Re: Recently Used Files Proposal

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Hi,

On Fri, 2005-06-03 at 03:46 +0400, Nickolay V. Shmyrev wrote:

> > A menu would never give enough informations on the recently used
> > items: apart from an icon associated to the mime type, we won't know
> > their location, or when they were accessed; so, given that we should
> > provide a tooltip for each item (with an API for adding custom text,
> > maybe), a menu could be also implemented.
> > 
> 
> Emmanuele, really the best way to provide access to recent items in
> application is menu.

Even if I could agree, I'm still skeptical about this.  A menu is what
it is used on some platforms, but I don't know if it's indeed the best
way to provide all the data we need to know about a recently used
resource.

Consider web browsing; Firefox, Epiphany, Internet Explorer - all show
the history as a side pane containing a treeview, with each page that
has been visited put it into a treeview.

What I am suggesting basically is creating the concept of a "resource
history", showing what resources the user has recently openend; and if
the panel registered the menu items it launches, we could also have the
recently used applications, for instance.

>  The main idea of recent file is to allow open new
> file without dialog, while you suggestion is to replace one complex
> dialog (FileChooser) with another one (RecentChooser).

The idea is to offer a set of widgets - a dialog, a button, whatever -
in order to access this data.

The GtkFileChooser could register an item in save mode, and show the
recently used items in open mode, so we could scrap the entire "Open
recent..." menu item altogether, and just use the "Open..." menuitem; it
could be a viable solution.  But this does not mean that we should not
provide some other way to access this data.

Kind regards,
 Emmanuele.



-- 
Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>
Web site: http://log.emmanuelebassi.net