Re: [Usability] [Yet Another] New File Chooser Design

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Wed, 2004-02-25 at 00:46, Luke Hutchison wrote:

[Apologies; I sent this prematurely.  Here it goes again.]

> Here is a proposed design for a File Chooser with a menu bar :o)

There are already about 30 designs for a GTK+ file chooser.  Creating
yet another one is not the way to write a file chooser.

The right way to design a user interface is to write a functional
specification, that is, a list of things that users will want to do with
that user interface.  In the case of the file chooser, it involves:

- For File/Open, it should allow selecting files.
  - To make it easy to see which file is which, it needs a preview facility.
  - How can we make file selection easier?  Allow sorting by date, etc?
  - There should be an easy way to select common locations like Home,
    Documents, CD-ROM, floppy.
  - Bookmarks for commonly-used folders?

- For File/Save, it should allow typing a new file name.
  - Needs to make it easy to choose a different folder than the default.

- etc.

That is, you design a user interface by thinking about what you need to
be able to perform with it.  If your first step is thinking about the
particular widgets you will use, or how many pixels apart are they
spaced, you are doing something wrong.  You can consult the HIG for that
once you have a functional specification --- that is the time where you
say, "what does the HIG recommend I use to pick items from a list?  What
does it say about widget layout?".

If you really want to help with the GtkFileChooser, look here:

	http://www.gtk.org/plan/2.4/willfix.html

Search for the GtkFileChooser section, and send patches for those bugs. 
Discussions about the look of the user interface are completely out of
place right now.  If you think the file chooser is missing an absolutely
basic piece of functionality, say so --- this does not include things
like "you should use a combo box rather than a list to display
bookmarks".

  Federico