Re: Global templates



Hi,

Am Sonntag, den 21.08.2005, 13:06 +0200 schrieb Reinout van Schouwen: 
> Hello Danny,
> 
> On Sat, 20 Aug 2005, Danny Milosavljevic wrote:
> 
> > This is not possible for the exact reason to prevent distributors (or
> > worse, applications) from including "a few" default templates with gnome
> > (like "New docbook xslt dtd schema document", which obviously everyone
> > and their brother needs ;)).
> 
> Don't you think it's a bit strange to hold back on a certain 
> functionality that would benefit users, unexperienced ones in 
> particular, because of the possibility that it might be abused?
> 
> To reiterate my comment on bug 312468:
> 
> I agree completely that the menu should not contain dozens of entries by 
> default. But not trusting distributors to handle such a feature 
> responsibly is a bit condescending. We need this, so that when for 
> instance Abiword is installed, all users get a 'Abiword document' item 
> under their right mouse button. Besides reducing the time needed to 

See, thats not what it was created for.

What the menu was created for is:

Lets say every day user needs to fill in what he does over the course of
the day at work, and how long it takes, or whatever.
For that, user has a, lets say, openoffice calc sheet (not that it
matters) with all the hour headers, the sum formula, and the lunch
breaks prefilled.

Now, every day, instead of writing the document anew, he jusT "copies"
the template.

You'd be surprised just how often such "half-filled documents" are
needed.

What you want to use this for is something completely different, you
want the system to be "document-centric", like win98 and os/2 are.
However, you will end up with a huge menu if you put each and every app
that is installed in there. 
Note that you can have an app installed just because you want to read
some file someone else sent you, and you dont neccessarily ever create
files yourself using that app 
(I myself have tons of apps installed only because of that)

Worse, user A can have installed the app just because he wants to read
some file user C sent him, but user B on the same computer has no clue
what that app even is.

That said, after you implemented what you called '"trash" (hide)' right,
and, on login, ask the user if he cares about creating documents of the
recently installed apps "etwetwe Document" and "ktrze Document", and if
he says yes, only then add them to the Templates, then, yes, then I
guess it could be quite nice...

Actually, I predict that no user will say yes there, which should tell
you something.

Of course I'd be happy to be proven wrong...

> create a new empty document, this would 1) drastically improve the 
> discoverability of the Templates feature; and 2) help the user to use 
> GNOME in a document-oriented/spatial fashion.
> 
> Relying on users to create their own templates means that the majority 
> of them will never learn about this possibility.
> 
> > If you as distribution want to put them in per default, put them
> > into /etc/skel/Templates before creating the user, so the user later can
> > at least get rid of the stuff he doesnt need and can change the
> > templates.
> 
> This is not a working solution. What I have in mind is that for instance 
> a 'Vector drawing' template appears in all users' templates once the 
> system administrator installs the distro-provided Inkscape package, and 
> that it disappears again when it's deinstalled. Of course, users should 
> be free to "trash" (hide) global templates that they don't need.
> 
> > I'm sure you noticed that the $HOME/Templates folder is visible to the
> > user. This is because it is for the user to put stuff in and edit or
> > remove stuff. A global directory would only be annoying to the users.
> 
> Ah yes, that reminds me of bug 136836. "Templates" does not mean 
> anything to non-English speakers.
> 
> regards,
> 

cheers,
   Danny

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