Re: [Fwd: Re: File Selector talk notes -- one other suggestion]

[Daniel Borgmann <daniel liebesgedichte net>]

Well, I always liked the ideas of ROX Desktop (although they aren't
actually new of course). I would love to have a filesaver which combines
this drag and drop action and the Mac OS-like simplicity of a bookmark
selection. What about this:

 __________________________________
|  Application: Save file        |X|
|----------------------------------|
|  [ICON]   Save as: [INPUT BOX]   |
|             Where: [SELECT BOX]  | <-(including bookmarks and history)
|                    [Browse...]   | <-(for selecting a different loc.)
|                                  |
| Tip: You can also drag the icon  | <-(bad wording, need more space)
|      anywhere to save the file.  |
| -------------------------------- |
| [HELP]           [CANCEL] [SAVE] | 
------------------------------------ 

The browse button would then open a "file open"-like dialog to select
the target folder of choice. 
Of course this would be different and unusual, but I could see this
beeing quite convenient and especially straight forwarded and simple,
yet powerfull.  


On Mon, 2002-07-22 at 22:23, Luis Villa wrote:
> I didn't notice any discussion about XDS (the FreeDesktop.org drag-save
> protocol for X) in the File Selector talk notes.  Drag-saving is a
> feature which I believe will make the GNOME desktop far more intuitive
> and easy-to-use for many people.
> 
> Please see the XDS (Driect Save Protocol) notes at:
> 
>   http://www.newplanetsoftware.com/xds/
> 
> This is the FreeDesktop.org proposed standard for "Saving Files Via
> Drag-and-Drop: The Direct Save Protocol for the X Window System".  It is
> an extension of XDND.  The concept comes originally from Acorn's RISC
> OS.  It is one of those features that you simply don't know how you did
> without it once you've used it.  You can be working on a document or
> drawing in one application, and then go "Save As..." and *drag* an icon
> across to an already-open file manager window, rather than navigating a
> (sometimes deep) directory heirarchy in the Save As box to find the same
> directory that you're already viewing in your file manager.  It makes
> life so much easier, and makes the file manager far more useful, since
> most people only currently use their file manager for loading things,
> not saving things.  It's nice to have a file manager window open on your
> desktop for all the different files in a project that you're working on,
> and to be able to both load things from it and save things to it, using
> different applications, without having to re-navigate the directory
> structure just to get there for each new application.
> 
> Another very useful application of this is that you can drag the file
> icon from the Save As window *into* another application -- e.g. imagine
> editing an image in the Gimp, and then drag-saving it into an Open
> Office frame.  It is much more visual than the Cut-Paste mechanism,
> which doesn't provide any user feedback as to what has happened to your
> data (the clipboard is usually invisible).  The other great reason why
> this is a good idea is that you don't have to create a temporary file
> anywhere just to get your artwork across from the Gimp to OpenOffice (or
> between any other two drag-save-enabled applications).  So there's one
> file-management task fewer to worry about.
> 
> Because XDS is built on XDND, it shouldn't be too hard to add this
> functionality to GTK/GNOME.  The main change is that a file icon
> (depicting the file type) would need to be added to a regular
> (Windows-like) file-save dialog box, perhaps with a label
> ("Alternatively: Drag icon to save" or something) above it to let people
> discover this functionality.  If it's built into a regular file-save
> dialog, then we can still operate the old way, or use drag-saving,
> depending on which is better for the situation.