Hi David, On Mon, 2008-06-30 at 10:42 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote: > I'm worried that people end up with menus like these
Sure - but empirically this has not proved to be the case in KDE - so we can relax ;-) > Create Document -> OpenOffice Writer ODF document > Abiword ODF document > KOffice ODF document Presumably all of them creating the same blank ODF document ;-) which sounds pretty lame. > So I don't think this feature you're suggesting is going to help anyone, > see e.g. how bad this works on Windows. This is why I'm opposed to the > feature. So - how can an administrator create default templates in these places for all users of all systems they administer ? And - as a better question: what default templates should a general purpose desktop come with ? what document types are sufficiently generally useful to make them easy to create anywhere. > One can also argue that it's still not discoverable how to launch the > word processor. It's not the launching of a word processer that is a problem - but using nautilus to create a word processing document: in a given place (ie. where the user might have a chance of finding it again when they browse to the same place ;-). > Back to the problem at hand, you want to make it easy for your father to > create OpenOffice documents. Typically when people use a full fledged > word processor they create documents of a given type. Hence why we have > the Templates feature. Does OpenOffice save templates to ~/Templates? What templates ? the system installed templates ? no - they are per system, not per-user; or do you mean the templates the user chose once ? if so - no, or do you mean the templates they authored ? [ that is done by a tiny sub-set of people ]. > If so, is this feature implemented in a way that compel users to use it? If > not, is this something that the OpenOffice team is interested in working > on? Sure - making OO.o's (huge) template set available via the right-click menu sounds like a disaster ;-) much better to have a single .desktop file that is launched: "Create new Office document" with a right click on a given directory that having been passed the right path will create a new document in there & launch OO.o on it. Browsing thousands of templates in a context menu is not a good approach: so then we're left with some evil UI feature such as a check-box: "[ ] add to the right-click context menu in the file-manager" that can be selected in OO.o ? ;-) But - really, my question is: why do the defaults suck here ? and what can we do about it; my patch improves that I think. If you don't like the defaults, you can hassle the packagers of your operating system to improve things. And yes - any sane distribution will by default (cf. KDE ad nauesum) not shove endless junk into your templates menu. > Another avenue to investigate is extending xdg-user-dirs so it can > create more than just directories; e.g. it could create and manage > payloads in ~/Templates just like it does with directories. I think > that's a more compelling feature as it allows users to manage these > instead of leaving the user with a lot of useless items in the "Create > Document" menu. So - wrt. the plurality of file-types idea; at least I buy the argument that it's slightly sucky to have "Excel spreadsheet" and "ODF spreadsheet" in the same context menu: would having a special desktop-file that could launch a more generic "create document" type help allay your paranoia^H^W fears ;-) about the grey-goo effect of this menu ? ;-) > In other words, what I'm trying to say with the last two paragraphs, I > think it would be useful to try and work with the Templates system > instead of brutally bypassing it. Of course, I'm not a Nautilus > maintainer but I thought I'd post my opinion anyway. My problem is, perhaps that I don't understand the existing Templates system you refer to. Here is my use case: * hot plug USB device * nautilus window pops up showing nice blank space * [ I want to create a new document in here ] My thesis is a right-click Templates menu should be -useful- at least on a new, blank install of a new user: and that (in general) the defaults should be good enough to do something useful out of the box. They are under KDE ;-) HTH, Michael. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- nautilus-list mailing list nautilus-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/nautilus-list