unity-design team mailing list archive

["frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx" <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 17:18, Jason Smith <jason.smith@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> On Thu, 2011-02-10 at 18:10 +0200, Roth Robert wrote:
> > Showing only the default app is not the best thing I think, because
> > opening the file with the default application can be done by simply
> > double-clicking the file. It would be nice to use this possibility to
> > show all the apps that can open the file (based on the mime type), and
> > the file would be opened with the app that the file icon has been
> > dragged into.
>
> Hmm this is a good point, maybe 2 or 3 then? Certainly we want to cap
> it.


Definitely, the UI still aims at minimalism rather than overpopulation.
The best interface is no interface at all, when everything just "works" ;)

Visualizing "Open with.." in the Unity launcher is a way of making it more
accessible, but after all what we want is a preview of the file, not yet
another technical solution to the ever so obfuscating "open" metaphor. What
does it mean to "open a file" ? All this sort of interaction, dropping a
file onto an app or an app onto a file ..are workarounds to a larger
problem.
The system's ability to recognize content and display it reasonably, by
itself.

I'd just like to open another axis of thinking in this topic, which could
help find a useful direction here:
Consider "Apps" to be proxies to "Actions".
Opon hover, displaying possible "Actions" is a more actionable interface
syntax, than suggesting "apps".
While apps are the technology that enables Actions, all which they stand for
is their essential functionality.

Showing e.g. "Eye Of Gnome" in the launcher makes sense, if EoG has a
telling visual metaphor representing it in the launcher, which will be
learnable and help the user remember that wherever such an icon appears, it
means something like "view the photo" or "open the photos" or "display the
content of this image file" or anything related to how a file containing
image data will be actually rendered on the screen for looking at it.

Simply showing an app-icon on hover is not a great improvement by itself, it
only visualizes open-with, and therein shows us what we have been doing
wrong in THAT dialog (context menu>open with) so far.
Showing an app icon that actually stands for some relevant interaction
possiblity otoh is a great improvement, which would make Ubuntu much easier
to use and much more learnable.