Re: [Usability] FOSA ideas

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Tue, 2003-09-09 at 13:36, Bryan W Clark wrote:

> Personally when opening a file I would prefer a nautilus type view
> because with the movie and picture thumbnailing that is built in there I
> find it easy to get the exact file I want.  I'm sure as other thumbnails
> come along for other file types it will get even easier for those types
> as well.

> So I made a quick mock up of what I'd appreciate in an FO
> http://www.clarkson.edu/~clarkbw/clarkbw-FO.png

One problem I can imagine (i.e., it's opinion ;-) happening is that a
user would expect a file dialog that looks nautilus-ish to behave like
nautilus.  This means supporting drag-and-drop, following nautilus
preferences, etc.  While it could certainly be possible given a plugable
UI (not sure if that was in the plan, or just the file backends), it's
obviously not good for a "stock" GTK FOSA dialog.

> 
> Note there are no file extensions, because the program i'm opening the
> file from should have told the FO dialog what it can handle and I don't
> need to waste space seeing that. (maybe an option to view extensions
> would be good somewhere hidden in the gconf for those of you who will
> flame over this)

gconf again not being in gtk, this could be problematic.  (side
question: is the "gtk plugable configuration api" planned for 2.6 or
after that?)

> 
> Each file has a thumbnail of it's contents, this makes it easy to know
> what I'm opening especially if I have a harddrive full of movies and I
> don't remember the name, but do remember that it was the one with the
> Bert and Ernie skit.

In this case we do have the preview widget, which should definitely be
used in the case of movies, and actually most other documents.  A teensy
thumbnail can be pretty useless on many file types (which you do address
below).


> I did put a zoom control at the top right because maybe someone wants a
> larger size thumbnail, my eye sight is pretty good but I'm young.

So if I need to zoom in to see the thumbnail, the list becomes next to
useless since all it can show is the thumbnail?  Seems better to remove
the zoom and just allow for the preview.  The thumbnail should just be
the MIME icon, which is useful especially when we have no extensions
shown.  (I *do* care if I'm opening "some-image" in PNG or XCF - one has
all the layers and such for editing further, the other is just a bitmap
useful for display.)

> 
> I left the throbber in there as well since network filesystems can
> sometimes take a while and I'd like to get good feedback on whether the
> system is really doing something or just stuck.
> 
> ------
> 
> Anyway, this is not complete yet of course, but I wanted to throw out
> those suggestions to everyone.
> 
> ~ Bryan
> ---
> Bryan W Clark
> Graduate Estudiante
> Math && Computer Science Dept.
> Clarkson University
> Potsdam, NY USA
> 
> http://www.clarkson.edu/~clarkbw/
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-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.