Applications versus Documents (by alaric)
I hate open and save as dialogs. Why do they need to exist? GUIs these days have nice filesystem browsers; then they need to provide little miniature browsers to applications to use as File Open and Save As dialogs. This is complex and wasteful. Back when I was at school, Acorn Archimedes computers had it right, in my opinion; you used the OS's inbuilt GUI file browser to find things. You double clicked on a document to load the default app, or you could drag the document's icon onto an application's icon to load it into a specified application. And from an open document's menu, there would be a Save option; if you chose it you got a small window with an icon in, the path the document was loaded from in a text field, and an Ok button. If you just hit Ok it would be saved where you found it. Or you could edit the text field, usually to provide a different file name. Or you could drag the icon out to a folder window and it would be saved to that folder.
You could even drag the icon onto another app, in which case the OS would (I gather) set up something like a Unix pipe for the app to save the file to, while the target app was told to open from the pipe, and the file would be transferred between the two apps.
The effect of all this is that the users saw a unified view of "their stuff" as a set of folders containing documents and other folders; applications were more like tools they applied to documents than enclosed worlds of their own. This was logical and convenient; one could go into a project folder and see a bunch of images, drawings, documents, and so on related to that project. When one had a folder open, one could open and save documents from and to it easily, without having to click Save As and then navigate through a file browser dialog to locate the folder you already have open there in its own window. Image files could be double-clicked to open them in the default image editor, or dragged to a tool that converts images between formats, or dragged into a word processor window to embed the image in the document.
Sadly, most current GUIs have forgotten this neat and simple idea.
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Mon 21st Aug 2006 9:16 pm 
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By andyjpb, Tue 22nd Aug 2006 @ 9:04 am
Yes: it's all true! Even the File Open/Save dialogs under MAC OS X are a bit of a pain. Navigating to anywhere that isn't the current directory or on of the quick link thingies involves a lot of effort... That's all after you've dicosvered the little drop down part of the dialog.
By Charlee, Tue 22nd Aug 2006 @ 9:21 am
You make so much sense. Why are you not the official oracle on these things?
By alaric, Tue 22nd Aug 2006 @ 12:09 pm
Yeah, that one had me for a while 😉
I've found that you can drag the little icon from the title bar of a Finder window into a Save As browser to make it show that directory, but it's fiddly to get everything side by side to manage it.
The OSX finder sucks, though - lots of people seem to be saying this. It's odd and inconsistent and they really need to rewrite it.
I read an interesting review somewhere that said it appeared to be confused between two models:
You can flip any one window between the two display modes in the Finder, but it's a bit arbitrary what new windows open like.
Here's the full moan:
Ars Technica article on the Finder
I'm all for giving people choice between UI styles rather than enforcing a monoculture, but the finder just confuses the two...
This is one potential approach.
By Alex B, Wed 23rd Aug 2006 @ 10:56 am
Preface: I am trying hard not to be intellectually limited to app-centric computing as The Only Conceivable Way.
However: I am not so sure that the filesystem is the place to have users navigating. They have to create folders before creating documents, can't remember which folder they saved a document to, can accidentally delete documents, have to manually version documents as they modify them/receive modified versions from others.
These issues are largely navigational and could be solved by the OS vendors, but they can't be bothered. (A global file-search does not suffice!) And for collaborative situations, having an app like Groove or Sharepoint manage documents is essential; they provide project-oriented document browsing, versioning and security without the user needing to fiddle with folders and saved searches and permissions and the like.
So until filesystem browsers get a LOT better, I'll stick with app-centric computing 🙂
By alaric, Wed 23rd Aug 2006 @ 2:19 pm
Oh, I didn't say filesystem browsers didn't need improving as well... 🙂
That includes the possibilities of ditching folder structures in exchange for dynamic searches, although I tend to find that both have their places - my work stuff is all neatly organised by project, while I'd like things like photos to be searchable.
The possibility of decoupling file storage from the core of a UI, so that different people can use different file storage managers, is also interesting - and would be easier to do without app-based file open/save dialog boxes; a document found in a folder-filesystem viewer, or in a search window, or in a versioned project browser, is still a document that (using a common activation API) can be double-clicked or dragged into an application to open up; and all of those viewers and search windows could be places that documents could be dragged TO to save them.