[Bug 170979] strange behaviour in "save as" dialog

[S. Burmeister]

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=170979





--- Comment #14 from S. Burmeister <sven burmeister gmx net>  2008-10-15 07:45:37 ---
(In reply to comment #13)
> a. the user often doesn't choose to click.
> 
>    all it takes is a gummy mouse ball and a user can miss click.

So? There is still the cancel button and those users can use the slider in the
dialogue (might be 4.2) to increase the size of the items. I won't argue about
how good most users motoric abilities are and how mice are using light and so
on...

> b. "rename" does not make sense in a save-as dialog warning that a file would
> overwrite another.
> 
> the user would not know what is being renamed -- the file that they are
> overwriting or the file that they are saving.

Really? If I copy files to a folder, I am saving them to that folder and I get
a dialogue that states the old and the new filename. And you are saying that
the user does not know what file he is overwriting? If you think users are that
stupid they won't be able to differentiate between single- and double-click.

> If a user downloads a file such as "ItunesSetup.exe" where the idiotic company
> that provides it doesn't provide version information in the name, and the user
> hopes to add some sort of version information -- It could be possible for the
> user to make a new folder and save the file in a new folder.  This is easily
> done in the existing dialog box, and no new functionality is needed.

So you want the user to create a new folder for each version of an essay? Does
not sound like what I see people do in real-life. They add to the filename, a
date or a number, but surely do not create a new folder.

> c.  Now, you bring up a good point that the user may want to have a new version
> of a file take over for an old version of a file.
> 
> This is what symlinks are for, and I believe there might be a place for
> selecting a symlink as a "save as" target and have another dialog poping up as
> " This file is a symlink pointing to---location, would you like to replace the
> symlink with this file, redirect the symlink to point to the new file, cancel
> 
> at that point if the redirect the symlink to point to the new file, another
> save-as dialog comes up.

Symlinks? Are you kidding? That's even more out of space then auto-completion
for most users.

> d.
> You mentioned the difference between save and save-as.   Save behavior must
> start with a new file (such as Untitled3), or replace the same file, or
> overwrite an existing file after a choice to abort (default abort)

You should check your applications. Open OO or any other application with an
existing document add to it and click on save. It saves without any warning and
I hope you are not arguing that it should be changed, since it does not make
sense in most cases and those few where it does are handled already.

I did not find any sensible arguments in your post against showing the user the
default overwrite file-dialogue he already knows from the filemanager and
incorporating "rename" in that way.


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