> a  menu item), but I don't see how it can be dangerous:

It's too similar to Save As. People might think that Save Copy does what
Save As does, and then mistakenly delete the original, thinking that
their changes are in the copy.

It's also not clear whether it saves a copy of the saved state (as a
Nautilus copy would) or the current unsaved state)

Export would be clearer, but sounds like data conversion to me.

>  AFAICS it cannot 
> lead to dataloss, since
> - it *saves* a copy
> - it is not allowed to overwrite the current document itself
> - after operation the current document state is not set to "unmodified" 
> (like it happens after a normal save operation), so the user still gets 
> prompted if he closes the document or the program.

But the user can still be confused about _which_ copy it will be saved
to. People are easily confused as soon as they have more than one copy,
particularly when you encourage them to use an application (often Word)
to manage files instead of a file manager.
 
> As I already said to Murray, I'm not opposed to having this plugin off 
> by default if so is decided.
> 
> However I'd like to point out that we didn't think of this feature after 
> too much wine, but we got requests for it.

I suspect that a rename, or some kind of drag-and-drop to a nautilus
connected server would be better.

>  Note also that this kind of 
> functionality is present in other text editors

Other text editors are arse.

>  (I know this is not a 
> good reason to copy everything the others have, I'm just offering a 
> datapoint).

-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com