From: Mark Fowler Date: 16:31 on 02 Sep 2003 Subject: Save Dialogs Which idiot came up with the idea of save dialogs? I mean, I have a finder window open here (Explorer, I can see you from here, wipe that grin off your face - you do this too.) It *is* the representation of that directory on the file system. It should be to me one and the same thing. Right, now I want to save this file from this application into that directory. Right, File -> Save As. Okay, now all I have to do is tell the program to save it into this window and all will be fine. What's that, my little application? You want me to navigate to the same place again using the world's smallest dialog? You can't be serious! I've got the window open here! Look, just save it there damnit! No, little application, I have no idea where that finder window is located on the hard drive. You see, I loaded it up from a alias. I think it's in my home directory somewhere? Does that help? This of course, is pure insanity of the worst kind. Whoever came up with the idea of reinventing a whole secondary Finder/Explorer system in order to save a file, rather than using the perfectly good one the user has already, needs a good kicking. Of course, ten years ago, before Windows 95 was all the rage, in this country we had RISC OS computers (that's Acorn to you crazy foreign people.) RISC OS was simple. It popped open a box containing a icon of the file when you wanted to save and you just dragged it to where you wanted to save it to (yes, directly onto the equivalent of the Finder/Explorer window) and it saved it there. It was that easy. Of course, it was more powerful than that. You could drag documents to other applications and it would 'save' them into the application directly. But that's just crazy talk. Next thing people will be having shells that can pipe output from one program to the next. Mark.
From: Chris Nandor Date: 16:37 on 02 Sep 2003 Subject: Re: Save Dialogs At 16:31 +0100 2003.09.02, Mark Fowler wrote: >What's that, my little application? You want me to navigate to the same >place again using the world's smallest dialog? You can't be serious! I've >got the window open here! Look, just save it there damnit! No, little >application, I have no idea where that finder window is located on the >hard drive. You see, I loaded it up from a alias. I think it's in my >home directory somewhere? Does that help? That's perhaps why Mac OS let you drag windows into a file dialog, to tell it directly where to go. Mac OS X sometimes supports this, sometimes not. :)
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 19:01 on 02 Sep 2003 Subject: Re: Save Dialogs > That's perhaps why Mac OS let you drag windows into a file dialog, to tell > it directly where to go. Mac OS X sometimes supports this, sometimes not. > :) I'd rather just have a draggable icon in the file dialog, like he said. To me dragging icons INTO a save dialog seems unnatural (maybe if there was an obvious well to drag it into)...
From: Chris Nandor Date: 19:08 on 02 Sep 2003 Subject: Re: Save Dialogs At 13:01 -0500 2003.09.02, Peter da Silva wrote: >> That's perhaps why Mac OS let you drag windows into a file dialog, to tell >> it directly where to go. Mac OS X sometimes supports this, sometimes not. >> :) > >I'd rather just have a draggable icon in the file dialog, like he said. To >me dragging icons INTO a save dialog seems unnatural (maybe if there was an >obvious well to drag it into)... There is, it's the list of files/folders you are selecting from!
From: David Cantrell Date: 16:51 on 02 Sep 2003 Subject: Re: Save Dialogs Mark Fowler hated: > This of course, is pure insanity of the worst kind. Whoever came up with > the idea of reinventing a whole secondary Finder/Explorer system in order > to save a file, rather than using the perfectly good one the user has > already, needs a good kicking. The whole concept of files is hateful IMO. Wasn't the BeOS storage system originally going to be just an RDBMS? That would be nice, you just have data BLOBs and arbitrary metadata (chosen by the application, perhaps with the user's intervention, but stored in an OS-defined way so that it's indexable and searchable) so that you can find your data again. But then they decided that abandoning the hierarchical filesystem was too outre' even for Jean-Luc Gasse'e and his delirious followers. But that would solve the problem you're hating about - you'd presumably have three options (save, save as new version*, save in other format) instead of the current two (save, save as) and conveniently get rid of the overloading of 'save as' to have two functions, as well as getting version control for free. * - to replace the save as -> save with the same format but a new filename dance, because there's now no concept of a filename
From: Nicholas Clark Date: 16:51 on 02 Sep 2003 Subject: Re: Save Dialogs On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 04:31:18PM +0100, Mark Fowler wrote: > Of course, it was more powerful than that. You could drag documents to > other applications and it would 'save' them into the application directly. > But that's just crazy talk. Next thing people will be having shells that > can pipe output from one program to the next. Indeed. And given that we get told of for liking things, I'm going to have to say what I hate about that. I don't hate it when it uses a temporary file for this save (although obviously I prefer it when the two applications in question understand the full protocol and do the transfer entirely in RAM) I hate the implementation because it did a temporary copy into the RMA (Relocatable Module Area), rather than copying the data direct from one task to the other. The RISC OS memory map limits the size of the RMA (to 16 Meg IIRC on 3.5+) And if you start shifting a large file back and forth the RMA slowly gets fragmented to the point whereby there isn't a block large enough for your file to fit in. So, even though the free space bar says there is 10 times the amount needed, there's not enough in once block, and an allocation attempt fails. At which point the RAM transfer fails. And the bit that I hates - at this point the whole inter-application save fails, rather than falling back to a temporary file. So either one has to resort to saving to disk by hand, or reboot the machine. Grr. The other thing that I hates is that all this was working very nicely about 15 years ago. And most every other OS has failed to steal the nice bits. Nicholas Clark
From: Ann Barcomb Date: 07:25 on 03 Sep 2003 Subject: file access dialogs (was Re: Save Dialogs) Mark wrote: > Which idiot came up with the idea of save dialogs? I mean, I have a > finder window open here (Explorer, I can see you from here, wipe that grin > off your face - you do this too.) It *is* the representation of that > directory on the file system. It should be to me one and the same thing. What I dislike about file access dialogs are the ones that try to 'remember' where you saved the previous file, but don't distinguish between 'open' and 'save'. I've noted this on too many applications to pick out a specific one to blame. It's very annoying to plan to open several files in a row, do something with them, and then save the results elsewhere. If you open a file in/some/very/nested/directory/structure, and save it in a/different/long/location, the open should remain linked to the first location, or at least some sort of shortcut should be available for it, since I suppose there are people in the habit of opening the files they just saved. With me, I think that 90% of the time I'm manually batch processing...usually saving a bunch of windows-format documents in to a standard. On odd file access dialogs, I've often wondered why gcombust (at least the version I've got--0.1.47) selects a starting directory the way it does. I think it's probably a bug since it doesn't make much sense as a feature. If you select files and directories, and then burn them on CD, then return to select (to put on another CD), the working directory the last directory in your previous input. Not the last directory you were selecting from, but the last directory from the list you selected to burn.
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