Re: [Usability] Getting rid of Open and Save entirely?

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Sat, 10 Jan 2004, Gregory Merchan wrote:

> Date: Sat, 10 Jan 2004 06:56:46 -0600
> From: Gregory Merchan <merchan phys lsu edu>
> Reply-To: merchan baton phys lsu edu
> To: usability gnome org
> Subject: Re: [Usability] Getting rid of Open and Save entirely?
>
> On Sat, Jan 10, 2004 at 11:35:38AM +0000, Alan Horkan wrote:
> <snip>
> > There is so much talk about using a Filemanager instead of FOSA (File Open
> > Save As) Dialogs I must ask has anyone done it yet?
>
> I don't believe I ever opened a FOSA dialog on OS/2 until 2000-something
> when I reinstalled it on old hardware and went looking for it.  I would
> surely have remembered something as ugly as the one it had.

To clarify, I did not mean that the menu item "File, Open  Ctrl+O" would
be removed but rather that instead of having the file open dialog
 appear you would be replacing it with a Nautilus window and some sort of
callback to ensure that the next document you click on would (attempt to)
open using the current application from which it was invoked irrespective
of what was normally configured in Nautilus as the default application for
that file.

> I did have to save in the apps that ran in Window-emulation, but that was
> just an occassional Ctrl+S.  Of course, I remember because of the times
> I didn't. :-)

Getting rid of Save seems like a good prospect (in the long run) but I'm
worried that some applications will have to do a lot of work to add a good
incremental save so that long operations dont force the program to
interrupt/block the user or slow things down too much but also that the
saves are done regularly enough so that if anything went wrong (even power
failure) that only a very small amount of data could be lost.  Sometimes
losing 5 minutes work due to the combination of crash and a crappy
Autosave features can be extremely annoying and that says nothing of the
Undo History you might also have lost.

I dont want to complain (much) on this topic, but I remain cautiously
sceptical until I see it working safely and efficiently with a large
complex structured document.

- Alan H