Re: [Usability] Chabada's Suggestions

[Kirk Bridger <kbridger shaw ca>]

I think it would be an interesting idea if it was lossless.  As soon as data can be lost in the translation I think it would be a mistake.

But as Matthew pointed out, it is a rename function.  Might it make more sense to have a right-click option to convert a file to another filetype, a la Nautilus scripts?  Certainly more complex but also more robust I think.

Why would a file's name determine it's format?  It seems artificial and fragile to me.  Alan's point about organizing via extension is a fallback to the shell, but is certainly true.  For the shell.  I think there are better ways to do it on the desktop - perhaps with Beagle and tagging images with their type or something like that?

However as long it is lossless there would be no danger and it most likely would be useful to some.  It actually might be kind of cool.


Kirk



Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:

On Jun 26, 2006, at 2:40 AM, Reinout van Schouwen wrote:
  

On Sun, 25 Jun 2006 17:21:12 +1200, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
    

The converse of that is the friend of mine who renamed something.bmp 
to something.gif and wondered why it didn't get converted.
      

Automagically converting the file after the user renames it to another
graphics type would be a very sensible thing to do, wouldn't it?
...
    

I don't think so, because then you would still have the "renaming a 
file in a particular way causes a confirmation alert" problem, except 
this time the alert would be asking about a (usually) lossy file 
conversion instead of merely a rename.