Re: [Usability] File menu applet

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Sun, 1 Aug 2004, Jonathan Rockway wrote:

> Date: Sun, 1 Aug 2004 16:50:32 -0500
> From: Jonathan Rockway <jrockway gmail com>
> To: usability gnome org
> Subject: Re: [Usability] File menu applet
>
> I really like the idea of having one bookmark store.  This is
> something that does not need to be application or desktop dependent.
> Here's my idea:
>
> Store a bookmark as:
>
> A URI
> A mime-type

Do we even need a mime type?

we already have
file, http, ftp, irc, webdav.

I'm not sure how mime type is the best way to filter, there are plenty of
applications that can open http locations but I dont necessarily want to
overload an editor application (Quanta, Mozilla Composer, Gvim, or
whatever) with all the links from my web browser.

I have always thought of it as wanting to have some links available in
many applications (home folder, documents folder, the "my docs"
folder I've mounted from my windows partition) and not need to add them
over and over again.  I guess it is the links to directories that I
particularly want to share across different applications, the files I want
tend to be in the recent documents list (or document history) but
sometimes there are files that I'd want to have in both EOG and gthumb
(not the best example, maybe this is the case where mime-tpye really comes
in?).

So now we have the gist of a use case, does my use case roughly correspond
to yours?

I'm sure there are some ideas that can be taken from the document history
specification.

I think the larger problem we are solving (again) is easy access to files,
document management.  Recent files and file history do really help with
file management and it does that rather well until you start scaling it
up.  tracking back based only on the time you last used a file is of
limited use, and that many programs let you see the file history only the
most recent files.
Bookmarking is in some ways building on top of that and allowing you
to mark documents (or directories) as important and put them in a
'physically fixed' place rather than just a place in time, and keywords
and categorisation make it even more managable.

If the document history kept track of which documents are most frequently
accessed that information would provide a useful suggestion as to what you
might want to bookmark.

I know I like collecting and sorting things more than most users.  Most
users are unlikely to add keywords or categorise their bookmarks.
What I'm thinking of will help make organisation of files across
your whole destkop easier but users will still need to want to
organise it which could be a problem.

I guess the application you bookmark a file from, the file type, and the
frequency of use will provide some useful information on which to sort
automatically.

> Other things that I'm forgetting :)

I always liked how Mozilla stored its bookmarks in HTML format,
I used to set my bookmarks file as my homepage.

> Then, an app can filter on mime-type.  Firefox, epiphany, konqueror,
> and lynx will "import" (show is a better word) the text/html (etc)
> bookmarks, while nautilus, file-browser-applet, and konqueror (the
> file-browsing konqueror) can filter on file:// URIs, etc.

there definately needs to be some way to group things together, I was
thinking in terms of folders but doing it in a more abstract way using
metadata and keywords works equally well.

It is getting late and I'm not sure if I'm making sense anymore but I
think this could be productive and I'd like to continue the discussion
later.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan