An obvious problem with BigBoards application selection

[Stuart Children]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2007 at 01:11:23AM +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-06-13 at 14:34 -0400, Jonathan Blandford wrote:
> > On Mon, 2007-06-11 at 15:44 -0800, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> > 
> > > Hmm... to show evince? If you want to show evince in bigboard...why
> > > wouldn't you want to show it in the normal menus as well?  I honestly
> > > can't think of a rationale where you'd want it to show up in one
> > > interface and not the other. Either evince should be treated like a
> > > normal callable end user application or its treated as a helper and is
> > > thus hidden from selection interfaces... pick a pov and stick with it.
> > 
> > It was a conscious design decision for evince to not appear in the
> > menus.  There seems to be no advantage to starting evince on its own, as
> > it is very much a viewer and not a creator.  We can perhaps finesse the
> > NoDisplay issue with a white list or black list.  A better approach
> > might be to categorize that kind of application by mime-type.
> 
> Huh. Should we put Totem NoDisplay as well then?

Indeed. I don't think making Evince (or Totem) NoDisplay makes sense. 
Here's why:

There are basically two ways a user might choose to "view" (or play or 
whatever) a file. One is to find the file and then open it via a process 
that knows what application should be used. The other is to start the 
application first, and use that to locate and open the file.

Now, users who don't know that Evince opens PDFs, or that Totem opens 
videos are certainly only going to do the former. However, once they've 
made the connection, there are actually good reasons to use the 
application to open the file. Here are three:

1) The application might maintain a recently-used documents list, and so 
I don't waste time navigating to the right folder to open it. 
Personally, I do this all the time in OpenOffice as I rarely create new 
documents, but frequently update a small number of existing ones. 
(Evince has such a feature.)

2) The application knows what type of file it can open and so can 
automatically filter the list of files in an open file dialog - so it's 
also easy to find the right thing to open. (Evince can also do this, 
though the default on this machine is "All documents" for some reason.)

3) I want to view the file in something which is not the default 
applicaiton.

I certainly don't see why it hurts to have Evince in the menu. So let's 
not proscribe behaviour?

-- 
Stuart