Re: [Usability] Re: Spatial nautilus - fantastic - but what about the rest?

[Reinout van Schouwen <reinout cs vu nl>]

On Fri, 21 May 2004, Jan Morén wrote:

> gnumeric, for instance, you either need to keep "Save As" or make the
> equivalent operation (make a copy, and continuing editing the copy)
> _really_ obvious.

This shouldn't be difficult to perform from within nautilus. Ctrl+drag (or
the much more cumbersome copy+paste), activate, you're in business.

> Juggling a tree of several variants when doing something complicated is
> not that uncommon - and needs more than just reliable rollback. Also,

Could you elaborate?

> you will still need a Save operation in many apps anyway, as you
> frequently want to save a file in a different format than the default
> (Ok, call it "Export"if you want but we all know it is "Save as" with a
> format list).

You're thinking too much application centric. It has been proposed here
before that each program could register the formats it can handle with the
desktop environment. In that situation, most of the required converting
work could be done below the surface - imagine a case where the user has a
scanned image in TIFF format and wants to insert it into a document being
edited with Abiword, which doesn't support TIFF natively. The drags the
TIFF image to the document area, Abi asks the environment to convert it to
PNG or somesuch, and it Just Works! Below the surface, Gimp or ImageMagick
has been called to perform the conversion.

Of course there will be cases where an explicit conversion is needed, but
you could think of a generic Conversion object (panel applet?) where you
drag one file, and then you're offered a list of all formats it can be
converted to.

> laptop users nuts. Constant kicking of the HDD is a sure way to deplete
> battery life (and ruin the sense of absolute quiet you otherwise can

Good point, but there are more cases where special handling of laptop
situations is needed. We could have some sort of meta-laptop-theme for
this perhaps?


-- 
Reinout van Schouwen			Artificial Intelligence student
email: reinout cs vu nl			mobile phone: +31-6-44360778
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