Re: Recently Used Files Proposal

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Hi,

On Fri, 2005-06-03 at 10:14 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> On 6/3/05, Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > On Fri, 2005-06-03 at 03:46 +0400, Nickolay V. Shmyrev wrote:
> > 

> > > 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.
> 
> You're thinking this way, I'd suggest, because your use cases are
> overly complicated. Consider this ridiculously common use case:
> 
> * I want to open a file that I know I saved in the recent past.
> 
> That's it. Very simple, very common. Currently, I can open one menu
> (Places->Recent Documents) and 'solve' that user problem.

What if you have more than one document with the same name?

What if one is a copy you keep on a network share?

What if you want to open a document you edited some time ago (but not
too long), and it went out of the menu?

This is what happens now with the Places -> Recent Documents menu; the
recently opened documents menu item in the applications File menu
currently cuts down the list size, but it is limited to a bunch of items
(some times the limit is customizable, but commonly is hardcoded) - and
having a menu with fourty items (many of which don't say anything about
their state/location/whatever) is a complete waste of the user's time.

> Covering that use case is the whole point of every recent file menu on
> every OS. People don't care what month it was opened, or what day it
> was opened, they just know that they opened it in the recent past, and
> they want to open it again without digging into crappy FS heirarchies.

Exactely.

But users also don't save their documents with meaningful names;
sometimes they don't even look where they save their files - and this
means that they have multiple copies around; they wish to get the file
that they opened some time ago "surely not today, maybe yesterday or the
day before"; users don't want to search - sometimes they don't even know
how to search for a file.

> Covering the more complex user problems is nice, but if you make it
> too hard to solve this very basic need, you've defeated the point for
> most users.

I was just saying that a menu, even if commonly used, might not be the
best way to convey the needed informations.


Kind regards,
 Emmanuele.

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