RFC: delete icon on activity thumbnail on every activity (except current active one)

Thomas Pfeiffer colomar at autistici.org
Fri Nov 4 14:38:32 UTC 2011


> right now for how the intergrated look between the delegate and the
> confirmation dialog is done, if the dialog would be opened in a smaller
one,
> will be scaled down as well, making no sense.
> 
> and no, i don't want to lose this integrated look making the dialog a
> separate
> entity

That's a problem, which certainly is not solved by using disabled buttons,
though ;)
Okay, maybe this is a good place for introducing my vision for error
prevention
in Plasma Active (which is not exactly new, though):
- As already suggested by Fania and seconded by Aaron and me, we want to 
avoid asking the user for confirmation whenever possible.
- We still have to prevent the user from doing irreversible actions by
accident,
though.

So instead of asking for confirmation for every potentially irreversible
action,
shouldn't we aim to make every action reversible? What I have in mind for
that is the following:
- Potentially irreversible actions are not carried out immediately.
Instead the
system "simulates" the action's execution first. The user then has the
option
to revert the action if it was unintentional
 - To avoid accumulating simulated actions and thus creating an undefined 
overall state, we should either execute it for real after a certain amount
of time or after a certain amount of following actions (even being able to
revert only the last action would already work).

This method works well with actions within applications (imagine a word
processor asking you to confirm every action like deleting text because
you
might have deleted it by accident and cannot get it back!) and is
widespread
there. It currently isn't so widespread on the system level, the only
notable
exception being filesystem "Trash" folders.

The only system I know that has this level of reversibility to everything
is Apple's
Time Machine.  I don't say we need something that powerful, but the
essence is pretty useful: You don't have to worry about making mistakes,
because you can always go back in time to before you made the mistake.

The advantage is obvious imo: The 99% of acctions which are intentional
don't
need to be confirmed, which makes things a lot easier. The 1% potentially
dangerous unintended actions can still be reversed since you usually
realize
a mistake immediately (and if you don't, you would tap "OK" on the confirm
dialog anyway, so this would have the same effect).

I'd suggest having one central "Go back in time one action" button. This
button would be global like SLC and supported by every Active app as well
as the system itself.

Then we could do away with any confirmation dialogs (including the one for
deleting an activity).

I think confirmation dialogs should be a thing from the past because there
are much more elegant solutions for error prevention.

What do you guys think?

Cheers,
Thomas



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