Re: The HIG and Open a Copy

On Mon, 2005-02-21 at 23:16 +0000, Alan Horkan wrote:
>
> 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 appreciate the real work that Rob is doing. I want to play with his
changes before making definitive statements. I'd like to read what other
people especially you Alan have to say. Things have a way being becoming
set in stone whenever Dom or I make pronouncements.

I have never used "Open Copy" and am frankly not sure what it does. When
Dom implemented it there was no widespread disapproval.

I think I like the recent files in the "file" menu.

I agree with sum1 that being able to turn off autospell check from the
tools menu was a useful feature. There is no doubt that the preference
dialog is much slower and more cumbersome to use. Actually the
preference dialog should be made non-modal on unix since all the
preference changes are "instant apply". I don't how to do that for unix
and not the other platform though.
 
Regarding the method Rob used to float his ideas, it is certainly not
how we've done things in the past but it has the effect of making
everyone really study his changes.

I think that as long as Rob is prepared to do the work to revert the
changes as we decide on them there is no great harm done.

The major damage will be to Rob as his various ideas get rejected. I
personally find it harder to see my work reverted rather than not
implemented, but everyone is different.

I don't think that in the future I'd like to see these sort of radical
changes happen often. It would make development very confusing.

More later. I want to hack now.

Martin
Received on Tue Feb 22 00:40:35 2005