Re: Open... vs Open Location...

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Sat, 2003-01-18 at 13:46, iain wrote:
> Now that there are a few programs using gnome-vfs for their file
> loading/saving the menu item "Open Location..." seems to be cropping up,
> which usually shows a dialog with an entry so you can type in a URI,
> whereas the Open just shows a file requester. GEdit, XMMS and GSt-Player
> are examples of this, and Mozilla has "Open Web Location..." and "Open
> File..." which again do pretty much the same thing, especially when the
> open web location has the browse button and says "Enter the web location
> (url), or specify the local file you would like to open"
> 
> This menu item never sat right in my mind because it requires the user
> to know how the two are different, when in reality they are not.
> /home/iain/blah.mpg is just as much a location as
> http://www.gnome.org/blah.mpg
> 
> So I started thinking about how we could combine the two into one. The
> first idea was a fairly obvious gnome file entry that can take either a
> remote uri or a local file and has the browse button to open a file
> selector. This is pretty much the same as the mozilla open web location
> dialog, but without the "this is supposed to be for remote locations"
> implications. - a bad glade mockup is at
> http://www.prettypeople.org/~iain/open-dialog-1.png
> The text would be rewritten so it doesn't suck, but thats the general
> idea. Issues with this - it adds an extra click to get to the most
> common case - selecting a local file.
> 
> Idea 2 - 
> http://www.prettypeople.org/~iain/open-dialog-2.png
> Basically rip out the file selector bits out of the file selector and
> put them in the first dialog :) Removing that extra click. Looks ugly
> still, but I blame that on my glade/gimp abilities.
> 
> Am I way off base here and the "Open..". and "Open Location..." items
> actually are the best way to do it, or do other people think we can do
> it better?

Better have only one of the two, and it would be better to get 2), and
that's what the work on the file selector in libegg is about.


> As a parting note, I'd say we could probably do the same thing for
> saving locally and saving remotely, but I've not seen any program that
> supports remote saving yet.

Some programs use gnome-vfs for saving (like gedit), but because there's
no file/path selector for remote location, they're stuck with saving on
local URIs.

-- 
Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>