Using the Desktop as a Place to Store Files in KDE4 [Was: Re: Concluding the discussion about splitting kdebase]

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday 19 May 2006 12:50, Sébastien Laoût wrote:
> Today I encountered a new use case of "using the desktop as a temporary
> place to store things".
>
> I should create an OpenOffice.org document to send by email.
> Naturaly, I save it on the desktop : Ctrl+S -> Desktop -> Choose name ->
> OK. Once it is sent to the destinataire, I deleted the document.
> How should I do in KDE 4?
> Tag the file? Mouais... In OpenOffice.org? Let's forget!

i'd much prefer to offer a way to say "i'd like to email a file to someone". 
this is similar to the common workflow of "open a file that was emailed to 
me, open it, edit it, save it, email it back to the sender and other 
recipients"

right now we make our users go through all these steps manually (over and over 
again) without any sort of help. one of the SoC projects that looks likely to 
be accepted is for a timelining UI element, which could come in handy here.

there's also no reason the desktop couldn't show in a nice list the last N 
used files either.

yes, OOo is a problem here as is every poorly integrated application. i can 
only see three options: a) continue to provide a crappy user experience, b) 
encourage these apps to use emerging desktop integration tools like Portland 
and support those efforts with our new features or c) write apps that feature 
the necessary integration features. the latter 2 options in some combination 
seem to be the most realistic to me.

> And what do you think about the Mac OS X Finder methaphor? ;-)

i think it's one way of doing a file manager, which is another discussion.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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