Re: [Usability]Preferred Applications Design

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sat, Feb 15, 2003 at 01:59:50PM -0800, Seth Nickell wrote: 
> 1) Long term, the preferred applications system needs to either
> complement or replace the file types system. Having both is
> confusing.

Since we have too many things in Preferences menu again, merging these
would be nice.
 
> 4) In the long long run how does this relate to an Applications menu
> that contains only generic entries like "Web Browser" that are
> preferences driven as to what web browser they launch?

This is one of the most interesting uses of preferred apps really I
think - sysadmins should be able to just say "my users get web browser
X, email Y, office Z" and that's it.

When does the desktop use preferred app?

 a) deciding which app goes in the menu under "Web Browser"

 b) deciding how to open a particular file type or URI (doesn't really
   work unless all apps in a given category handle exactly the same
   set of file types/protocols, already untrue - perhaps 
   the mime control panel could have:
 
     HTML files (text/html)     [ Preferred Web Browser ]
                                  Mozilla
                                  Galeon 

   i.e. Preferred Web Browser is another app you can choose, I dunno)

 c) sometimes a program wants to launch another program,
   e.g. gnome-terminal opens a URL in browser, needs to know which 
   browser to use. It seems that here g-t could base the decision 
   on the file type or URI protocol.

If we make c) go via the file type/protocol system, then the preferred
apps control panel only affects:

 - the menus (basically a sysadmin feature, users can use menu editing)

 - the "Preferred Foo" "symlink" available as a MIME handler in b)

Surely there's some way to conveniently change a block of related mime
types at once that doesn't require "Preferred Foo" in the list of
available apps; for example, perhaps you could have a types-for-app
display in addition to app-for-type display:

 Use Mozilla to open:

   [ ] HTML files (text/html)
   [ ] XML files (text/xml)

You could then quickly change your browser by opening Mozilla's view
like this and checking everything you want to use it to open.
Now you don't need Preferred Web Browser to be a choice in b)

At that point, if the file types control panel is good enough to
easily be sure Mozilla is handling everything it can, I don't see any
point to "preferred apps" other than the possible sysadmin feature we
don't have yet.

So maybe we can just nuke the Preferred Apps control panel once we
have a nice file types control panel.

Havoc