RE: browse dialogs

[Stephen Yates <sjy999 totalise co uk>]

>===== Original Message From "Perkins, Casey S. (US - Hermitage)" 
<caperkins deloitte com> =====
>Hi, My name is Casey Perkins. This is my first post to the list, after
>listening for a week or so.
>I've been thinking for a while how all browse dialog boxes are unwieldy.
>Whether I happen to be using linux, mac or windows, gnome, kde or
>what-have-you, I find myself having to return to certain directories again
>and again, and the only way to do that is click, double-click an seemingly
>endless number of times. A lot of time is wasted every day just browsing for
>files.

The suggestions you made aren't bad, but personally I dislike all the browse 
dialog boxes that I have used.  They were needed in early single tasking 
versions of Mac OS where you couldn't access the Finder from an app.  But I 
can't see why most other GUIs have blindly copied this kludge.  When the user 
has learned to use a powerful graphical file manager with multiple windows, 
why should they have to use a clumsy little dialog to save and load files?

With RISC OS it was all done with drag and drop, you drag into the application 
to load, and drag an icon from the document window to the file manager to 
save.  The directories that I want to save to are usually kept open, so all I 
have to do is bring one to the front and drag the icon.  Even if I don't have 
the directory open, or a link to it on the desktop, it's still quicker to get 
to it in a complete file manager than in a little dialog.

I imagine that would be hard to implement in GNOME, so I think that they 
should look at the Mac OS X dialogs, they are the best that I have used.  The 
way they attatch to the document window is quite nice, but their best feature 
is that they let you change to a directory by dragging it's icon into the file 
dialog.  This was also a feature of NeXTSTEP/OpenStep and Navigation Services 
in Mac OS 9.


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