Re: drag and drop saving.

[Martin Soto <soto iese fhg de>]

Liam Quin <liam holoweb net> writes:
> Personally, I stand by the idea that the way you open a file is to
> drag it from Nautilus into your program's Input Bay, and you save by
> dragging out from the Launching Bay :-)
> 
> Sun started something like this in OpenWindows 3.2 or so, with every
> program having a rectangular "drag source" representing the current
> document, and a "drop site" for receiving documents.  But then the
> product was dropped, so I don't know if there were any usability studies.

This is a nice idea, but I'd go one step further: You just select the
desired document in Nautilus, pick one of the available editting views
(you should be able to have the full Gnumeric or AbiWord embedded in
Nautilus) and edit the document freely.  You close the window when
you're done.  The changes will persist automatically.

Are you afraid of not having that last opportunity to not save the
changes if you don't like them?  Then add a persistent undo feature.
If that doesn't seem enough, add some explicit checkpointing service,
that allows you to make a snapshot of the document at any given time,
and to recover it later if necessary.  The XML infrastructure
available in Gnome should allow for both things more or less easilly.

The fact that you have to load and save documents in computer systems,
is probably the biggest example of unnecessarily exposing system
architechture to users.  Of course you need to keep documents on disk
for persistance, and you have to load them in main memory for
efficiency, *but users shouldn't have to deal with it*.  I've seen
people loose hours of work because they made a mistake while saving a
document, and, even worse, sometimes what they did was even
reasonable.  Such problems can certainly be avoided with a better UI.

But anyway, I'm probably dreaming...

M. S.