Re: [Usability] An idea about representing groups of programs as one

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On Jul 27, 2007, at 10:19 AM, Rogue wrote:
> ...
> 1. A lot of applications can be identified as providing the same 
> "feature"
> 2. In my menu items i see the "feature" as compared to a list of
> applications
> 3. This "Feature" item can either be drilled in order to get access to
> the various "feature-providers", or can be clicked to launch the
> "preferred" application
> 4. You can configure your preferred application via the
> preferred-applications UI.
> ...

Maybe Gnome's Mime-type registry could include multiple actions, not 
just opening, so that an application could register as knowing how to 
--for example -- print HTML files. Then you could select an HTML file 
in Nautilus, go to the "File" menu, and see a "Print With" submenu with 
items for Firefox, Gedit, and PrinceXML. Or you could select multiple 
music files, go to the "File" menu, and see a "Make Playlist" submenu 
with items for Rhythmbox and Banshee. That would require cooperation on 
action names, so you didn't end up with one program using "Make 
Playlist" and another using "Create Playlist".

A bigger challenge would be implementing a similar system for 
selections that weren't necessarily files. For example, a few weeks ago 
my mother asked me how to total some numbers she'd entered in a word 
processing document. It would have saved a lot of time if she could 
have selected all the numbers, gone to a menu, and had access to 
Gnumeric's SUM() function.

Cheers
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/