Re: The HIG and Open a Copy

On Mon, 21 Feb 2005, Ryan Pavlik wrote:

<snip> please trim messages a little </snip>

> I personally believe "Save as copy" is more useful than "Open a copy",
> since it is both more common and can be used to a similar effect. (Some
> other apps have only Save as copy or Save copy, not open).

Even if it is only used by very few users I dont think any of us want to
turn away users from Abiword.

> This might be a good compromise?

I'd like to see things provided as plugins or some documenated alternative
method before they are removed.

> If open a copy is removed, the ability to create
> templates should at least be "How-to"ed because it provided a quick and
> easy way to achieve "template-like" function without a template.

If we could be confident that Templating was the main reason for having
"Open a Copy" I'd feel a lot less worried about removing it now that we do
have a good template system.

(Most of these opinions are mine, some of them I'm just putting out there
for a well rounded discussion).

Ryan your point about any change baffling existing users is a good one.

sum1 wrote:
> menu functions achieves this. At this point, I /really/ would like to
> see the changes reverted until conclusive discussion has ended.

I too would prefer to see things done that way as they have been done in
past Abiword development. Dom and Martin have been awfully quiet, I've
been expecting them to say how they would prefer development to be done.

I think abiword is at the stage where changes need to be shown to be
demonstratably better than what we have. If it is six of one half dozen
of the other, if all other things are equal then the existing setup is
less likely to confuse users.

I'm pretty sure when we've chewed over it a bit more we will want to
make some of Robs changes but definately not all of them.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

Free SVG Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org
Dia is for Diagrams http://gnome.org/projects/dia/
Alan's Journal http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
Received on Tue Feb 22 00:20:18 2005