Re: [Usability] Filename in application's window titles

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Thu, 9 Sep 2004, Sven Herzberg wrote:

> Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2004 16:18:54 +0200
> From: Sven Herzberg <herzi gnome-de org>
> To: usability gnome org
> Subject: [Usability] Filename in application's window titles
>
> Hi,
>
>   according to the HIG [1] primary windows should display the filename
> of an opened file in the window title. I'm working on Criawips [1] (a
> presentation application) and unlike other document types (text/plain,
> etc.) presentations have a real title (saved in the file).

I'd recommend showing the title (if it exists) followed by the filename
only but not the full file path.

Microsoft Office provides an option to show the full file path for those
who want it, if I remember correctly.  It is not something useful to most
users so I would not even bother putting in the user interface, I'd bury
it in a config file somewhere.

>   Is this case (which would apply to e.g. media mplayers too) a special
> case that should be treated as "Show the documents title" or should I
> still show the filename?

as more applications start to include decent metadata this should soon
become the base case not a special case.

>   A simple use-case where the filename is not very good: Andy has got a
> lot of presentations and he often copies and pastes slides between old
> talks and a new presentation, so he's got lots of windows open; Andy
> wants to organise his talks in a folder (~/Presentations) and has one
> subfolder for each (e.g. labeled "<date> <event> <title>"). Within these

I'd incorporate the date in the filename if I were him something like

presentation-20040831-event-title
or
20040831-event-title

There is only so much you can reasonably do if users use non-unique file
names and use only the directorie names to differentiate their files.

I think by using the Title from within the file you have made a reasonable
effort to accomodate the user and after that the user should consider a
differnt naming scheme for his files.

> folders the presentations are all called presentation.criawips, papers
> are called paper.pdf and abstracts are kept in simple files calles
> abstract. So opening 4 presentations for c'n'p would result in a very
> unhelpful window list.
>
> [1]http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/windows-primary.html#primary-window-titles

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
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