Re: [Nautilus-list] script w/ mime handling

[John Sullivan <sullivan eazel com>]

I think technically the mime-folder-hierarchy wouldn't be too hard, but I
think there are at least four major usability problems with it:

(1) It puts the burden on every user (or the installer program if there is
one) to put each script in the right place. This is much more error-prone
than if the script just "does the right thing" in the Scripts folder.

(2) Using the hierarchy in this way precludes a commonly-asked-for feature
of letting the user create arbitrary subfolders in the scripts folder.

(3) It forces users to think about and deal with MIME types explicitly. I
don't think we want to limit the utility of the Scripts mechanism to only
users who are thoroughly conversant in MIME types.

(4) If the Scripts menu reflects the folder hierarchy, then you've got to
navigate multiple levels of hierarchical menus to choose a script, which is
a pain. If the Scripts menu doesn't reflect the folder hierarchy, then
there's a hard-to-understand relationship between the Scripts folder and the
Scripts menu.

John

on 10/16/01 9:09 PM, Tuomas Kuosmanen at tigert ximian com wrote:

> On Tue, 2001-10-16 at 16:32, John Sullivan wrote:
> 
> Note that you can still write and use scripts like those now. They
> can invoke programs that check the MIME type before converting. It
> would be nicer if the utility of the script could be determined
> before it was chosen instead of afterwards, but the current system
> doesn't prevent anything.
> 
> One weird idea I had one day, would be a hierarchy on the scripts dir
> like:
> 
> .gnome/nautilus-scripts/mime/image/jpeg/
> 
> Now I dont know if this would be something the hackers would like, but
> it would make sense for me that it might work.
> 
> Lets say I have two scripts. One is "Rotate JPEG image left" (to correct
> the vertical digital photos, using jpegtran so the image quality is not
> lost. This only works for jpeg images. So I would put it to
> 
> ".gnome/nautilus-scripts/mime/image/jpeg/Rotate JPEG image left"
> 
> The another script I have is "Scale to 640x480", this works for all
> images. Now I could put this to
> 
> ".gnome/nautilus-scripts/mime/image/Scale to 640x480"
> 
> A script that works with all files would be just like now, on the
> nautilus-scripts folder.
> 
> I guess you get the idea. One could then symlink stuff when needed to
> add scripts to different places on the mime directories. We could even
> have some kind of a nautilus view for moving the scripts around in the
> hierarchy etc. But using this kind of thing would make it pretty easy to
> also install new scripts if people want to share those, just have a
> script to put the files on the right directory under the Nautilus
> scripts dir.
> 
> I am probably on crack though, since I dont know if this would work on
> practice (I dont really program myself, I just debug some perl scripts
> into existence sometimes :)
> 
> Tuomas
> 
> 
> 
> John