Subject: Re: POW user suggestion
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Sat Aug 18 2001 - 17:58:48 CDT
At 11:10 PM 8/16/01 -0400, Nils Barth wrote:
>On 2001-08-16-16:33, rob.campbell@att.net wrote:
>> But if the user wanted to close the only open document
>> and then open an existing document, they would have
>> to "Open..." it from "Untitled1". This would result in
>> two open windows, only one of which they care about.
There are a number of ways to do what Rob describes, but doing things in
this order will probably not work.
One of the early MSDI refinements I got talked into was the optimization
that File / Open will reuse an existing Untitled window if it's empty and
has never been saved.
Although you can use your desktop to launch AbiWord on an existing document,
just launching the app creates an empty untitled document. If the first
thing you do is open another document using the file manager, we originally
left that useless untitled document hanging around, which pissed people off.
(And rightly so.)
So for several years now, we've detected that situation and reused the
window.
>> Not a big deal, but a "Close & Open..." menu option that
>> closes the current document and prompts for an existing
>> document to open would solve this elegantly. Since the
>> user may want to close the last open document and work
>> on a new one, a "Close & New" option would also be
>> necessary.
>>
>> So we need two new, little used menu items. It sounds
>> ridiculous, but that's the price of a complete and
>> elegant Single Document Interface.
>
>These are -only- useful if the user wishes to close all open AbiWord
>documents, -then- open/make new... -in that order-.
Are we all clear that this is the *only* use case being described? For
anyone who wants to play UI designer here, the key question we need to have
an instinct about is:
What's the most common thing that most people want to do *immediately
after* they're done editing *all* the documents they currently have
open?
1. Start a new, empty AbiWord document.
2. Open another AbiWord document.
3. Do something else.
My belief is that #3 is far more common, so the UI is optimized for that
case. I recognize that some people may want to do #1 or #2, but I continue
to believe that's a less common use case.
Remember that if they want to work on more documents, they can always open
or create them *before* closing the last open one.
>The user has two options:
>(1) Choose File->Open... or File->New... before closing all documents.
>(2) After closing the last document, open an existing one in the file
>manager or launch AbiWord to create a new one -- this is the
>`Document-Centric' way of doing things.
>
>Close & New, Close & Open, or in fact anything that does two separate
>actions (which are in fact independent), does not below as a menuitem.
For the record, I'm with Nils on this one.
Big surprise, huh? :-)
Paul
motto -- AbiWord is *not* a shell. That's what the desktop is for.
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