Re: [Usability] Cross-Session vs. Temporary States

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Thu, 2007-05-10 at 18:19 -0400, Jacob Beauregard wrote:
> I'm wondering if anyone has looked into consistent separation of permanent and 
> temporary state manipulations.

This is somewhat related to session management, I guess... AIUI, any
properly session-managed app should already be capable of remembering
and restoring its state on demand (not just when you log in/out, or
quit/restart the app).  And any proper X session manager should be able
to save the state of the entire session, and restore it again later, at
any time.  So you could have multiple saved sessions, e.g. one for each
project you're working on, that you can call up on demand.

I don't think we've ever really looked into the need/requirements for
consistent per-application state saving though (probably because we've
never even had particularly great session management in GNOME)... as you
suggest, there are probably some apps where it's more useful than
others.  And as GNOME begins to appear on mobile devices, where
state-saving has long been the norm, it probably is something that
deserves some thought.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems